First Snow!!!

Since I last posted, we saw our first snowfall! It was super exciting for a South Carolinian like me. Everyone else was just like, "oh. yeah. It's above the Arctic Circle." I was more like run down the hallway to my friend's classroom and shout at her and the counselor "IT'S SNOWING! LIKE REALLY BIG FLAKES!" They both were excited. But then again, all three of us are in Alaska for the first year, so it is a really big deal to us.

Honestly, I don't think I'll ever be at a point where I'm not excited about the first snow of the year. That would be depressing.

First snow flakes. It's just starting to stick!

This is actually the second snow. The first one melted and I woke up to this a day or two later.

The second snow.

Trying to show you how big the flakes are. They're wginormous!

So that's been exciting. It frosts every night now, but there's no snow on the ground. Another two weeks or so and it will really be the beginning of winter. Right now it gets dark at night for a while and everything. As opposed to when I first arrived and it barely got dusky at all.

The other exciting thing I want to show you is a picture of me with my PLC partner. She's the 5,6,7 teacher, and her second year on the slope, though her first year in Atqasuk. Every Friday, we have Spirit Day, and there's a kind of weird tradition. The girls wear their traditional atikluks and the boys wear, get this, Hawaiian shirts? Yes, that's right. The boys wear tropical shirts instead of any sort of traditional clothing from their culture. I don't own an atikluk yet, but I'm excited to learn how to make them. I'm also hoping to learn to make a parka, even though there's no way mine will be ready before this winter!

Me (left) with DaleMarie in our borrowed atikluks. Mine has apples and starts and A+.

The most exciting news is that Danielle borrowed a copy of the Inupiat Rosetta Stone so we can start learning some of the language. Right now, all I know is tuttu (caribou) and a few other words. Some of them aren't nice words (thanks kids, for using them in my classroom) but mostly I just don't know how to spell any of it, even if I can (sort of) pronounce them. Sorry. I'll work on my spelling and share some more in later posts. Next post, I'm going to share a little bit about food, how to get it here, price, and the exciting and delicious things I eat now (like tuttu. In spaghetti and tacos and burgers. Yummmmm.)