Here I am!

Well, I've managed to find a wireless internet connection buzzing around in the air - even though we're in the middle of nowhere... It's pretty weak and it keeps going off, so I will try and get something posted quickly! :-)

Okay, well I finally arrived, obviously. The flight from Houston to Minneapolis was great, I even filmed take-off and landing on video to watch later on. The flight from Minneapolis to Anchorage was not so great, it was about 6 or 7 hours and it was very boring. But this is what I saw out of the plane window as I was approaching landing in Anchorage:


















Awesome or what? Anyway, here's another one. This is the FIRST shop I saw as I arrived in Anchorage airport:


So anyway, yesterday was my first real day here and it was pretty action packed considering.

We went to Fran's archaelogical site, where they are excavating a "gold assayer"'s house from a gold rush town. The assayer is the man who tells people the value of the gold, and he would also extract gold from things like quartz. They use chemicals, so we generally have to wear gloves in case we find a crucible with mercury all over it or something. Anyway, I had a find! I found a huge piece of ceramic, the same ceramic that made the crucibles we kept finding everywhere, but this was far too chunky to be a crucible. It was all in bits so we had to pack it up carefully for reconstruction later on. Here are some pics:













So there's the artifact all wrapped up and labelled, there's the picture of it in the ground so we know what position it was in, and there's me with my find :-) Okay, I know it might look like a crumbly old bit of rock but when you see it you can see how shiny the glaze is and you know it's ceramic :-)

So that was the site. Later on in the evening we went up the mountains to "celebrate" the solstice. Interestingly, the idea of "celebrating" the solsitice is ridiculous to everyone who lives here. They hate the solstice, because it means that from now on, it will start getting darker. It starts incrementally at first, getting darker by a few seconds every day, but later on they start losing 20 minutes a day, until the winter where it is dark almost all of the time. But at the moment it is so weird! It is day ALL the time! It is day all night! It is twilight around 2am for a while, but then it's day again!

We had a meal on the mountain, Jack bought a small gas burner and we had hot dogs (yum) That picture was taken at about 11 at night, and yes, it looks like day! We came home before midnight though, I was so tired.
























(I look huge because I'm wearing about 15 layers of clothing, it was cold!) Anyway, that's pretty much it for now. I will leave you with some pictures of the very American food I ate on my way here:

The packet of Cheez-It Snack Mix was so massive I still have loads left. Basically, in my 40-or-so hours of travelling to Anchorage, I became a junk food addict. But its okay, Fran and Jack make good food. (Although I did have pancakes with maple syrup yesterday for breakfast, and I'm hoping for waffles today ^_^)





Hope to update again soon!

Love Rebekah