It's A Small World After All

When living in Nunavut, sometimes it feels like you're living on a totally different planet than everyone else. It's nice when life reminds you the world is pretty small.

I started a new class today: HR Management. I had been told that the instructor used to teach in London (Ontario) but I forgot about it until I was walking out the door wearing a Fanshawe College t-shirt (Fanshawe being a college in London). When I walked into class, I was immediately greeted with, "Fanshawe!" from my instructor.

As it turns out, he used to live two blocks away from Jeff and me in London. Not only that, but he worked at Fanshawe, which was literally across the street from where I worked. We probably walked past him in mall and the grocery store...but we had to move 2300 kilometres away to actually meet someone who in essence, was a neighbour in London. He now lives on the floor below us. For someone who loves coincidences, this blows my mind.

However, we weren't neighbours for long as he moved to Cape Dorset to work for the same GN department Jeff works for.

In other news, it has gotten pretty cold around here lately. Weirdly enough, as soon as November started, the temperature dropped 15 degrees. Today the high was around -19C. Coming from the extreme south of Canada, today topped one of the coldest days of my life. I told a few people this today and they stared at me for a second before breaking out into laughter.

I guess I'll hop on the bandwagon and report on Halloween in Rankin. Since it was pretty warm (-5C? I can't remember), we didn't get as many kids as I expected. Apparently when it's colder our building will get more kids because it's warm in here. I made the front entrance of our apartment (mine and Jeff's, that is) look like a pathetic haunted house. Xeroxed drawings of jack-o-lanterns and cut up garbage bag was the best I could do in the 20 minutes I had between getting home and the start of the kids. I don't know what it's like in other communities, but there was a specific time for trick-or-treating here. It was from 6-8 and the kids were good about staying within that time frame.

Also, the contest I won ($500 to spend on half.com) is turning into a big pain in the butt. To be able to order anything off half.com, we need an American credit card number to authorize it and an American address to ship it to. So the whole point of the contest getting us free stuff has been lost because we have to find and pay someone to let use their credit card number and ship the stuff up to us. Sigh...there goes the fun.

All in all, things are going great. We're still enjoying every second of it up here. Our plan right now is that in May I'll be out of school and we'll take a vacation to Ontario and hopefully somewhere a little more exciting than home for a bit (no offence family!). Jeff thinks I'm insane for this, but I really want to stay up here for a few years before ever vacationing south again. I want the full weirded-out effect when we go on vacation. I have dreams all the time where we go back to Ontario and the tall buildings scare me, haha. I think it'd be a neat thing to say that going "back home" gives you culture shock.

Oh yeah, the sunset at 4pm thing. Apparently the sun sets sooner than that, but that's around the time it starts getting dark quickly. It's a bit weird but I like it, and I think Jeff likes it too. In London, we would look at the clock and say, "Oh darn, it's 11pm already. How did that happen?" but here, we look at the clock and say, "Holy crap, it's only 7pm! I thought it was 10!" I feel like we have a lot of free time here which is complete reversal of London. I like it!

(posted by Jaime)