Music camp!

Before we moved up here I knew I would need to get the kids involved in some activities this summer--we'd be arriving in August, and school doesn't start until September. A month of no friends, few toys, and no activities would have been....well....let's just be polite and say "difficult".  What's a kid to do in Iqaluit for the summer?  The resounding answer? Music camp!

Sporting new camp T's

Every summer the Iqaluit Music Society runs a hugely popular week-long camp.  Campers get to choose from various musical activities: Inuit drum dancing, xylophone, recorder, fiddle, percussion, throat singing, accordion, choir, and bagpipes. (For those of you not in "the know", throat singing is a hugely popular traditional Inuit form of breathing/chanting. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnGM0BlA95I)

Coraline has always wanted to learn to play the violin, so she was easy.  Signed her up for the two strings: fiddle and guitar.  DJ was trickier.  Although very musically inclined, he has the attention span of a gnat and mostly just wants to run around and kick balls.  So.....Inuit drum dancing it is!  The way I saw it, he would get to bang something and move around.  Perfect! Plus, Inuit drum dancing sounds exotic and cool. Since I had to select one more activity: percussion.  More banging on things.

Registration.  Note the sealskin in the background.

Throat singing is extremely popular among the girls.

This camp is extremely well organized with volunteers flying in from around the country to help out every year.  The best part about camp?  Its FREE, so no one is excluded.  (Even the instruments are supplied to the students with no rental fee.)  This makes it available to everyone in the community. (Donations are graciously accepted but not expected.)

Coraline working on art with new friends.

The camp runs two community events in the evening.  The first was a "Community/Family Inuktitut Dance".  This was scheduled to start at 7pm. Being the ignorant southerners that we are (please see previous posts), we arrived 30 minutes early for this.  It seemed everyone in town was talking about this event, so I wanted to make sure we got good seats!  We all arrived, filled with anticipation, and realized no one else was even in the building yet.  The band wasn't even there. We have since learned that in Iqaluit nothing starts even close to "on time".  One of our neighbours laughed her head off when she walked in and saw us just sitting there in the empty school gym.  

That's Coraline standing by herself waiting for other people
to show up for the dance.

At about 7:25 the music finally started.  Two local Inuit were assigned the task of leading everyone in the dances.  As I sat there watching and listening I suddenly realized I knew one of the people up dancing.  It was CORALINE!!  Now, everyone who knows Coraline knows that she is the last person anyone would expect to spontaneously get up and dance in front of a crowd.  She's the very definition of a wall-flower (like her introverted mother). But there she was, with her new friend Lilith, joining in with the dancing.  I couldn't have been more proud.

And later, joining in, to our surprise.

Friday evening the camp culminated in a 2 hour concert. We knew upon arrival this would be a special event.  First, people were getting there on time. Second, nearly every seat in the place was taken.  I can't believe I'm saying this about a kids' music camp concert, but it was FANTASTIC.  Traditional drummers, fiddle players, accordion, and of course the kids. I have been a mom for 7 years now, and I've politely sat through any number of children's performances.  I've always been proud of my children for having courage and getting up in front of a crowd to perform. Let's face it though, you (or maybe its just me?) mostly attend this type of event to cheer on your own kid and spend the rest of the time bored.  Not this concert. I thoroughly enjoyed all of it: even when my kids were not on the stage. (Please excuse the fuzziness of photos, my iPhone didn't do well in the low-light of the gym.)

Percussion

Guitar

Dance and drums

One of 3 traditional drum performers.

Mass choir singing in Inuktitut and Latin.

Up next: Inuksuit! Don't know what that is? Read the next post.

The sun! Its everywhere!

During the summer solstice the sun rises in Iqaluit at 2:20am.  Luckily, we are two months past that so sunrise is slightly later.  Today it rose at 4:10am. (Author's note: I actually wrote this post about two weeks ago, so the sun is rising even later now.)

When the sun rises this early, especially for families with small children at home, people get very creative with blocking out the light. Driving around town you see houses with every window covered with blankets, fabric, blinds, etc.  Some people have even resorted to using tinfoil.

Tinfoil window treatment. Wonder if anyone has suggested
 this for a story on Houzz?

In all honesty, I'm not sure if this house is deserted
 or if this was done to block the sun......

Before we left I decided to pick up a bunch of $8 disposable paper blackout blinds from Walmart. (They got packed in a very long box with DJ's hockey stick and put on the flight with us). Not knowing exactly how big the windows were, I just bought the biggest blinds available.  Since the blinds are paper, you can cut them to whatever size you need.  They certainly aren't perfect. For one thing, they stick to the window frame with double-sided tape.  I've read reviews where people have complained that they fall down, though I've never had an issue with that. Also, they are a real pain to "roll up" or "fold up" during the day (the paper is like an accordion).  That's not a huge issue now, but in the winter we are going to cherish those few daylight hours.  My current plan is to just take them down when the sun starts rising after 8am or so, then put up new ones in the spring.  (They are not re-usable as the tape won't re-stick.)

DJ with the blackout blinds.  Thanks WalMart!

The first room I "sun-proofed" was Coraline's.  Two blackout blinds, plus the curtains the homeowner left behind, and her room is almost completely dark even during the day.  Perfect!

Coraline's brown curtains with black blackout blinds.
Not exactly stylish, but she's able to sleep well past sunrise.

DJ's room was a little different. His window is round at the top, and I wasn't quite sure how to tackle that with my paper blinds.  Would they stick to the wall above the window rather than the window frame? (Turns out: no. They fall down and are not long enough anyway.)  I also discovered a big long lump of fabric on top of the curtain rod. I almost removed it thinking it was some kind of lining to go behind the curtains, until I realized there already WAS a liner behind the curtains.  Then I clued in: it was there to block the light above the rod.  It doesn't do a great job (grommet-top curtains that let light in through every hole would never block the sun), but DJ is a deep sleeper.  As long as it is dark enough in the evening that he can fall asleep, it would almost take an explosion to wake him up early.

Light-blocking fabric lump.

Champion sleeper.

Thank you to everyone who responded to my pleas for feedback last post. This blog ultimately is meant to be a record of our adventures for my family, but I always appreciate knowing that there are others out there who find it interesting.  (It would feel kinda sad to think my posts are just floating out there with no one reading until my kids look into them years from now.) So whether you got in touch via email, blog feedback, Facebook, text, etc., I appreciated hearing from all of you! For everyone lurking silently in the background the verdict is in: I'll keep posting at the current rate I've been posting.  You lost your chance to complain.

Up next: music concert? Is it possible to capture Inuit throat-singing through photos?  Stay tuned to find out if I even attempt it....

Stilts and crates

Mom! Mom! The crate is here!

The sealift is in! Wahoo!  Even if you are nowhere near the harbour it is obvious.  Everywhere you look you see wood shipping crates sitting in front of people's homes.  People get EVERYTHING shipped via sealift: cars, furniture, beer, noodles, bicycles, rice, cleaning supplies, you name it. I've been told the sealift people just unload the crates next to the beach. A local company often transports each crate to the customer's home address (last name and address are often written on the outside of the crate).  The other option is going down to the beach to do it yourself, which I would imagine is kind of difficult.  I suppose you could open the crate with a crowbar and try to put everything in your vehicle (making multiple trips).  You would just have to cross your fingers that the rest of items in the crate were still there when you came back to reload. After they are emptied the crates are recycled (wood is precious up here where there are no trees). I've even seen a dog-house made from a deconstructed sealift crate.

Lots of groceries in this one?

If you order a LOT of stuff via sealift, you can't just have it sent up in a crate.  You need to purchase a container.  You get the joy of keeping the container, so many homes have shipping containers next to them.  Some are painted to match the house and made into extra storage for skidoos, etc. Some appear have been turned into workshops or even living spaces. Some have obviously just been left to rust.

Common sight: shipping container!

Container painted to match house.

You may have noticed in the pics above that the houses are raised off the ground. All the homes here are built on stilts (or more correctly: piles).  This is because of the permafrost (ground that remains permanently or almost permanently frozen).  Permafrost is what keeps the land (rock) stable.  If the homes were built on top of the rock, the heat from inside the homes would melt the permafrost, causing the ground to shift.  Obviously, you would end up with shifting homes, unstable cracked floors and walls, etc.  This means no house has a basement or even what most of us would think of as a foundation.

These 2 dogs must not get along when left alone.  The
fenced space under the piles doubles as a dog run
for the smaller dog below. (I learned today that this family actually has a
dog-team that has full run of the "basement" space.)

Some houses leave the piles as is (as are?) and use the space under the house to store things like skidoos (that's "snow machines" to my Thunder Bay peeps and "snowmobiles" to my American friends), equipment, shovels, etc. Other homes (like ours) have surrounded the space between the bottom of the house and the ground in thin wooden "skirting". This means we can store things under the home and lock a door to keep belongings relatively safe.

The house next door.  Space under piles is open.

Our house.  Fooled you! Not a foundation!
Thin plywood-like sheeting provides basement-like storage.
Sort of. Only accessible from outside

The photo of the house above has it all: piles, shipping crate, and cargo container!  Iqaluit at its finest.

Next up: This sunshine is just too much!

ATTENTION: Looking for reader feedback.  I have so many flippin' things to post but I don't want to bombard everyone's inboxes.  Anyone have any comments on the rate of posts?  Too many per week? Too few?  Want to know more? I have a traditional Inuit drum concert coming up, pics of the house with ALL OF OUR BOXES in it, photos of the city, the weirdness of shopping in Iqaluit, etc.  The list just keeps going!  If no one steps up to complain/suggest I'll just keep posting 1-2 times per week as per usual.

#4066

I will do a post on our new home once our things arrive.  Right now we are living out of suitcases.  Because everything is being shipped up Air Cargo it could take anywhere from, well, now, until 7 weeks from now, for our things to arrive.  For now you will all need to settle for info about our neighborhood.

Iqaluit is different in that no one pays attention to street names.  Many streets are not even marked with signs of any kind.  Instead, your address is simply your house number.  If you call a taxi to come and pick you up, you just say "Can I please get a cab to 4066?"  The first time I was here we stayed in apartment building 1104B. So when people asked where we were staying we said "1104B".  To add to confusion, the houses are not even numbered sequentially.  You may have a bunch of houses on one street from 1460 to 1482, but 1483 is two streets over. (I'm not sure if they are numbered as they built or what the reasoning is.)

So, our local address is 4066, Iqaluit, NU.  (This is not our mailing address.  Our address used to be "General Delivery", but we have upgraded to a PO Box. That story deserves its own post.) Our house is off the Road to Nowhere, so our neighbourhood is simply called "Road to Nowhere".  Other neighbourhoods include "The Plateau" and "Tundra Valley".

Our house.  Yes, those are Christmas lights still up.
Everyone seems to just leave them up all year.

Its a relatively nice, quiet neighbourhood.  There is a park down the street for the kids to play in.

Coraline with a new friend at the park
(note the little white stray dog behind them).

Free-range children.

Our backyard is spectacular.  There is a large slope leading away from the house, then a pond.  Then the ground curves back up again to a big hill the kids have dubbed "the mountain". 

"The Pond" and "The Mountain".  Our backyard.

Those dots on top are JJ and the kids
(as seen from the back deck with camera on "zoom").

Up next: houses on stilts and what to do about all that sun!  (For anyone who is wondering Buffy's eye is doing much better.  She is still wearing a "cone of shame", but only for two more days.)

NunaVET

This is going to be a post about yucky stuff.  If yucky stuff--like eye discharge--makes your stomach turn, read no further.  If you are comfortable with medical stuff (and pics) keep reading.

A couple of days ago I noticed Buffy had more discharge than usual coming out of her eye. She has always had occasional eye goop that I just wipe with a tissue, but I found myself wiping her eyes a couple of times daily.  I assumed that, like me, she was experiencing some minor allergy symptoms from being in a new place.  Today when we woke up I looked at her eye and it was grotesque--swollen like crazy, bright red, with green discharge trickling down the side of her face.  It was one eye, not both, so not allergy related.

Up until recently there were no veterinary services of any kind available in Nunavut.  (Not just the city of Iqaluit, but the entire territory.) Occasionally a vet student school group, or a non-profit outreach service, would come up to perform spay/neuter surgeries.  Its shocking and sad to think that a town with a large dog population had no access to medical care for them. There are dogs EVERYWHERE: tied or chained to houses, in pens outside of houses, running the street, etc.  JJ (who is a pediatrician) has heard from local family doctors that they used to do emergency vet care on occasion if they were in the right place at the right time (with supplies on hand).  A moving guide from about 10 years ago I ran across online recommended going to your local veterinarian and purchasing antibiotics, pain control medications, etc. to have on hand before you moved up.

The local veterinarian started out in this little "mobile clinic".

Now the clinic has evolved into a larger facility
 with more equipment.

Thankfully, there is now a vet in town. See the website here: http://www.nunavet.ca/about-us/ .  Dr. Cunningham at Nunavet was born and raised in Iqaluit, went away to school in Saskatoon, and came back to practice. She has two young children (age 4 and 6), so she isn't available all the time. She works Monday to Friday, regular office hours, and takes vacations.  When she isn't available her voicemail message gives out the number to a vet clinic in Ottawa who will give advice to people in Iqaluit over the phone. If a vet emergency happens at night or on the weekend.........well, let's just say I don't really want to think about that.

Thankfully, today was a day the clinic happened to be open.  We took Buffy in and were told we could come back for an appointment later.  In the meantime, they gave us a cone to keep Buffy from damaging her eye any more.

I love my cone......

We went back in later that morning for our appointment and Dr. Cunningham used a stain to determine there are no ulcers present in Buffy's eye.  She was out of anti-inflammatory eye drops, so she faxed a prescription into one of the local pharmacies (there are two).  Because the pharmacy is so busy it took us another 3 hours to get the medication.  It was the last bottle of eye drops in stock, and it expires at the end of the month.  (I'm very glad I picked up enough asthma meds to last the year before we left Thunder Bay.)

Get this cone off my head
so I can scratch my eye.

I'm very grateful Dr. Cunningham returned to Iqaluit to practice in what has to be a challenging setting. With the poverty rate, and the stunning number of loose and aggressive dogs running around, she has her work cut out for her.  The people of Iqaluit are very lucky to have her.

Send lots of good thoughts Buffy's way!  We have a follow-up appointment on Monday and I'll update when we have news.

Nunavut hospitality

So, some of you may have noticed that in the last blog post I briefly alluded to a two-hour wait at the Iqaluit airport our first day here.  We are renting a house and the person with the house keys was supposed to be meeting us at the airport. We had a first name, no phone number or any contact information.  We stood around waiting for nearly 2 hours with our 14 suitcases, dog and cat, overhead paging this guy. JJ made multiple phone calls to our limited Iqaluit contacts (many of whom are away on vacation), before we finally decided to load everything into a van and drive to the only hotel in town that is pet-friendly.

We got everything loaded into the van and were halfway to the hotel when we got a return phone call from the homeowner.  Apparently, the guy who was supposed to give us the keys had a flight to catch so he couldn't wait around the airport.  He decided to give them to a buddy of his, but gave him the wrong date to meet us.  Long story short, we got keys from someone ELSE in town, and didn't have to stay in a hotel after all.

Today there was a knock at the door and a kind, somewhat abashed fellow introduced himself as the "buddy" that was given the wrong date to meet us with the keys.  He had spent the day yesterday on his boat, oblivious to us standing around the airport, having a wonderful day in the balmy 17 degree weather (a heat wave for up here).  He was extremely apologetic (though it wasn't his fault) and offered us 2 huge fish from his catch: Arctic Char!

Here fishy, fishy, fishy......

According to www.seafoodsource.com, "The Inuit of Canada have enjoyed char for hundreds of years; they freeze the fish and eat them like Popsicles."  I'm not sure how accurate that is, but I know Inuit have been eating Arctic char for a long time. Arctic char is a member of the trout and salmon family of fish.  I have to admit, I'm going to have to look online to figure out how to cook this, and I certainly won't do it justice.  How exciting though, for our first home cooked Iqaluit meal to be an authentic Inuit dish!

Our dinner!  Ha, just kidding.
This is how Martha Stewart cooks Arctic char.
http://www.marthastewart.com/344559/grilled-whole-arctic-char

The flight

We're here!  After two days of driving, one day of flying, and two very long hours at the Iqaluit airport, we are HERE!!

JJ on the rocks!

View from up the road.

The road trip was a typical two-day drive with pets.  In short--it was long, noisy, stinky driving interrupted by fast food and (if time) a dip in the hotel pool.  Why stinky?  Because Mylo decided he did NOT like his cat carrier.  He wanted to be sure we knew how mad he was.  So he got his point across in a way that could not be more clear.  His cat carrier got emptied, rinsed, etc. several times throughout the trip.

We're having so much fun!

I do have a suggestion for multi-vehicle road trips that helped us enormously: WALKIE TALKIES.  I know, its old-school technology, and we have cell phones, but trust me on this.

1) You can't read a text or talk on your cell phone safely while driving on highways.  I know people do, but we don't.

2) It gives your children a VERY IMPORTANT JOB.  They become dispatchers.

walkie talkies

Finally, after a 5:30am wake up call today we made it to the airport.  We had 14 pieces of luggage, the dog, the cat, plus 5 carry on bags.  The woman at the check-in counter with Canadian North didn't even blink.

This is ALL ours.

In-flight safety bear.

After we made it to our gate we spotted DJ's school principal (who we had met on our first trip up last fall) who was returning from her vacation.  Then we met a family who live down the road from our Iqaluit house who were returning from their vacation (they also have two children).  Iqaluit is a small city of 7,700 people that feels like a small town of 500.  (Maybe the isolation has something to do with that.)

The front half the plane is just for cargo, there is a
big wall about halfway up the plane. Passengers get the back half.

As the ground became visible from the house DJ commented "It looks like a desert!"  And it does, except that instead of sand, there is nothing but rock as far the eye can see. DJ then said "I thought there were going to be icebergs!" Coraline: "I thought there were going to be houses!"


Ba da bing.


After we got to our house and unpacked (well, ok, after we ate pizza and opened suitcases then walked away from them), the children spent the rest of the evening playing at the park with the same boys they had met at the airport.

Tomorrow: finish unpacking, figure out the "car" situation, get new sim cards for cellphones, arrange for internet and satellite TV, buy groceries, pick up cat food and litter............