busy day

[I look pretty evil in my picture today…and I am pretty evil »]

Well I know how much it irritates me when someone goes to a different country and makes no absolutely no attempt to learn the language, so I’ve taken it upon myself to learn “Antarctican” and I have mastered it rather quickly.  I now speak Antarctican fluently.  Thank you.

So it was a pretty busy day.  My boss took me on a tour of the “town” in one of those enormous vans.  I was lucky that he has access to places most don’t so I got some pretty unique views.  I tried to take pictures, but I am coming to the realization that I’m no good at photography.  I also realized just how much the size of everything skews perspective here.  Something that I see can see clearly and that doesn’t look that far away looks TINY through the camera.  It is weird and hard to describe, but everything seems off.  I’ll try to illustrate it in pictures below.

Also, I saw something really neat today.  It is called a “sun dog” (from what I’m told).  Something about ice crystals in the air or some such scientific explanation, all I know is that it looks awesome.  Supposedly they appear in a variety of ways, but what I saw today was a very defined ring around the sun.  I thought I was seeing things so I took my glasses off, still there.  I had to ask and someone said, yeah, that happens.  I tried to capture it with my camera and here it is.  There are some “artifacts” in the picture, but no trickery, I saw this first person:

 I also attempted my first hike today.  I tried to get up on the top of “Ob Hill”.  I was really unsure of where the path was and we have been told repeatedly to stay on the path.  So I was a little nervous about getting off the path, and the recent snow made things a little more confusing.  The steep uphill part was made of all loose volcanic rubble.  Footing was a little squirrelly going up and even worse coming back down.  Well I said I attempted it because I didn’t make it all the way to the cross on top.  The closer I got the more snow there was and I was by myself so I figured I’d go back up there when I could see where I was supposed to be going.  Excuses, excuses…

Now back to the perspective of things…I hiked up to a wooden post part way up Ob Hill.  In this picture (especially with this low quality) you can’t see it.  It is where it looks kind of flat.

Then I zoomed in as far as I could with my camera in this picture and you can barely see it (I can’t even really see it in the pic).

However, I could see it clearly from where I was standing…I don’t understand it.

I took a lot of other pictures today, but I haven’t uploaded them yet and I want to make sure I figure out what I took the pictures of so that I don’t mislead you.  Be on the lookout.