Important Things to Do When In Iqaluit

After finally traveling to Iqaluit - can you say lame - I just had to make my way to Tim Hortons - and not only buy a doughnut and a coffee, but take a picture of both the food and the pretty little Tim Horton's sign on the outside of the Northmart. (To my credit, I was also excited by their selection and quality of fresh produce - not just a chain restaurant.) In my defense, I'm a former employee of Tim's and so it has a bit of a special place in my heart. I did enjoy the coffee and doughnut though.

In more current news, the wind is howling at 80 km/hr gusting to 93 km/hr (That means the wind would be going over the speed limit on Northern Ontario's 2 lane highways - at least when it was gusting, although not enough to likely warrant a ticket or pass many other vehicles - but that is another story). We've had school canceled for 1.5 days now, and seriously, there was no way that anyone was going to go anywhere this morning. Strangely, although the wind speed has increased, the visibility has improved, and I fully expect that it'll be a cold windy morning, but we'll be back to business as usual.

One new hobby that we've developed here is Norwegian - which is fascinatingly similar to English (considering that at no point in my many years of school did anyone suggest that there was any link between the two languages - and thanks to the antics of the Swedish Chef on the Muppets, I was led to believe that Scandinavian languages were entirely like gibberish and their weird consonant combos and funky looking vowels clearly were more closely related to Russian than English) - but nei! The pronunciation is a bit different, but often completely foreign looking words turn out sounding shockingly like their English counterparts... Take kaldt - looks strange, but its pronounced a lot like... cold. Anywho... I'll keep you updated as we find new and fun words since Norsk er et kjempebra språk (Norwegian is an awesome language). I'll also send some hats off to Google's translator - its been a good tool for fooling around and trying to figure out how some of the grammar works.

Jeg liker å lytte til vinden blåse under en blizzard (I like to listen to the wind blow during a blizzard.)

Jeg tar min kaffe svart (I take my coffee black)

Jeg håper den foodmail gjør det her snart (I hope the foodmail makes it here soon)

Togturen til Bergen ser vakkert (The train ride to Bergen looks beautiful)

Jeg skal gjøre noe nyttig akkurat nå (I should be doing something useful right now)

So there you go... :D Now if only there was a Google translator of Inuktitut.