Today is going to be a short post. It's been a pretty rough day for me. It began with a phone call from home with some disconcerting news. It really shook me up and I've had a hard time dealing with trying to me present in two worlds... My world here with 23 people around me constantly (with zero downtime) and my world back home. Today was a late start for us and we didn't have to be at the site until 10am. Today was my day to work at the ReStore so I went with Connelly, Garrett and Laura. The restore isn't very big (about the size of two trailers) and they have to pay $7000 a month in rent! Apparently rents in Alaska are at a premium and The Alaska ReStore ranks third in the country ReStores for the highest rent costs. The other two are in southern CA. The restore was basically controlled chaos. Everything you can imagine for your house is crammed in there. It's like a garage sale in crack. We were only there from 10-3:30 but we unloaded three Uhaul size trucks FULL of everything from railroad ties to washing machines. It's by far the most heavy lifting and manual labor alive done here.
Dinner was at the Native Hospital and we got to try native foods. Of course I'm always game. I had moose stew, Eskimo salad (whale skin& blubber, seal and walrus) and herring eggs. The moose stew was good, the herring eggs have me goose bumps both times I took a bite, the walrus and seal were fishy but good... and the whale skin? That ended up in my napkin. It was really chewy/dense and the blubber felt like trying to chew through gristle but was also almost as hard as a bone. No thank you.
The black stuff is the Eskimo salad. The twig looking thing had the eggs on it.
We got back to the church at 8:30 and decided to go for a hike. Yep, a hike at 8:30pm. It was like the middle of the day out there.
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