McMurdo Life

Well, life at McMurdo has given me a throw back to my college years, kind of. Many of my colleagues have described this place as a cross between a College campus and a mining town and I would have to agree. From what I understand, do to the fact that I am staying here for a relatively short period of time, I have been placed in a building houses people who are also in for similarly short periods. What this means is that my room is about 10'x30' has 6 beds, 1 desk, 2 night stands, and one closet/wardrobe thingy. There are currently 4 of us in this room, and any attempt to control the temperature in the room fails. Its crazy hot, and no, I cannot open the window (without breaking it anyway), and that would be wasteful of the fuel spent to heat the place.
It was time to go to bed last night, and I can't say that I was all that tired, so, I figured I would take advantage of the 24 hours of sunlight here, and go on a walk. Well, I guess after sitting in a dark plane and dark buildings all day, exposure to the sun created the wrong balance of chemicals in my blood to induce sleepiness. I was more awake than ever. Oh well, off to bed I went anyway, only to interrupted by one of my roommates sawing down the Amazon rain forest, and at the rate he was going, it should be about gone by now. It took me a while, but I finally remembered that my ear buds isolate outside noise, and I figured a nice come album might help me fall asleep. Seemed to do the trick for a while. The "shutters" for my window don't stay shut, so there was a good amount of light flowing into the room. Once I woke up and noticed that I had a hard time falling back asleep again, any beneficial sleep from that point on was questionable.
The food, while not that bad, is not all that great either. Its buffet style, a lot like we had in the Lottie Nelson Dining hall, for any of my college classmates reading this. Yup, all you can eat, though you really ought not to eat all that much of this if you value your health. I should cut them some slack though, I'm only coming to this conclusion after 4 meals, and breakfast really shouldn't count. Anyhow, I don't think it would be hard to gain weight here if you aren't careful.
Life outside of work seems active, though I haven't gotten involved in to much yet, there seems to be plenty of choices. There are 3 bars, a gym, bowling alley, tap dancing classes, martial arts classes, a band, hikes, tours, clubs, etc. Lots of stuff posted to do. You just have to be extrovert enough to make an effort to get involved. I think if you really wanted to draw inward here and not be noticed, that too is possible.
So with that, I'll leave a little slide show of some pictures... as I had mentioned before, I have been taking a lot more, but don't really want to post them until I've processed them to look the way I want, and I don't have that software with me.