South Pole Station

The night of my first day here, I just took it easy. Internet was down until the morning, so I went to the music room to play guitar. There was already someone in there, so I asked if he wanted to jam. He was a beginner, so I decided to take up the bass and play along. Eventually a drummer stopped in, and we had a makeshift band! Played until it was time to go to sleep. The guitarist had some beers which he shared. Diamox is weird. It affects the taste buds. It felt like I was drinking beer with pop-rocks. Really strange. I slept ok that night, except the Diamox would wake me up to pee, really really bad.

The next morning, we met at 7 am for breakfast. After that, we walked over to our labs (in the Dark Sector--which is the coolest name for a lab, ever). But they couldn't unload our cargo until 2pm, so we just took care of some minor lab work, then went back for lunch. Lunch was a baja style shrimp burrito. It made the whole base smell really good! The food here is way better than I was expecting, and waaaaay better than it needs to be.

To get to the Dark Sector Lab, you have to suit up and walk in the -40 degree (-60 with wind chill) snow for about 15 minutes. So, you don't want to do it a lot. We trudged back at 2 to find that the hoist to life our cargo wasn't working properly. So we went back and had fall safety training. And that was about it until dinner. Dinner was a delicious lamb stew or meatloaf. Very tasty. After that, I played in the music room for a couple of hours and then played a computer game until bedtime.

Had breakfast at 6:30 and now I'm going to meet the group to see if the hoist is fixed, or if we've procured a hand hoist to lift the cargo.