Wow. It's been a while. I now live in a house at the base of Alyeska Mountain with two new friends, Annika and Jessie. Annika grew up here in Girdwood but moved to the lower 48 for a while. She moved back around 2001 and bought the house we live in. She gets very excited about christmas and it looks like an elf threw up in our living room.
I still see my friends at the hostel quite often. Salome and Avi are working at Challenge Alaska while Brenden is a lifty and Amy works at the ski school desk at the mountain. Salome painted a mural of a pine tree with mountians and a river on my helmet
We all celebrated Santi Claus, the saint day of Saint Nicholas, on December 6th at the hostel. This celebration, for us, centered around making bread people, simmilar to gingerbread men, but less cookie like.
In Switzerland, Santi Claus is tall and thin. He drives a sleigh pulled by donkeys and brings chessnuts and other sweets. When he comes you sit on his lap and tell him your sins. If you have been good, he rewards you with sweets, but if you have been especially bad, he empties his sack and shoves you in! Then he takes you back to his home in the Black Forest where you spend a year peeling carrots for his donkeys. That is a little stiffer punnishment than a bit of coal in a sock! Christmas and Saint Nicholas' Day are seperate there, which makes more sense to me.
We have had some beautiful sunsets lately! This picture is from half way up the mountain around 4:00. That bit of Ocean is the Turnagain Arm skirted by the Chugach Mountains and Girdwood is that little bit of light to the right of the sign.
I will have more pictures soon
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