Polish polish

The irregular schedule of the Condor flights flying directly from Frankfurt to Alaska gave me a day free. It was an easy choice to visit my very good friend Pawel in Warsaw. Pawel and I were classmates at the United World College in New Mexico. I arrived 6 days before Pawel and Agata’s wedding – so the timing was close but not quite perfect. They were really wonderful hosts – you’d hardly have known it was so close before the wedding apart from the dance lesson Monday night.

I didn’t have a well-formed idea of what Warsaw would be like, but it surprised me. A huge building boom is underway, fueled by EU support for infrastrucure development. Very modern ‘urban suburbs’ like the one Pawel and Agata live in seemed to be multiplying and spreading out into what was pastural land around the city. From their place, the subway was a 5 minute stroll past a high-end wine store and a roadside market. Downtown apartments are now comparable in price to those in Brussels. The ramping house prices, and labor shortage are a bit of a worry for Pav as they try to finish construction on their new house.

We went up the iconic, monumental communist palace, now called the ‘Palace of Culture and Science’ with great views of the sprawling city of green-belts, high rises, and industry, straddling the Wisla River. Warsaw is an old city, with the cathedral dating from the mid 1300s. But like much of the old town area, it was devastated in WWII. In the decade after the war, in which 6 million of their countrymen were killed, Poles flocked to Warsaw to literally and symbolically rebuild their capital and country. Its now near the end of a similar period of rebuilding post-communism – led by young professionals like Pawel and Agata who work in banking and consulting. Pav reminded me that things are still very different out in the country side though, and noted that the regulatory environment, infrastructure and development are a bit out of synch still. Nevertheless, and although I was there only for a day and two nights, Warsaw certainly struck me as a place of optimism, opportunity and promise. Above all it was just great to spend time with Pawel and Agata and to get a better feel for their life in Poland.

APECS , shaping the future of polar research

In late September, I attended a workshop in Sweden for the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS). This group has grown out of the International Polar Year 2007 - 2009 (IPY), which is an international effort to focus global scientific resources and attention on the polar regions and people.

Participants, varying from senior undergraduates to young Professors were drawn from essentially two different backgrounds: IPY Education and Outreach groups from around the world, and an early APECS incarnation which was largely focused on early-career issues. The process of combing to form a single organization and agreeing on its structure, positioning, mandate, objectives and potential funding sources was challenging and absorbing. However we do now have those things, and are working towards several flag-ship activities in the next two years including career-development workshops at major science conferences, and an International IPY conference planned for Edmonton, Canada, May 2009.

This process was greatly expedited by discussions with and guidance from half a dozen key senior scientists and science planners/ administrators. Personally, it was a fantastic opportunity to learn from and work with a group of young, motivated scientists as well as these mentors. I’m now on the five-person interim executive which will establish the group under the coordination of Jen Baeseman at the Arctic Region Council of the US (ARCUS) also housed in Fairbanks. It was actually quite an exciting feeling to have made what we all agreed was pretty significant progress at the workshop. The obvious challenge is to maintain that forward momentum with us scattered back to our day jobs!

I didn’t actually get much of a chance to see Sweden at all. We met at Sanga Saby conference center about 40 km from Stockholm, but after a late arrival and taxi ride on Wednesday night, I only got half a day in the city on Sunday. Just long enough to get in some ‘city time’, see a few sights around the central city islands, and see Germany bet Brazil 2-0 in a great final of the womens’ soccer world cup. The 10 hour time difference was a challenge late in the evenings, but at least made it easy to take a couple of early morning runs.

Jan and Butch in Alaska

Lisa’s parents, Jan and Butch, dropped in en route to the rugby world cup in France. It was a short but really nice visit and, thankfully, the weather and animals played their parts pretty well. Our whirlwind highlights tour from Seward to Fairbanks meant lots of driving, giving us plenty of time to catch-up.

Lise and I zoomed the 360 miles down to Anchorage after work Thursday night, arriving just after Jan and Butch touched down. On Friday we made a day trip to Seward with a 5-hour boat tour or Resurrection Bay. Straight after launch we spotted a sea otter lolling and rolling around in the swell. (Sea otters eat 25% of the body weight a day - beat that!) Later on the boat stopped for 20 minutes to watch and photo a pod of Orcas (killer whales). We also saw Steller Sea Lions and some birds, but unfortunately for Lise, no elusive puffins. A slightly choppy crossing at the mouth of the bay, which opens into the Gulf of Alaska, we cruised passed the Bear Glacier and booted back to port. A really nice meal of crab and local seafood rounded out the day.

Saturday dawned a beautiful, crisp, clear autumn day for the long drive up to Denali Park. With only a few little clouds under the main peak, we got a fantastic view of Denali on the drive up. It was past the official ‘end of the but we were able to drive the first 32 miles of the park road. Unfortunately, no bears, moose or caribou made themselves visible but we did see some young snow shoe hares with ears and legs already white for the winter, and a flock of half-white ptarmigan hoping that if they stayed still we couldn’t see them. Daft little things. Dinner at a greasy spoon in Healy was sweetened with a shimmering green Aurora in the clear night sky.

We had the very comfy ‘Touch of Wilderness’ bed and breakfast all to ourselves, and from the second storey at breakfast, we were treated to a wolf wandering through the back yard with his own morning snack – a fox or rabbit maybe.

Lise had Monday off and showed her folks the Museum, galleries, sights and surrounds of Fairbanks. We had a lovely potluck dinner with Pat and Adia, and Bobby and Morgan hosted by our friends Fred and Kay. Too small for dinner, our place is also a bit small for accommodations too, and as it turned out nowhere near as unusual in character and characters as the Goldhill Lookout B&B.

So, a short but full and wonderful visit. No puffins and no bears but pretty much everything else. Jan and Butch - we hope you enjoy France and the AB’s finally lift the cup again. Thanks for the party mix, Dominion crosswords, chocolate licorice, ‘blackout’ tops and most of all, thanks for being able to make it all the way up here. Good tears at the airport.