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With the weather staying around 40F (6C) or so, I decided it was a pretty good time to get out and go for a decent walk around the village. Weird I’ve been up here almost 6 weeks but haven’t really gone for a walk, though with the kinda temperatures and blizzards that we’ve had, even the locals don’t head outside much! Good chance to take some photos so people can see what the rest of the village is like too. Frank, the school principal, paced out over 6 miles of boardwalks when he first moved out here – I was out for good hour and a half and can believe that kinda distance, as although there’s only around 400 people in the village, it’s all pretty spread out.

With all the strong winds, some damage has been caused to the wooden boardwalks + bridges. Given the way a lot of snow on the frozen lakes has been cleared away with the wind + rain, I don’t think any land (or water!) speed records are going to broken anytime soon mind:

That said, around some of the boardwalks themselves there is still a good build up of snow that’s been cleared away. There’s a little bobcat that drives round clearing the boardwalks (which is pretty funny to watch – you don’t expect something like that up here), so you can get a good 4 foot or more of snow piled up that’s been cleared away:

Looking across to our house and school, the locals are still plowing their snowmobiles across the lakes and standing water. Me, the idea of all that melted snow and standing water makes it look too much like the lake had melted, so I stuck to the boardwalks.

Ladies and gentlemen, please have your passports ready for inspection. Welcome to Tuntutuliak Intertational, home of the Bluejays. Enjoy your visit.

There’s a couple of Cessna 172′s that seem permanently tied-down – FAA website shows the registered owner being people from the village, but not sure whether they’re actually air-worthy. Guess they are, just not used much:

Another shot looking across to the ‘terminal’ area. When the other planes come in, they just pick somewhere around here to park, unload, then fly back out. Can get quite busy at times if they’ve been on weather hold in Bethel or other villages – when we were heading out to Anchorage after Christmas there were 2 other planes alongside ours, with another coming in to land as we ready to take off. Gets quite crowded with 6 planes down here, but there were no planes in the area this afternoon.

One man and his dog (kidnapped from Marie at lunchtime…):

A big perk of working at school (or having Kat working there ) is that you get to use the two large washing machines + dryers once a week. You have 3 hours, so easily enough time to run through all your laundry. The locals either wash by hand, or head to the washeteria which charges $7 per load to either wash or dry, so you’d be looking at $28 for two loads of laundry (quickly adds up!):

Around by the river, there’s a lot of abandoned buildings and feels pretty run down. The area is also littered with little fishing boats like these, used during the summer to catch as many fish as possible so they can be smoked or dried to get them through the winter.

The old school building is also over by the river, though was abandoned long ago. The current school was built around 20 years, and it’s a shame such a large building like this is going to waste. It’s meant to be loaded with asbestos, and would cost too much to bring in engineers to thoroughly clean it and then fix any structural problems.

But, there is a fairly modern community center just across one of the lakes from our house and the current school, so it’s not like there’s a demand for a large, multi-purpose building like this in the village. Haven’t been in to the community center yet, but this was around 2p.m and seemed fairly busy, with all sorts of events going on such as dancing, weaving, etc. scheduled throughout the week:

Coming back into the housing area, Rocky ran off to play with his brother Koda, Nick + Dana’s dog. Koda has a darker, sleeker coat and isn’t as well-fed (polite way of saying fat!) as Rocky since he doesn’t steal sandwiches or get fed all scraps of food like popcorn He also goes out running alongside Nick on the snowmobile twice a week so is in better shape than Rocky – Nick took Rocky out last weekend with him and poor Rocky just wasn’t used to it so was a bit slower than Koda!

So, that’s pretty much Tunt! Really is a mix of old, abandoned and run-down buildings alongside a modern school, community center and church. Even though I’ve seen so many of the locals going across the lakes on snowmobiles + 4-wheelers, I’ll stick to the boardwalks until the standing water freezes again and is snowed over!

We’ve also got some more of our big food order through – we received pasta sauce, salsa sauce and some dried foods a few days ago, and a stack of butter, cheese, trail mix bars, oats, powdered juice, etc. got delivered today. A bit concerned the meat products haven’t arrived as although I wouldn’t mind the meat sitting in an aircraft hangar when it’s -20C, I don’t particularly want 20lbs of ground beef, 14lbs of bacon and 12lbs of sausage sitting around when it’s 7/8C Hopefully it just hasn’t been despatched yet, or will arrive tomorrow.

Now that I’ve managed to rummage through some other people’s cameras, have got together a decent colletion of photos. Considering Kat and I had given our cameras to a couple of groups of kids, they ended up taking some decent photos, though a lot of them were simply of their friends!

There’s still a few other camers I’ll be downloading photos from, and then I’ll put together a CD of high-resolution photos to send out to people. These two were some of our photographers, and certainly worked out cheaper than paying a professional photographer. Sure we’ll end up with some good photos from Lake Tahoe in the summer too.

Katie did a really good job on the wedding cake, as did Wanita and the other helpers with decorations. Glad they convinced us to go for a traditional 3-tier cake, and the top part is now wrapped up in the freezer ready for our 1st wedding anniversary.

Having gone for a traditional pot luck too whereby the guests all bring a dish to share, there was a mountain of food for people to pick + choose from, creating quite a queue at times! That said, the entire table was cleared by the end of the night!

There were about half a dozen large tables around the gym, and at times you had to remember you were actually in a school gym rather than a hotel ballroom or similar! Our table got swamped by kids wanting to sit with us, but so long as they had food on their plates they were no bother!

The rest of the photos (around 30 or so) of the reception can be found in my photo gallery, along the other photos from the actual wedding ceremony. They’re probably better if anyone’s wanting to print them off too:

• Photos from the wedding ceremony
• Photos from the wedding reception

Is still feeling pretty weird being refered to as Mr + Mrs Foulds, or people jokingly asking where my wife is! We did get a load of congratulations cards through the mail today which was really nice, and there doesn’t seem to be any complicated in the forms we need to send off to the immigration department. The change of weather on Saturday that allowed Lincoln to fly back into the village has just kept on going, with temperatures up around 42F (6C), although 40-50mph winds are making things fun to walk around in!

Think we’ve just about recovered from yesterday now! Even though the wedding ceremony went by really quickly, and the reception only lasted a couple of hours, still seemed like a very long day. But, the reception at the school was cool – lots of people turned up bringing all sorts of different food dishes and everyone seemed to enjoy it.

It gave the kids from school a chance to get involved (and stuff their face with food!), and rather than Kat + I going round taking photos, we gave our cameras to a couple of groups of kids and let them play around. Although some of them were a right mess with people missing heads or the classic ‘finger over the lense’, we got about 35-40 good ones I was looking over this morning.

A lot of the teachers were taking photos too which should turn out a bit better, so I’ll start stealing them off their cameras and uploading them over the next few days. Was a shame quite a lot of people were sick and hadn’t made it though as there’s an illness going round the past week, so even the people up here will be wanting to see the photos

I’m glad Katie convinced us to go with the proper 3-tier wedding cake idea as it looked awesome – hopefully someone managed to get a decent photo of it! I hadn’t heard of the tradition of keeping the very top part of the cake and eating a piece to celebrate your 1st wedding anniversary so it must be an American thing I guess. Wasn’t much of it left at the end of the night, and pretty much all the food had disappeared with so many people there! Also glad we had a traditional pot luck too so that we didn’t have to prepare all the food ourselves.

Still feels kinda weird being a married man now though! Think it’s more wearing the wedding ring though as I’m not used to wearing a ring on that hand. Kat keeps giggling sometimes about too, and is finding it weird being called ‘Mrs Foulds’ now!

Next step is getting another round of forms sent in to the immigration department to grant permanent residency. Hopefully won’t be as much of an issue as getting the visa (which took a year!), and am also hoping there won’t be a problem travelling around in the summer if the green card doesn’t arrive by the end of May.

Some people worry about the weather in terms of will it be raining. We worried about the weather in terms of will the minister be able to fly back into the village after being snowed in in Bethel for two days! Thankfully Lincoln made it and we managed to fix up a couple of snowmobile rides to take us to the church:

Was very weird riding through the village on the back of a snowmobile with Jason driving, and Nick driving Kat! Wearing our wedding gear with big winter jackets and snow boots on just added to it

The church was very pretty, a lot nicer than I was expecting to be honest:

Having spoken with Lincoln before the ceremony, he performed a nice short service without too much religious stuff since we’re not Moravian or all that religious anyways. Felt pretty weird exchanging vows!

The service only lasted around 10 minutes or so, and was really nice without any kids trying to cause problems and get into the church, and there were a good 20 or 30 people from the school which we wanted there, so worked out as being the nice little ceremony we wanted. Lincoln realised he didn’t know my surname, so simply pronounced us Mr + Mrs:

At the end, Elena played some nice music on the piano again as we walked down the aisle to the back of the church, though I don’t think either of us really knew what to do then! But, the guests that followed us down and shook hands as they were leaving:

With the weather fairly warm and not too much wind, we also managed to get a photo outside the church with Lincoln:

Lots of people there were talking photos and Marie had taken all of these for us which turned out really well. Will start going through them over the next few days and upload them into the photo gallery once we’re sorted, but hopefully these will keep you all ticking over.

No, I haven’t got the wedding jitters and done a runner. Would be hard given the fact that it’s been blizzarding quite badly the last 2/3 days and there’s only been a handful of planes making it into the village! We’ve been trying to get things sorted, although we still don’t really have much idea as to what’s going on tomorrow. Seems like everyone is taking care of things, or meant to be, so we could well find nothing is sorted at the church or for the reception!

A couple of the teachers have offered to play bodyguard at the church and all the kids have been told not to bother turning up there, just wait for the reception instead. Don’t really want 100 kids in the church running around, shouting to get your attention, etc. and this is the one thing both Kat + I have insisted on and everyone else has agreed with! The kids would only get bored anyways, so best for them to wait until there’s food, drink and places for them to run around.

Since it’s a pot luck where people bring a dish and quite a few of the teachers have asked what food we’d like, figured we should bring a few dishes ourselves! Baked a couple of loafs of bread earlier today, have some poor-man’s steak in the oven now (mince meat held together with a little flour and crackers almost like a burger, lightly browned, then baked covered in cream of mushroom soup) and have a mountain of rice to cook later on since pretty everyone will eat rice. Kat’s class baked all sorts of cookies + brownies this morning, and a couple of other classes with the younger kids in made pretzels or similar snacks so sounds like a good start.

The weather hasn’t turned out quite as planned with some strong winds and blowing snow but it’s actually pretty warm, hovering around 30F (-1C). Likely to be windy again tomorrow with blowing snow, but hopefully we’ll get a bit of a break and have some sunshine around 3p.m (midnight UK time) when the ceremony will take place. Will try to get a few photos online during/just after the reception so there’ll be stuff there for Sunday, and move through uploading photos other people have taken the start of next week

The whole world and it’s wife seems to be invited anyways, so if yer in the Lower Kuskowim area of Alaska and passing near Tuntutuliak, pop in:

I would say that I created these with my own fair hands, but all I was allowed to do was the cut the paper. To be honest, is probably my limit since I’m not well-known for my artistic or creative skills! They look really good and add a nice little personal touch to things – Kat’s certainly very proud of them!

Frank, the school principal, seem shocked when asked if it was okay to hold the reception in school (the only place big enough in the village basically even though it doesn’t sound all that impressive!). Guess he hadn’t been paying attention over the past year when Kat had been talking about me moving here, or even last Christmas when I was first introduced to him just after we got engaged

Doesn’t look like we’re gonna have little sausage rolls at the reception mind…

So, we’re getting married next Saturday (the 27th)! When we spoke with the minister from the Meravian church he said he could perform the ceremony whenever we wanted, so why wait any longer?

One of the locals, Martina, headed into Bethel over the weekend and was going to pick up some flowers, decorations and some other bits + pieces, and another of the locals is going to put together a wedding cake. There’s also people wanting to help decorate the church and get things sorted for the reception, and usually when there’s some kind of party like this going on, everyone will bring a dish to be served so means we’re not having to prepare all the food ourselves

Hopefully we can keep the actual wedding ceremony at the church fairly small and have the reception open to the whole community as it will be the first white (i.e. non-local) wedding they’ve ever had in Tunt, so they’re wanting to make it into a really big deal. In a way, it’s pretty cool as there’s not going to be many people able to say they got married in an eskimo village in Alaska, but then with so many people wanting to get involved and help out, it’s difficult to actually keep control of what’s happening!

Yesterday afternoon was so much fun! During the teacher training going on at school, Nick came to find me to see if I was up for going out to where he goes chipping ice after school. It sounded pretty good, and meant I got a chance to ride a snowmobile too. Been up here a month and hadn’t had a chance to ride one myself! The school snowmobile is a 500cc Ski-Doo and was very similar to riding a motorbike, except the throttle isn’t twisting but a small lever on the inside for your thumb like a brake lever.

Was cool riding out of the village to chip ice, which is literally driving a metal stake into the ice to chip pieces off then collecting them into big plastic drums to thaw out back at home. It’s quite a lot of work, but 10 minutes or so filled up 5 x 32 gallon drums which works out to about 100 gallons or so once thawed. Do it a couple of times a week and you’re set, and will give a lot cleaner water than from the school (or 25c / gallon from the local water provider!), but the school is building a new water purifying station right next to the well sometime in the next week or two which will make things a lot better.

After we brought the ice back to Nick’s house, we headed out again so Nick could show me some of the trails around the village. I didn’t realise they were building a new airport (it’s not like the current one puts planes into holding patterns because it’s so busy!), but the runway is much longer and wider so bigger planes will be able to land, both for cargo and passengers. You won’t be looking at jets landing anytime soon, but the idea seems to be that since a lot of people pass through Bethel just to get to Anchorage, 8-10 people could get together and charter a plane direct from Tunt to Anchorage for the same price as going via Bethel, but you get there in 1 1/2 hours direct as opposed to waiting for one of only 3 flights a day to Anchorage.

Driving around some of the trails and keeping an eye out ptarmigan or foxes was fun, not so much in terms of wanting to actual shoot something, just riding round on the snowmobiles Taking the video was pretty good, though is very bumpy riding round the edges of the lakes even just doing 20mph or so. Going along the new runway and the flats coming back into the village Nick would shoot off as his snowmobile gets up to 90mph or so, but I topped out at 55mph which is about all the school snowmobile will do – that still feels ridiculously fast bouncing along across the tundra!

But, ended up being out for a good hour or so and feel really comfortable on the snowmobile now. Was surprising how easy it was to pick up after riding motorbikes for a few years, and also how it wasn’t as dis-orientating as I thought it would be out on the tundra. When the weather comes in, sure, it’s just white everywhere, but in clear weather like yesterday you’d have to head a long way out of the village and not be paying any attention to get lost!

We had a great sunrise this morning, it’s just a shame that there are a couple of big fuel tanks for school a hundred yards or so from the house! That and the power + telephone lines that criss-cross all over the place. But, was almost like the sky was on fire, and not bad to look at when eating your breakfast:

Jana, the speech pathologist, had made it into Tunt this morning and had managed to pick up some fish from the pet store in Bethel. Considering it’s the same pet store that sold Kat two male gerbils last year that ended up having babies, and Molly became Max a few months ago, am a little concerned given the fact that the fish are guppies! Should be fun though – the tank isn’t really all that big to support many fish, and if any of the guppies do give birth the babies are likely to be eaten pretty quick or sucked into the filter. Had some guppies give birth in an aquarium I had in Gateshead and they weren’t that bad to look after.

I also came into school for half an hour this afternoon to meet Kat’s class as they kept asking about me. They had some fun questions, I explained where I was from and how long it took to fly here, and how things aren’t all that different in England. Considering most of these kids will get no further than Bethel or Anchorage occassionally, they just couldn’t grasp somewhere as far away as England.

Suppose it’s not all that different from the kids I was working with at Greencroft and plenty of other places back in England in terms of growing up, living + dying in the same place without really venturing very far. Guess one of the ideas in moving over here and wanting to travel around elsewhere is that if I decide that the north east of England is where I want to spend the rest of my live then fine, but at least I’ll have been out and seen other places

Been feeling very productive today. Got up fairly early (for me!) and took a couple of boxes to the post office to get sent out, then took a load of trash to the furnace. Figured that having a rail of coat hooks behind a freezer in the entry way to the house wasn’t all that useful so took it off and put it on the other wall – Kat was pretty impressed I’d even been out of bed long enough to get that done by lunchtime! Makes it much easier than trailing wet boots + jackets into the house all the time. I also emptied one of the big containers of rain water into the water tank and set another couple up to collect the melting water after the blizzard finally eased up just before lunch and the temperature started rising.

We’ve also got the marriage licence through which is pretty cool as only took around 10 days and saved us the trip into Bethel. When I first read the actual licence my heart sank as they’d mispelt my middle name (typo turned it into ‘Kennteh’) but there was another licence right underneath with it spelt correctly Everything on that seems set now, so will check with Lincoln from the Meravian church to make sure he’s okay to perform the ceremony and will look at doing that in the next couple of weeks I guess! Find it pretty funny you get this fancy certificate with gold lettering and stuff, but it actually gets returned to a central office after the ceremony and you have to pay an extra $20 to get a copy of it for yourself!

But, as I was coming back from taking the trash out, had to pick my way through the school ‘car park’! Is pretty funny with so many snowmobiles outside during the day – must have been 12 snowmobiles and a couple of 4-wheelers. The house is where Marie lives, literally 10 yards from school, which is why poor Rocky doesn’t get to play outside during the day! Since Marie + Kat got their own cable run through the mail, I’ll look at setting that up outside our house so he can come round and play during the day.

Overall, have felt a lot more useful + comfortable today and overcame a fear of talking with people in the village. Maybe not fear, but when I’ve been introduced to people, both sides have had a hard time understanding each other. A lot of it I guess is my accent which is just so different to anything they’ve come across before – accents from the lower 48 are usually fine as they’ll have heard them on TV. Chatted with Alice in the post office when sending packages off, and chatted with one of the maintenance engineers from school for a good 5-10 minutes after he got his snowmobile stuck in a snow drift outside the house. But, talking slowly (not in a patronising way) and trying to avoid using slang seems to work fine and was nice to chat with Mark for a bit this afternoon about random stuff!