Seasons and Language

Well, this is going to be my last post from Canada for 2012 at least. I left camp 2 days ago. Spent the night in Montreal together with Matt and Adam and today it is going back to Germany.

You can really feel that it is getting colder. We already had some kind of snow storm one night. It only stayed on the hill tops for a couple of hours though. You could however see the flakes falling. We almost thought the tents would fly away. The camp crew did a good job with all the tarps however. It was only noisy. The next morning a couple of things were scattered around camp but nothing was badly damaged. Also the Tamaracks are turning yellow and golden. It really looks lovely. The spruce trees stay green all year round. The Tamaracks however drop their needles similar to the leaves from other trees. The aerial view from the plane was also great. Soon it will be all green again once all the needles from the Tamaracks have fallen. And not long afterwards everything will be white.

Charlie carved a small Inuksuk out of a plank of wood before he left. It sits in camp now, reminding everyone that he was there. Out of coincidence we met him again on the plane with his kids and wife. I asked them about Inuktitut because the symbols are really funny. Somehow they reminded me of a mixture between Hiragana and Katakana from Japanese. It turns out that that my suspicion was true. It would surprise me if they were not related of some sort. Of course they have different syllables. The general trend seems to be the same however. Instead of aeiou they’ve got only aiu. The words are different however.

Atsunaii – Goodbye

Ai – Hello

Nakumiik – Thank you