Life in the Freezer

Hungarian hairdresser party

Check out her liquor closet...and my cheesy smile. Too much teeth.

Last weekend Scott and I went to the Hungarian hairdresser Ildico’s room party and we were all given little sips of various Hungarian “medicines” (liquors) including a drink made from 40 herbs that had about 17 aftertastes (the last one so bitter that it caused severe facial distortions ;) We met several interesting folks, like Marco, a helicopter pilot from Bulgaria who is learning Spanish so he can retire on a cliff five hundred feet above the ocean in Chile, a janitor named Sparky who wore a homemade calico dress, giant blue FDX issue boots, and boom box earrings, and another tall Hungarian woman (also named Ildico) who said the bitter Unico “medicine” was a gift from the gods. Interesting, Scott’s scratchy throat was gone by the next day.


I also had a chance to go on my first boondoggle (morale trip) already. I went dive tending with the BBC/Discovery Channel film team (who also made Planet Earth) for a day. We took a Piston Bully (a enclosed tracked snow machine that goes about as fast as a very slow jog) and went to a drilled hole in the ice with a warmed hut placed on top not far from town.


The two divers put on endless layers of insulating clothing, plus a dry suit but they still were nearly hypothermic after their 45-minute dives in the 28 degree water. They said cold hands were the worst part.


The ice is about 7 feet thick near shore where we were, and they described in detail what they found: fist sized flea-looking crustaceans, cliones (flying vampire pigs is how they described them), giant volcano sponges, anemones, star fish as wide as your forearm, ptinafors (jellyfish whose whole bodies are one giant maw that opens when they sense movement), and finally, colorful bacteria lining the underside of the ice, creating a stained-glass effect when the divers look up. This bacteria is what all these slow-moving creatures live off of. The divers were gracious enough to give me detailed verbal descriptions of all they saw. Kathryn (the producer) and I had great chats about men, gardening, her home in Bristol, England, and McMurdo culture while we tended to the divers for about five hours. They were all very approachable for being muckedy-muck filming folks. The series, Frozen Earth, will be coming out next year.


I had more pictures of the dive tending, but my card got corrupted :(