Mary-Day 2

We have luck getting our first interview in at 9 with a scientist guy out at the college. We break for breakfast afterwards to a cool little restaurant called "Pepes", where if you let them know it it your first time in, the present you with a certificate saying you are an accredited lifetime member for having crossed the Arctic Circle to Barrow. You fill in your name and the date, haha. You also get to put your address into a notebook which entitles you to a hand-written xmas card that the waiter assures us we won't receive until April since they have a huge mailing list and probably won't get to it until then. After breakfast we venture back out to the college area and meet with a local elder to interview. He was pretty much deaf so it was an interesting shouting interview, lol. After that our next interview wasn't until 1:30. With some time to kill Ryan and I decide we should walk out to the welcome to Barrow sign and film a few stand-ups just to be cool. As we are finishing this, a random man driving down the road stops and asks us what we are up to and then proceeds to tell us that at the end of the road, there are polar bears, and that he is the guy who shoots all the pictures of polar bears in Barrow you will see in grocery stores. We get excited and ask him to drive us to the end of the road so we can check them out and then makes up some lame exscuse that he has errands to run and his little masculine "lap dog" needs to be fed. So we sadly walk back to the college area and proceed with our next interview. After we are through we have our cab detour to the end of the road in hopes of seeing a polar bear but it wasn't our lucky day. We then head closer towards the downtown area and start looking for more people to interview by asking folks for leads and hitting up the heritage center. Ryan manages to finally get ahold of a guy he had been trying for days so we catch yet another cab to his house and begin another interview. It was interesting because we are noticing that the answers are becoming more and more themed to being "because of the white man!"(our main interview question was what effects of climate change (in coastal Alaska communities) have you noticed over the years...) We also get a kick out of how the man says that over population is also the problem, as his wife sits in the same room with their infant baby. Hmmm....anyways after that interview we walk over to the office of the Whaling Captains Association and try and find someone to interview there. We luck out and score an interview for 9am the next day. We then keep trying to call names of people on our list we have yet to get a hold of, and with no luck, we take a cab back to where we are crashing. We decide to have yummy "Arctic Thai Food" and it was amazingly delicious compared to our canned food meals we brought along and not too overpriced. We bs some more with the guy we are staying with and I turn in early again.