Reflections...

So I almost forgot to do my little “first Inuit gathering” recap after Friday’s get-together. The details are a little hazy in my 5-day-old reflection. But the highlights included…

1. Tried caribou and liked it (I can only compare it to duck meets roast beef. And being as I heart both duck AND roast beef, I was thrilled)

2. Tried beluga dish/treat/word-that-starts-with-“m” and didn’t like it. I really did give it an honest go, but I couldn’t chew through it. So I had to swallow it whole. Luckily it was small (think about half as thick as your pinkie finger, and as long as from the tip to the first joint). I’m not swearing it off for good, because everyone at the gathering said it was super tasty, and a treat… so maybe I just had a tough piece. The long and short of it is I will give it another try, and if it’s better ok. If not… well that’s just too bad.

3. Inuit children love me. I think the reason I was invited was so that I would meet other people in the community, but the kids were too much fun. Birthday boy and I played a wicked game of “spy ball” (a ball with Spiderman on it that can get squished into a Frisbee… and every time it became a ball again he would shout “You/I made it SPYBALL!”). Birthday boy’s sister and I blew up approx. a million balloons…. Including a tiny green one that she christened her “lucky pickle” when then promptly got lost.

4. The most interesting thing I saw was when my coworker/the host brought out all the meat from the deepfreeze (frozen caribou, more beluga I think and something else…) and laid a flattened box on the floor, and a whole crew gathered around the frozen meat and sliced at it with these little slicers/machetes. I had seen them before, when some of my co-workers daughters were cutting up pepperoni and that sort of thing, but it was a really interesting sight, to see all these women … literally all ages… from grandmothers to five-year-olds… carving away at frozen meat, gathered on the floor. If I hadn’t been a guest, and was actually attending as a journalist or whatever, I would have stolen Robyn’s crazy camera and taken some fantastic photos. But that would have been rude. And I wouldn’t have been invited back :P