Another Saturday Night...

...that is the title of a song by a much loved artist (Yusuf Islam a.k.a. Cat Stevens) who just recorded a new album! His newest album is called An Other Cup and so far I have only heard one of the songs, but I'll be out to purchase the CD once it hits stores here in Yellowknife...

Before I moved to Yellowknife, I didn't know so much about it. I thought it was a tiny place in Northern Canada that didn't have any of the regular things I was used to in Montreal. This is both true and false. Allow me to explain:

Yellowknife is obviously small. There are twenty thousand people in the city, considerably less than Montreal. It is the capital of the Northwest Territories and the largest of all communities in the NWT as well. The second largest city in NWT is Inuvik, with a population of approximately 3500. I am lucky in the sense that I have been somewhat exposed to various communities in the NWT given my work in the Telecommunications business. I speak with people from all over the Territories (Yukon and Nunavut) included and though I haven't been further North, at least I have become a little bit more familiar with these areas.

So yes, you can get pretty much everything you need here, as far as daily living is concerned. Housing is more expensive than other places, so is food and other living expenses. But this is a different climate and the cost of living in the North is understandibly more expensive than living in the South.

Last week there was a bit of a crunch in the stores. The ferry was out. The ferry (on the MacKenzie River) brings pretty much everything to town. The ferry is used all year except when the ice road is in place. However, during freeze up and melt (i.e. the transition from Fall to Winter and the transition from Winter to Spring), goods come in by helicopter. To be honest, it was weird to see bare shelves at the grocery store! Apparently the ferry was damaged last week, but it is back on schedule this week.

The ice road is extremely important in the North. During the last decade the duration of time that the ice road is of use has decreased dramatically. This is because it hasn't been cold enough to form good strong ice and there has been an increase of precipitation (which has insulated the ice before it has been fully formed). During the conference I went to last week, one of the speakers from the department of transportation said that the ice roads duration decreased by 18 days in the last couple of years! This is due, in large part, to global warming.