Feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme, get on up, it's dog sled time!

Family fun.

This weekend we took part in Fur Rondy! It is actually called Fur Rendezvous- apparently fur goods are a big deal here. It is a winter festival to celebrate life in Alaska. All sorts of events take place over a ten day period. I guess it has been going on for 77 years, which is 23 years longer than Alaska has been a state. We (Jenny, Dan, Oskar and I) went downtown Saturday morning to watch the ceremonial start to the Iditarod. I was under the impression that sled dogs were much larger and furrier. My impression was wrong. Many of them actually reminded me of feral dogs. They are scrappy looking things and they even have giant nasty tongues flopping out of their mouths. We didn't stay the whole time, but long enough to be surprised by the Jamaican team. You read me right. And he even knew he was awesome; as he rode by he danced and waved Jamaican flags. Some of the mushers were even handing out stuff like at a parade and one guy almost fell off his sled trying to do so. Hopefully he will do better today. There were 60-some teams and they came by every few minutes. Since we had Oskar we didn't stay the whole time but got a good sense of what it’s all about. We were originally going to go downtown, but got a tip to go to Central Lutheran where there are less people and their youth group provided hot cocoa and treats. We even saw some people we know.

Orange jackets!

Pretty white puppies.

Jamaica!

Later we went to the Running of the Reindeer. It’s like the running of the bulls, but better because it has Santa’s seal of approval. Jenny got to experience the very un-PCness of the Alaskan announcer. Some of what he said was funny, but most of it offended at least one demographic. There were four groups that ran- Un-Alaskans, women, men, and couples. We only watched the first two so we could get a spot at the restaurant. In the first group the announcer asked where people were from and someone said he was from Texas and then the announcer said, “Welcome to a big state!” That bit was actually funny. Texans are unjustifiably proud of their state. While watching the event I commented that I remembered reindeer being bigger and that they should use moose instead  so you can see them better and really make it exciting.

And back to the beginning to do it all over again!

To do these events they put a lot of work in getting snow back onto the streets. Maybe that’s why they don’t work very hard to clear them in the first place. Just a thought. The events really were a lot of fun though. People were well spirited and we only ran into a few obnoxiously drunk people. 

Jenny is here this week and it's awesome. It's nice to have people around who want to hold and play with Oskar all the time.

Oskar helping Dan with his sermon. Looks like he got bored.