24 Hours of Daylight

If you notice, I don't refer to any daylight in any of my previous posts. Mostly that's because I forgot I was going to be in Akiak during the summer soltice. Which means - I never saw darkness during the week I was there. If there was a twilight or any bit of the sun setting, it happened so late at night that I was already alseep. And when I say the sun was shining, it was like a mid-day shine: bright, bright, bright!

I didn't think the daylight would really mean anything different. And it wasn't annoying. It wasn't anything negative, but there were some effects it had on me that I never saw coming....

1) I was not tired. A part of me was exhausted, sure. But overall, it would be 11:30 or midnight and I was not ready to go to bed. I just wasn't tired. I had to force myself to go to bed. And then I would crash!

2) I had all this energy. You know how people say they wished they had more time in the day? Well, go to Alaska! I'll give you an example: one day I got up to go to a fish camp (a future post) at 10:00. I stayed there for two hours when I went to the summer camp and helped out there until 3:00. Between 3 to 5 was spent with the IT guy, fixing up our laptops. At 6 we had dinner at another teacher's house and after dinner, we went to a dog yard (future post). After that it was about 8. So another teacher and I walked back to the school to check our e-mails. The internet went down while we were there. So we walked backt to the housing. It's now 9 p.m. Time to wind the day down & go to bed, right? Nope! It's time for another visit to the fish camp (I stayed home & caught up on my homework).

The activities never stopped! At midnight, you could look out of your window & see kids walking to and from the river. You weren't tired and there was still stuff you could do.

3) I had four meals a day. My mentor explained that the constant daylight increased your metablolism and you needed more food. So at 10:00 p.m., it was second dinner time. I felt hungry most of the time.

And this makes me wonder....will the opposite to all of this happen during the darkness? Because I will be there during 24 hours of darkness too. The nice thing that I will be awake to see some sunlight, but what will happen? I'll just have to wait & find out!!

So that's my experience with the constant daylight. Overall, not bad & I got more tanned being out by the river. So I went to Alaska & got a tan!!

Here's a picture of the closest thing I saw to sunset. And that's only because it was a raincloud covering the sun!!