Welcome to Yellowknife!

I arrived here yesterday, my connecting flight from Edmonton touching down under a cloud of fog. There go my aurora-watching plans. Yellowknife is supposed to be quite a dry town, but it's going through a wet spell right now, which will hopefully clear up later this week.

My trip to Yellowknife has been a couple of months in the making, although it happened mostly because I cornered myself into it. I would have otherwise spent these two weeks doing a medical elective somewhere in Ontario, or possibly Alberta, but because I gave one particular medical school in Ottawa (which shall go unnamed) a range of dates in which to give me an elective, by the time I heard back from their intolerably slow electives office, it was too late to fill all the other slots at major universities. It was high time for an adventure, anyways.

"So, you're going to Whitehorse, eh?" asked my brother.
"No, Yellowknife."
"Whatever. It's a colour, and then an object. How about in order to avoid confusion, I just refer to it as 'Colour-Object' from now on."

"See which of these mits you prefer. Remember you're going to the Yukon, so don't be cheap." asked my mother.
"Well, actually, I'm not going to the Yukon."
"Where is it then?"
"The Northwest Territories."
"Whatever."

Evidently, Canada's Northern geography is not well known in the rest of the True North Strong and Free. My favourite bit of confusion happened when I was talking to a South Asian friend.

"So where are you headed next?"
"Northwest Territories."
"Oh really!?" he was visibly impressed. "But isn't it dangerous there?"
"Why would it be dangerous?"
"You know, with the army moving in and everything."
Evidently, his Pakistani geography needed some work.
"That's the Northwest Frontier Province you're thinking of."

As I walked into the terminal from the Air Canada Jazz flight, a man with a goatie came purposefully towards me. "Wajid Sayeed?" "Hi, you must be Derek. Just let me grab my suitcase. . . Nope, that's not it . . . Ah, there it is." And off we went into the frozen north.

Not so frozen. While there were occasional chunks of filthy snow lining the over-gravelled pavement, most of it had melted. Aside from being much smaller, the town looked like Ottawa in mid-November. Since I had been following the weather here for a few days before departure, it was not particularly surprising, since the lowest I had seen the thermometer go was -8 degrees.

Derek Orlaw, the fellow responsible for Physician Recruitment around here, took me on a little tour of the town. For a city of only 20,000, the hospital was a quite respectable size. "We serve a giant area here," he said, "People get flown in from communities that are literally hundreds of kilometers away."

"Then I suppose you have airlift here." I hadn't seen a helipad at the hospital.

"Yeah. Lear Jet." Wow.

We went around downtown, with my guide pointing out various landmarks and restaurants. Yellowknife's north and western edges are surrounded by lakes, one of them being Great Slave Lake (named after the people who speak Slavey, not human bondage) and the other being Frame lake, which is the smaller one, but also the major recreational lake. The marina leading into slave lake reveals several little houseboats which people seem to live in all year long.

After we pass through downtown Yellowknife, we reach the peninsula that juts out into Slave lake. "This is where the pavement ends, which means you're on Reserve land from here on." The Reserve, despite being otherwise indistinguishable from the town, was all gravel roads.

We headed uphill on rocky terrain, around a big building that sat in the middle, half of it supported with stilts because of the slope.

"This is the N'Dilo reserve. That big blue building on the left here is the N'Dilo Diamond Company." After the gold had been exhausted, Yellowknife had gone through a period of transition to a mainly government-services economy, until diamonds were found in the late '90s. Or so Wikipedia had said. "They had an agreement with the diamond company to get 15% of the diamonds, so that they could cut an sell them. The problem is that you don't just learn to cut diamonds overnight - it probably takes as long as getting a medical degree does. The aboriginal company went bankrupt a couple of times before they hired help with management, and made a contract with some, it think its Armenians, to teach them how to cut diamonds."

Unfortunately, not a tribe that was breaking any moulds.

"These little teepee sort of things are smokehouses. N'Dilo people use them for game meat; fish, caribou, you name it. That big building in the middle of the reserve is where they keep people from out of town. Some of these people who come from remote communities for treatment have never left their own community. To them, Yellowknife is like New York - it's the big city, it's a culture shock, they'd really get lost if they were just left to fend for themselves, so the people here accomodate them." I wonder how close the cultures are, given that the people on the reserve here are so integrated with the city.

There is apparently a sizable Muslim community in Yellowknife, my guide tells me as we pass the local cab company. Mostly Somalis. Another ethnic community that fails to break any moulds. "We also have a . . . I'm not sure what the right word is . . . a Muslim church building."

"A mosque, would be the English word." I decided not to confuse him with "Masjid."

"Yeah, we have one of those in town. I'm afraid that I haven't had a lot of contact with Muslim people before. " The subject had arisen after he called my mom's cell phone (which I carry) and got my answering message, which, being originally intended strictly for close relatives, began with "Assalamu Alaikum." It was odd that he'd never heard of it, since he said that he'd moved up here from Vancouver, which I had always thought was the Asian ethnic epicentre of Canada.

We arrived at the apartment where I would be staying, went over some of the administrative details, and then parted company. According to the internets, the Aurora viewing index for tonight was 14%: Poor. Damned fog.