INUVIK, NWT -- Driving outside one of Canada's largest towns above the Arctic Circle, cabbie Ali Ahmed shudders when he hears we're from Winnipeg.
"Winterpeg? It's very cold down there," he says to me and photographer Wayne Glowacki as he ferries us to the airport. "Very, very cold."
Cabbie Ali Ahmed who lives within 100 kilometres of the Arctic Ocean feels sorry for us
As bizarre as it sounds, his Arctic community of 3,500 is often a lot balmier than Winnipeg in the middle of the winter.
On Friday morning, it was -3 C in Inuvik, which is located 2,850 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg and only 100 kilometres from the Arctic Ocean.
At the very same moment, it was -19 C at the corner of Portage and Main.
Ali Ahmed, who came to the Northwest Territories from Sudan, appears to have a good reason to fear the climate in southern Manitoba.
Now just when you think it's humiliating to have Arctic residents dis our city for the cold, Ahmed delivers another stereotypical zinger.
Inuvik, home to an ingloo-shaped Catholic church, may soon have a mosque.
"Do you know my friend in Winnipeg?" he asks, forcing Wayne and me to groan and issue the standard line about how there are 700,000 people in the city.
"No, no, I'm sure you do. He runs a restaurant and a store," Ahmed insists.
And sure enough, we do vaguely know his friend -- Ali Hussein Saeed, who runs the 7/16 Convenience on Sargent Avenue. We concede defeat a second time.
During the short cab ride between Inuvik and its airport, where Wayne and I are trying to catch a ski-plane ride to a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker in the Amundsen Gulf, we learn that Ali Ahmed is one of roughly 100 Muslims living in Inuvik.
The community has a full-time mosque staffed by a part-time imam who's originally from Iraq. But when the Muslims of Inuvik attend prayer services at the Little Mosque On The Tundra, they don't face east toward Mecca.
They actually prostrate themselves northeast, thanks to Inuvik's extreme northern latitude and the curvature of the Earth.
"We use computers to figure it out," Ahmed says.
Relocating from eastern Africa to the Canadian north wasn't too hard, he says, because he lived in a small town in Sudan before coming to Inuvik.
Northerners are friendly, if occasionally a little belligerent about asserting "this is our land," and he can easily satisfy his cravings for big-city life during occasional holidays to Toronto, Calgary or Vancouver.
Inuvik, however, is hardly among the most remote Arctic communities, in spite of its location near the extreme northwestern edge of Canada's mainland. The community is connected to the rest of the country by the Dempster Highway, a 671-kilometre ribbon of gravel that winds its way northeast from Dawson City, Yukon.
The road link means Inuvik residents don't have to pay sky-high prices for groceries and other basic commodities, which is the scourge of fly-in communities as far south as Little Grand Rapids, Man.
In Inuvik, a litre of milk sells for $2.99 at the North Mart, while potatoes go for $3 a kilo. And the quality of the produce isn't much worse than the wilted veggies you find in Winnipeg in the middle of February.
Aside from above-ground sewers, which are encapsulated in boxes just like the wastewater lines in parts of Flin Flon, there isn't all that much to distinguish Inuvik from other small Canadian towns.
One notable exception is Our Lady of Victory Catholic Church, which is shaped like an igloo. It may be soon be joined by a brand-new mosque, which the local Muslim community hopes to build within the next two or three years.
"Some people say there's no life up here. You have to keep busy all the time," he says. "Me, when I go south, I get bored after a while."
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