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Month: October 2006

Beaches!

Beaches!

Here are some photos of beaches I went to recently…

Norfolk Beaches Norfolk Beaches

Norfolk Beaches Norfolk Beaches

Norfolk Beaches Norfolk Beaches

Norfolk Beaches

These are taken in Sea Palling. This is a beach where they have some kind of piers parallel to the coast, for protection (against erosion I suppose, a big problem on the Norfolk coast). You can reach some of them, and climb on the rocks – though that is very dangerous… they love warning signs here!!

Last weekend we went to Winterton-On-Sea. This is close to Great Yarmouth, so quick to reach from Norwich. Very nice beach! The tide was very low so the beach was big. We had fun playing with Pauls kite 🙂 Here are some photos:

Norfolk Beaches Norfolk Beaches

Norfolk Beaches Norfolk Beaches

Norfolk Beaches Norfolk Beaches

Norfolk Beaches Norfolk Beaches

Norfolk Beaches

All is going well here in Norwich! I moved to a new office last week. It looks ugly from the outside (it’s a container building!) but quite nice on the inside. The only thing I don’t like is that it’s quite far from everything on campus.

Other than that, have a lot of trips planned for the near future 🙂 I’m going to the Netherlands with Paul for 5 days in November. Should be fun! I won’t be home for Christmas or New Year… we booked a trip to my favourite country in the world, Switzerland!! We are going skiing in Zermatt for a week, then spend some days travelling, and then we’ll go to Celia’s New Year party. We fly back to London on the first of January. I’m really looking forward to this trip :)))

And I’m also busy preparing the trip that Patama and I will do in South America. After the cruise in Antarctica, we will be in the Falkland Islands for 5 days, then we’ll probably spend a week in Patagonia (Torres del Paine), some days in Santiago and Lima, then the Inca Trail for 4 days before we fly back to the UK. Very exciting!

And yeah, in between all of that I still have to try and concentrate on work… hmm 🙂

Ok this is the end of my enormous update, in case you haven’t noticed, I have uploaded three entries at the same time, so keep scrolling down!! 🙂

Lost in the Lakes

Lost in the Lakes

In the last weekend of September (or the first weekend of October, whichever you prefer 😉 ) I went to the Lakes District with Paul. It was a long drive to get there, more than 7 hours!

We stayed in a very cute youth hostel near Coniston. The road to get there was a dirt road! In the morning the (kind of strange) guy who runs the youth hostel made us breakfast – toast with mould, yummy!!! So we decided to get our own breakfast the next day hehe. This is the hostel:

The Lakes District

We started walking early, we wanted to climb the Old Man of Coniston (800m). 10 minutes from the hostel (we could still see it!) we got lost, despite GPS, maps and a compass. We sure got great navigation skills 🙂 The confusion was mostly due to Paul not noticing that we had crossed a pretty big river! But since a mountain is kind of hard to overlook, we eventually found the path to the top. It was a nice climb but it was very busy with people who had the same plan. We saw some abandoned copper mines on the way, it reminded me of Alaska. The weather was changing all the time, sunny/cloudy/warm/cold/windy, but no rain so that was good. We spent some time on the top of the mountain, then followed a ridge. The climb down was long and we were quite tired by the time we made it back to the hostel. We had dinner in a pub, it was good and a nice pub, but they didn’t want to serve us dessert! I was disappointed because they had Bailey’s cheesecake on the dessert menu!

Anyway, here are some photos of the hike:

The Lakes District The Lakes District

The Lakes District The Lakes District

The Lakes District The Lakes District

The Lakes District The Lakes District

The Lakes District The Lakes District

The Lakes District The Lakes District

The Lakes District The Lakes District

The next day we spent some time along Coniston Water. It was good we didn’t go for a long hike that day, it rained quite a lot! We wanted to walk next to another lake nearby , and got hopelessly lost in all the small roads, but hey we got there eventually and we saw some really nice places on the way 🙂

The Lakes District The Lakes District

The Lakes District The Lakes District

In the evening we drove towards Blackpool. We hadn’t booked any accommodation for Sunday night since we were not sure where we wanted to go. We passed through Lancaster, decided it looked like a nice town and we tried to find a place to stay. The tourist information was closed on Sundays, and there was no youth hostel. So we tried some B&B;’s, but they were closed. Just when we were leaving, we saw a pub/B&B; that had a room available. We were glad to have found something, but hmm it was an interesting place! The pub was a gay/lesbian friendly place with a dress code, and they had their karaoke night that night… From our room we could hear everything perfectly, it was quite hilarious, but we didn’t get much sleep.

We drove to Morecambe the next day, a small town on the coast. They have an obsession with birds there, it’s full of artwork of birds! Very nice, there was so much to see. We walked along the coast for a long time. Morecambe Bay has big tide differences, there are even walks across the bay.

Morecambe Morecambe

Morecambe Morecambe

Morecambe

At night we drove to Blackpool. This place is famous in England. It’s a big sea resort with lots of amusement (roller coasters, arcades, fair rides, etc). In the fall they do Illuminations, which means 5 miles of the road along the coast is lit up with ‘Christmas’ lights. It’s very touristy but I like lights so I enjoyed it. They had a tree with big lights that changed colours all the time, I want one!! :)) We went for a ride in the big wheel, that was nice! Here are some photos:

Blackpool Blackpool

After that we drove back to Norwich, which took a bit more than 5 hours, we came back exhausted, but it was a great weekend!!

Fluid Dynamics Summer School – 2 weeks in Cambridge

Fluid Dynamics Summer School – 2 weeks in Cambridge

Hello!

I have been back for a month now, but still wanted to post some pictures of the summer school in Cambridge. I was there for 2 weeks, with about 80 students of many different nationalities.

We were working hard! Breakfast at 8:00 every morning, first lecture at 9:00. We had four lectures per day, plus lab or computer practicals, lunch dinner, sport events, (poster) presentations… Some days were more than 12 hours! It was all about geophysical and environmental fluid dynamics, so lots of maths, quite difficult. The lecturers were really good though! Very enthusiastic and motivated people, all experts in their field, most of them were real characters! This made the lectures interesting and even fun. I enjoyed the labwork a lot as well, great fun to play with the experiments and a good way of understanding the theory.

This is the building where we spent all day, the Mathematical Center, where the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics was housed. Very nice building!

GEFD Cambridge GEFD Cambridge

Here are some photos of the experiments we did:

GEFD Cambridge GEFD Cambridge

GEFD Cambridge

Plumes in stratified flow

GEFD Cambridge GEFD Cambridge

GEFD Cambridge GEFD Cambridge

Coastal currents – Rossby waves in a spinning tank

GEFD Cambridge GEFD Cambridge

GEFD Cambridge

Thermal convection

On Friday night in the first week, we had the formal dinner in Queen’s College. Very posh dining room! The dinner was very nice, though I didn’t enjoy the food – the boneless chicken had LOTS of bones hehe. The dessert was great though, so that made me happy again 🙂 Here are some photos of that evening:

GEFD Cambridge GEFD Cambridge

GEFD Cambridge

With Daniel (from Germany) and Ronan (from France), Justin (USA), and in the pub afterwards with Justin and Jeff (USA)

On Saturday we had lectures in the morning, but we had the afternoon off. Herbert, one of the lecturers, and a fellow of King’s College, gave us a tour of Cambridge. Since he’s a senior member of the College, he could take us to lots of places where you normally are not allowed, and we were even allowed to walk on the (holy!) grass!

His tour was great, he shared many great stories with us. He even attracted some new ‘students’, strangers tagging along with our tour, not knowing we all knew each other so it was obvious for us that they didn’t belong on the tour, quite funny!

GEFD Cambridge GEFD Cambridge

GEFD Cambridge GEFD Cambridge

GEFD Cambridge GEFD Cambridge

GEFD Cambridge GEFD Cambridge

GEFD Cambridge GEFD Cambridge

GEFD Cambridge

In the final week we went punting during lunch time. I have to admit I was lazy and didn’t punt myself… And our punter fell in the water! (apparently this was only the second time in 16 years of the summer school!) I just relaxed and took lots of photos.

GEFD Cambridge GEFD Cambridge

GEFD Cambridge GEFD Cambridge

GEFD Cambridge GEFD Cambridge

The last few days were tough. Everybody was getting very tired, at one point I just wanted to go home. Somehow I did find my motivation back though, even when we had to present our lab work and computer practicals on the last day – 4 hours of presentations!! It was a big relief when that was done. In the evening there was a closing reception, an
d one of the lecturers had organized a performance of the ‘PV-song’ (Potential Vorticity Song – very geeky!). He played violin, a lot of people were in his choir. I cannot sing, so I wasn’t even allowed to join the choir, but with Gustafo we decided to waltz through the performance – like spinning vortexes. Good fun!! I have some photos of the closing reception somewhere, will try to find them and post them later – unfortunately I haven’t found anyone who took a photo of us dancing!

Most people stayed until Saturday morning, but I decided to go home on Friday night. I was really glad to be back, though it had been a fun and useful two weeks!

Coming soon: photos of my trip to the Lakes District with Paul!