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Month: October 2009

September in the Netherlands

September in the Netherlands

I spent most of September in the Netherlands with my family. It was nice to be back home for a bit longer than usual! It had been much too long, especially during the last phase of my PhD I hardly had time to go home for longer than a couple of days.

Veronika came to visit me on a sunny Saturday, and we spent a fun day catching up and enjoying the weather. We cycled to the beach through the dunes. The dunes have changed a lot in recent times, they don’t get drinking water from them anymore (so it’s a lot wetter) and they have introduced grazing animals in certain areas. We spent a long time at the “Vogelmeer” (bird lake), watching several species of birds and lots of cormorants. And some Scottish Highlanders 🙂

The skies turned grey by the time we made it to the beach, but it was still warm. We walked along the beach for a while, and then had some lunch – and rosé 🙂 – at a restaurant where you can sit outside – very nice!

We continued our way through the dunes, and found some more Scottish Highlanders. In a different part of the dunes, we also saw horses! There were so many of them…

And they all seemed to love the basket on my mum’s bike! One by one they came to check it out, we were laughing a lot.

We briefly visited the ruins of a medieval castle (Brederode) close to my parents. Autumn is obviously on its way…

I went to the dunes a few more times, and also took this panorama below.

I also finally got to play with the lens baby that Paul gave me for Christmas. This is a very creative lens that gives special effects in sharpness, as you can see in the photo of the path through the forest. It can also take very nice portraits, like this one of my mum 🙂

My brother and I organised a dinner for the whole family (including aunts/uncles) to celebrate that we both graduated in September. It was a really nice evening! In the photo below I am cutting an enormous icecream cake for dessert 🙂

I also spent quite a lot of time with Mare, which is always fun 🙂 Though it’s a bit hard to use the computer when she’s near, hehe. She’s so funny, if you show a picture of a cat on the screen, she’s very happy and even tries to lure it towards her by making funny sounds!

My parents bought me a new lens for my camera as a graduation gift. I actually bought two 🙂 A 12-24mm wide angle lens from Tokina, for taking photos of the northern lights this winter, and a 60mm Canon macro lens. I’ve always wanted a good macro lens, and I’m so happy with this one! On the way back from the camera shop, my parents went to this large garden centre/nursery, so I had the perfect opportunity to try my new lens! And WOW, I am so happy with the results! Click to enlarge, I have made the enlarged versions bigger than I usually do so you can see all the details in them…

Back home I also took some photos of my mum’s passion flowers. I love these flowers, they are quite incredible! And the plant has a lot of these “rolled up”branches that are very photogenic too.

I cycled around quite a lot, happy to be back in a country where this is so easy 🙂 This is a view I came across when I cycled back from Bart and Kaya to my parents, somewhere in Overveen.

And these photos are taken in Spaarndam, a very nice village near my parents. I love the bench with the swans 🙂

That was a short overview of my time in the Netherlands, hope you enjoyed it!

Skiing in October!

Skiing in October!

We had a lot of snow last week. I thought it wouldn’t last, but it did. And so this morning we took the cable car up (which is now going to run all winter instead of closing down until March, yay!) and we went skiing! Up there (at about 400 m) there is a lot of snow (half a metre or so), and it’s quite good, though a bit wet. The weather today was beautiful, with bright sunshine and a pretty band of clouds over Tromsø island…

Of course we weren’t the only ones out to enjoy the first snow. There were lots of people on skis and snowboards. The group of snowboarders in the photos below made me laugh. They were walking up to more serious slopes in their snowshoe boots, but with the deep wet snow this wasn’t easy. We were zigzagging up while taking lots of photo breaks, and we kept running into them. They looked really funny walking in a line wearing their very bright coloured clothes 🙂

There was also someone kite skiing, and we watched him for a while. It looked beautiful and so much fun!

Us enjoying the snow and the sunshine…

Paul disappearing into the distance, as always a lot faster than me 😉

Before turning back, Paul wanted to get up a bit higher and I took a break 🙂 with a nice view!

We took the last cable car back down. When we entered the building, we ran into a new colleague of Paul with his girlfriend. They were a bit jealous that we were on ski’s, and they happened to have the same size boots, so we swapped our ski’s and Telemark boots for their hiking boots 🙂

It was a fun day! We didn’t expect to be able to ski this early in the year. I am not sure the snow is going to last, as the weather is supposed to turn warmer sometime next week, but at least we made the most of it!

Oslo again!

Oslo again!

I visited Oslo for the first time last month (see here) – little did I know I’d be back only a month later! This time with Paul, who hadn’t been to Oslo either. We rented a really nice apartment right next to Vigeland park (Catalina Apartment Hotel in case you’re interested – we can really recommend this place!). Unfortunately we woke up to a very rainy day on Saturday. We walked to the city centre, visiting some of the sights, like the Royal Palace in the photo below. We found a really nice cafe to shelter from the rain for a while 🙂 serving good hot chocolates. Ordering a hot chocolate is a bit of a hit-or-miss experience in Norway, sometimes you get some kind of warmed up synthetic chocolate sauce, and the other day I even had a hot chocolate with soft ice in it instead of cream…

The next morning we woke up to a beautiful sunny autumn day. We had planned to visit 3 museums in one day, but the weather was too nice to be inside all day. We first went to Vigeland park to see the sculptures. We found this really fascinating oscillating fountain there… I am not sure if it’s supposed to be like that, as there was an identical fountain on the other side which didn’t do it. I did find this video on youtube, so it looks like it does it more often. We didn’t have a compact camera to take a video, so instead I made an animated gif. If you click on the image below you can watch the fountain oscillate… (be patient, it might take a while to load)

We walked around the sculptures for a while, very nice to see them on such a beautiful day!

In the afternoon we went to the FRAM museum. Second time for me 😉 but I actually didn’t have time to see everything during my last visit so I didn’t mind. For Paul (as an Arctic oceanographer) it was of course a must! The FRAM is a really famous ship from the history of Arctic and Antarctic expeditions. Fridtjof Nansen used it to try and reach the North Pole by letting the ship freeze into the ice and drift with the current, and it brought Amundsen to Antarctica on the trip where he became the first to reach the South Pole… so there is a lot of history there and it’s great that they preserved the ship for everyone to visit.

This is what it looks like inside, I thought it looked quite comfortable. They have common rooms in the middle and cabins all around the outside. Note how they have a “rail” around the table to prevent things from sliding off in rough weather…

From the FRAM museum, we took the bus and subway to visit Mihailo and Marion (and their kids). Mihailo and I used to work for the same supervisor in Alaska, 5 years ago! It was great catching up and we had a really nice time.

My job interview was early on Monday morning. It went quite well, I am proud to say I managed to do the entire interview in Norwegian! I was scared I’d have to switch to English at some point, but the person who interviewed me was very helpful and it all went well. Of course I can’t really compete with fluent Norwegian speakers, so I have no idea what my chances are of actually getting the job, but I’ll find out in about 3 weeks time.

It was a really sunny day again, so after dropping our luggage in a locker at Oslo central station, we went to explore a bit more. We visited the Oslo Opera House, a really great modern building where you can walk on the roof (check out a really cool timelapse of it being built here). You have a nice view over the water and the city from the roof. Can you tell that I love my new wide angle lens? 🙂

We stopped for lunch and another hot chocolate at a nice bakery, and it even was warm enough to sit outside 🙂 After that we went to see Oslo City Hall. This is the building where the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony takes place, and although it doesn’t look spectacular from the outside, it is really beautiful inside! Lots of murals with scenes from Norwegian history and culture. In the photo below Paul is also showing off his new backpack, he was very happy to find enormous outdoor shops in Oslo 😉

In the photo below on the left is a detail from one of the murals that I really like: a queen sitting on a smiling bear being offered a crown, cheered on by Norwegian kids – cute! The other one shows just how incredibly detailed the murals (continuing on the ceiling in this case) were.

We walked around the Akershus fortress in the late afternoon. In the photo below Paul is sitting on one of the walls of the fortress, and behind him you can see the port (with some really beautiful ships!) and the brown brick building on the right is Oslo City Hall.

After our visit to the fortress, it was time to get the train to the airport. It was a really nice weekend trip, we both enjoyed it a lot. It was nice to catch some last days of nice weather too 😉 Tromsø is turning quite wintry, we had snow yesterday and the roads are icy. Paul has changed the tires on his bike already, now I just need to do mine and the ones on the car and then we’re ready for winter…