Last Sunday we met up with a friend from Norwich, Nina. She’s a PhD student in the same project that I was in, and she was in town for the Arctic Frontiers conference. We picked up her and Svetlana (Nina’s friend from Russia) from their hotel in town, and we drove to Håkøya – the same place I took the sunset photos in the last post. We had a VERY cold spell in Tromsø last weekend. The lowest temperature measured was -15, for the first time since 1998! Combined with a strong wind, it was seriously freezing. We went for a short walk on the beach. Here’s a photo of Nina (on the left), Svetlana (middle) and me, and one of Nina and Svetlana.

It was beautiful there, with lots of big pieces of sea ice lying on the beach. We spent some time taking photos before running back to the warm car…

We drove back to town and stopped underneath the bridge between Tromsø island and the island of Kvaløya. Svetlana wanted to take some pictures of the bridge. I had never stopped there, but it was really impressive to stand underneath the bridge!

Our next stop was Prestvannet, the lake on top of Tromsø island. We’ve hardly had any snow this winter, which means that you can skate on the lake! There were quite a few people braving the cold wind. I was hoping to go skating too, but as we’re in the middle of moving my skates were somewhere in a box and I couldn’t find them.

After our visit to the lake we were really frozen and went for a cup of tea inside 🙂

I have finished my training at work now, and I’ve started with the parallel shifts. Very exciting! I’m now writing forecasts “for real” and I’m learning a lot. They don’t want me to do night shifts yet, but I have worked a few afternoon shifts (15:00-23:00) which aren’t too bad. On Tuesday night I drove home from work and noticed some northern lights in the sky. When I came home, they were really bright, I could clearly see them even from inside the house. I quickly went outside to get some photos. The first photo is taken from the building plot in front of our flat, they’re building a football field there. The second one is taken near our front door 🙂 We thought it would make a great “we’ve moved” card, but as we’ve been subrenting this flat before we started renting it ourselves, everybody already has our address 😀

The aurora was so good that we decided to drive to a beach near the north tip of the island. When we arrived there, it started to move like crazy, dancing across the sky. It was showing some pink as well, as you can see below – very impressive!

We stayed there for a while, enjoying the beautiful show. Luckily temperatures had climbed up that day, otherwise we would have never lasted that long! I played with the camera a bit, and asked Paul to stand very still…

We’ve been busy this past week with decorating our new flat. This is the first time for us to live in an unfurnished flat, so we needed lots of furniture and appliances. We finally have everything now and we can start to unpack all boxes. Tomorrow we’re going skiing though, we FINALLY had a lot of snow. And on Tuesday my mum is coming to Tromsø for a few days, so I’m sure there’ll be lots of photos to share next week 🙂