Hello!

Wow, I’ve had a busy couple of weeks! I had my annual meeting yesterday. Two months late, but that was good, cause now I could bring some results to the meeting. These official meetings are held at BAS in Cambridge so my other two supervisors can be there as well. I was a bit nervous, as this was a fairly important meeting and my first year didn’t go very well. But it went fine and they were happy about my progress so now I just have to work very hard from now on to catch up the delay that I have. Hmm, we’ll see.

I worked extremely hard last week in order to be ready for the meeting before the weekend, cause we went to London to spend the weekend with Paul’s parents 🙂 We went by car, it takes about 2,5 hours to get there, not bad! We were both really tired from working hard so after talking to his parents for a while, we went to bed and slept till late on Saturday.

After breakfast (for us)/lunch (for his parents), we took the train to central London. We went to the Tate Modern to visit this exhibition. They have slides coming down from the 2nd,3rd,4th and 5th floor! You can try all of them, and it’s free 🙂 But you have to get timed tickets for all but the ones from the 2nd floor. They didn’t have tickets left but they told us we could come back at 20:00 when there would be new tickets. The museum was opened till 22:00!

We went for a walk along the Thames to the Tower Bridge, as I had never seen it (except from a long distance). It was a nice walk, at sunset.

The view from the bridge, and on the right you can see the Tate Modern (with the big chimney)

The Tower Bridge

From there we took the underground to Covent Garden. I had never been there either, it’s a big market with lots of shops around, really nice. We bought some dinner and then headed back to Tate for the slides 🙂

This is what we saw on the way to Tate, very nice blue/green lights under a bridge!

We got tickets for the slides on the 3rd, 4th and 5th floor. I was a bit scared as they are quite high and fast! And not that comfortable 😀 But it was fine, and good fun!! We had a quick look around the museum as well, too bad we didn’t have that much time. I got kicked out at closing time for the second time (it was the same when I was there with Tanja last Summer).

The slides! I loved the shadows cast on the opposite wall

On Sunday we went to Greenwich. It reminded me a bit of Vienna with the nice big buildings and parks.

Kicking the leaves 🙂

We walked around the Old Royal Naval College, a very nice building. Especially the room with all the paintings (even one of Willem van Oranje!). They put mirrors so you wouldn’t hurt your neck looking at the ceiling!

Inside the Old Royal Naval College

We visited the National Maritime Museum, where Paul was hoping to find a model of the Autosub that he used for his PhD, but this one got lost as well 😛 It was a very nice museum though, with a cool exposition of northern light photos.

Of course I wanted to see the famous meridian, but believe it or not, we couldn’t find it!! It was dark and hard to find it in the park. Oh well 🙂 We did climb up to the Observatory, I would like to come back and visit this building (and see the meridian hehe). From there the view of London was really nice!! For a moment I imagined I was in New York 😉

Nice view!

We went back to have dinner with Paul’s parents. After dinner we drove back to Norwich. It was a really nice weekend!

And now it’s back to work, I think time will fly. It will be Christmas break in 2 weeks! I’m looking forward to that a lot!

I hope I’ll find some time to write something before then…

Take care!

Hanneke