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Author: Hanneke

I started my first blog when I left the Netherlands (my home country) for an internship in Alaska in 2004, to keep my friends and family updated on my adventures over there. Little did I know it would be more than 13 years before I'd move back to the Netherlands! I spent a year in Toulouse (France) before starting a PhD in meteorology at the University of East Anglia in Norwich (UK) in 2005. That's when I started this current blog, first in Dutch but I soon switched to English. I really enjoyed life in the UK, and was actually planning to stay there after my PhD, but "life is what happens when you're busy making other plans" and I ended up moving to Tromsø in Northern Norway in 2009. Tromsø is a photographer's dream, surrounded by spectacular mountains, with the light ever changing from the midnight sun in summer to the dark days compensated by aurora-filled nights in winter. I learnt Norwegian and got a job as a weather forecaster - I got thrown in at the deep end, doing radio interviews and speaking with fishermen with way-too-strong dialects straight from the beginning, before I was anywhere near fluent in Norwegian :D I survived though, and slowly started to do some research on the side. I got more and more involved in research projects and in August 2015 I moved 2000 km south, to Oslo where I started working 100% as a researcher. A year after moving to Oslo, I met Michiel at a music festival in Brussels :) and we started to travel very frequently between Oslo and Rotterdam, where he lives. You can't do that forever though, and I soon realized I found the perfect "excuse" to finally move back home, something I had been considering many times before. So since July 2017, I'm living in Rotterdam! I'm actually taking some time off before finding a new job, and I'm looking forward to lots of adventures in the near future - so stay tuned!
The British Museum & London by night

The British Museum & London by night

I’ve had a very busy week as I was trying to finish a chapter of my thesis – finally finished it late this evening 🙂 I am heading off to Southampton on Sunday, to attend a meeting there on Monday, then flying out to Tromsø on Tuesday. It will be quite a change, from autumnal England to winter wonderland Tromsø… they had lots of snow already!

So before I head off, here are some of the photos I have been promising…

While in London in October, we visited the British Museum. The museum has a covered courtyard, which is really amazing – it’s covered by a huge glass and steel roof, very impressive!

Of course the museum itself is very impressive as well. It’s huge, and most of it is free (I still find that really nice, in the Netherlands museums are very expensive). We didn’t spend a lot of time there, it was a very sunny day and we were more keen on enjoying the sunshine than spending a lot of time indoors… But here are some impressions from the museum:

We then went to Covent Garden for a bit, and watched the street performers – always something amusing going on there. This is the market inside:

We crossed the Thames at Embankment, at sunset, with lovely views! On the other side, there are a lot of street performers as well and it’s a very nice atmosphere.

We walked along the Thames for a while – the views were so nice, with the Big Ben, the London Eye and the Palace of Westminster very nicely lit. I didn’t have a tripod with me, but I still managed to get a few nice photos…

That’s all – I think my next update will come from Tromsø sometime next week. Till then!

Brighton

Brighton

Two weeks ago, when I was in London with Paul, we went to Brighton for a day. On the way we stopped at Devil’s Dyke to admire the view. You can see really far from there. They do a lot of paragliding there, but when we were there it was too windy and the place was deserted. This is the view:

And they have devils there too….

After a short stop we continued to Brighton, and parked at the Marina. We wanted to see the white cliffs! Well, I really wanted to see them, as they are very famous and I had never seen them. From the Marina, there is a concrete walkway underneath the white cliffs, sometimes with a beach underneath, sometimes just rocks – and then the waves actually crashed over the walkway sometimes!

The chalk from the cliffs is really soft, and bits of it fall off – fun for writing with 🙂

We also played with the self exposure of the camera to get some touristy photos 😉

After a few kilometres, we came across a tiny cafe serving tea and (amazing!!) home made cakes. Mmmmm……

From the cafe, there were stairs to get on top of the cliffs and to the road. We walked on top for a while, the view was quite impressive! The mill is on a golf course, that’s why the grass is so green in that photo…

From there, we took a bus into Brighton town centre. This is the Royal Pavilion – it looks Indian and I thought it was built recently for tourists – but it’s actually from early 1800 and belonged to King George IV. A very pretty building! The gardens surrounding it are also really nice.

We walked through the narrow lanes for a while, a maze of tiny streets with little shops (a lot of them jewelry stores) – very cute. We ended up on the beach, to watch a very impressive sunset! The building structure you can see in the sea is the remainder of the West Pier, which was awating renovation since 1975 and since then was falling apart, until finally it burnt down in 2003.

They do have another pier though, a typical English one full of arcade games and fun fair rides. I walked around on my own for a bit, while Paul was parking the car. It was surreal to walk around alone, in the dark, nobody around, among closed fun fair rides – I felt like I was in some kind of computer game!

I really enjoyed our visit to Brighton! I always like visiting beach towns in low season when it’s deserted and has a special kind of atmosphere. Brighton gets really crowded in Summer, as it’s so close to London – must be a different experience then!

That’s all for now. I hope to upload more photos soon, I still have a lot of photos of London, and I also took some photos yesterday at the fireworks in Cambridge – though because of the low clouds and the smoke coming from the fireworks, only half of the show was visible!

Terschelling

Terschelling

Earlier this month, I was in the Netherlands with Paul, for a family party. My dad and his twin sister turned 60 and it was also my parents 35th wedding anniversary, so enough reason for a nice party! Typical for my family, it was not a very typical party… my dad put us all to work in his class room at the school he works at! It was a great success, photos of the party can be found here. It was also great to see my beautiful niece Mare again, she’s 8 months old now and seems to love my camera 🙂 (probably because she can see her reflection in my lens, but hey).

After the party, we took a train, bus and ferry to the island of Terschelling. This is one of my favourite places in the Netherlands, an island with wide beaches, dunes and forest. We were staying in a hotel called de Walvisvaarder. I had booked a double room, but they gave us the Cupido/bridal suite! A very beautiful room in the loft with nice views!

The next day we rented a tandem bicycle from the hotel. Paul was very keen on trying a tandem, and it was a lot of fun. When you sit at the back, it takes a while to get used to trusting the person in front. It’s very strange to sit on a bike without being able to steer it! Paul even managed to take photos while sitting on the back… (to the great amusement of people coming from the other direction). The other photo is taken at the beach.

The wind had formed nice patterns in the sand around shells… in the first photo you can see me in the distance, taking the second photo.

Paul on a dune top with the flag of Terschelling.

We saw some “inktzwammen”, or shaggy ink cap in English next to the bike path. To me, these mushrooms are very familiar as you often see them in the Netherlands, but Paul had never seen them and was fascinated by the black ink dropping from them in later stages of their life cycle. They are quite fascinating though I find them too disgusting to take macro photos of… instead I took photos of Paul next to the mushrooms (they can grow quite large!) and nice drops on the grass.

Later we cycled through a forest full of mushrooms. Macro photography paradise! We spent a long time there playing with our camera’s.

What we didn’t expect were these huge mushrooms in the dunes. In the first photo you can see very well how tall they were! The last photo taken from underneath the mushroom shows that either there’s aliens living in the mushroom, or Paul should clean his camera 🙂

Around this area, a lot of people were picking cranberries – the only place in the Netherlands where they grow. Apparently a barrel of cranberries once shipwrecked from a ship from America in 1840 and they started growing. Now you can get many dishes with cranberries on the island, very nice!

We continued cycling to West-Terschelling, the largest village on the island. Also home of the famous Brandaris, the oldest lighthouse in the Netherlands, from 1594! Very impressive that it’s still standing more than 400 years later. The first photo is some advertisement for a sausage of 1 meter long!

This photo shows part of an English submarine from the first world war, recovered by divers.

We were only on Terschelling for 2 days, so the next day it was time to leave already. We briefly visited ‘t Behouden Huys musem, named after the house Willem Barentsz built to overwinter on Nova Zembla. Willem Barentsz is from Terschelling. They named a lot of streets after him, but I thought they could have dedicated a much larger part of the museum to him, as it’s a interesting story! There was a replica of the house, and one room that told the story, but most of the museum was dedicated to other subjects related to Terschelling. Still, a very nice museum!

After visiting the museum, we took the ferry back to the mainland. This time, we were on the slow ferry, which takes two hours. It was very sunny, so we enjoyed being out on the deck and watching all the ships. The sea there has very large tidal differences and is the creeks change all the time. All the shipping has to go through narrow shipping lanes, so you get good views of the ships around you – lots of beautiful wooden sailing boats!

We had a great time on Terschelling, a pity it was so short! A day later we flew from Amsterdam to London, to stay with Paul’s parents. We stayed there for 1.5 week and had a very nice time. Paul flew back to Tromso on Saturday, and I am back in Norwich for three weeks. I have many more photos of our holiday, and hope to upload more this week. I have to give a department seminar on Friday though, so I am a bit busy this week. Anyway, coming soon: photos of Brighton and the white cliffs, and photos of London.