Rotterdam (or Anywhere)

After a very rainy and cold period, we were in for a nice surprise. SUMMER!!! With *real* summer temperatures: 23 degrees here in Tromsø. Ohhhh how nice 😀 I tried to make the most of it in between shifts. Yesterday I was able to leave work a bit earlier, and we drove to Sommarøy to have a bbq on the beach. We were meeting a few colleagues of Paul, which was a bit challenging as the mobile network was down so we had to try and guess where they would be… but who cares with views like this? 🙂

We had a very nice bbq in the sunshine (our second one in two days :D). I had borrowed a canoe from work, which was the kind you have to put together yourself. I had been warned it was difficult, but gjeezzzzz… we spent several hours trying to put it together and in the end had to give up. So frustrating when the view is like this and you have a half assembled canoe on the beach…

Oh well, the trip was still worth it, absolutely beautiful out there! Now I’m back at work, even though it’s a bank holiday weekend for most people. Not fair, especially with this weather 😉 But I can’t complain, I have 5 days off next week and we’re going on a nice trip 🙂 More later!

Today we were invited for a boat trip in a beautiful wooden boat, large enough to fit 6 people and 2 dogs and a lot of fishing gear… It wasn’t the ideal day though, the rain came pouring down and we didn’t catch anything except one cod too small too keep. Oh well, afterwards we sat in the kitchen by the fire with a warm mug of tea, and home made cookies, cake and bread… 🙂

Oh Summer, where art thou? 😛

Yesterday we had quite a special show in Tromsø: an eclipse of the midnight sun! For a while, it looked like clouds would spoil the show though. Even an hour before it started, I was contemplating staying at home as it looked hopeless. But we decided to try our luck, and go up the cable car anyway. Eelke and Roy joined us, and we brought a picknick blanket, warm drinks and chocolate. When we got to the top of the cable car, it was actually raining… Not long after some sunbeams starting to appear, and we got a bit more optimistic. Within half an hour, the sky cleared up more than enough to be able to watch the eclipse, how lucky!!

Paul had brought his welding helmet to be able to look at the sun – it worked brilliantly! I brought a dvd which also worked fine.

At 22:45 we noticed a small “bite” out of the sun, which quickly grew bigger as the moon moved in front of the sun. It’s quite hard to get good photos, you have to underexpose so much that you can’t have much foreground in the images. I also tried taking a photo through the welding helmet, which worked quite well!

At 23:30, the eclipse was at its maximum. With the naked eye, it was hard to see anything. You could kind of notice – out of the corner of your eye – that a patch of the sun was missing, but I didn’t notice it got darker. The sun is of course quite low around midnight and the light is very soft and yellow anyway. The photo on the left (below) is very unrealistic, with a halo caused by my lens or the filter, and a “second” sun upside down underneath the sun – but I think it made quite a spectacular image 😀

Just before midnight, the southbound Hurtigruten arrives in Tromsø. They must have had a nice view too 🙂

There were lots of people watching the eclipse, both locals and tourists. There were actually quite a lot of Dutch people up there, and one older couple started talking to us. They were on a long holiday in Norway and had just been to the North Cape. They offered to take our photo, it turned out really nice 🙂

The cable car stayed open until 2:00, an hour longer than usual. We spent a pleasant hour sitting in the cafe enjoying the view with a warm drink. What a night! 😀