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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!
Ice

Ice

On Saturday we drove to Håkøya, an island near Tromsø. We noticed that large parts of the sea are frozen, something we’ve never seen before! It hasn’t been especially cold, but it has been windstill and we had freezing fog (on the day the sun was supposed to come back) – so perhaps this caused the sea to freeze? The sun only comes up for a short period and by the time we arrived it was after sunset. The sky still had a deep orange colour though, and the views over the frozen sea were beautiful…

It was quite cold, so we didn’t walk for too long 😉 When we came back to the car, on one side it was getting quite dark while the lights were coming on…

While on the other side, the sky still had some colours, and was reflected in the very still water.

On Sunday the weather was overcast, and we decided to visit a waterfall near Ramfjorden. It was all frozen over, with spectacular ice formations! Below you can see Paul sitting on part of this ice fall, and some of the icicles that are part of it.

And some more ice formations.. the second photo is taken with quite a long exposure, which blurs the water flowing underneath the icicles.

It was a fun weekend! We also enjoyed the Tromsø International Film Festival last week. We saw 10 films, and we liked most of them. We thought we’d be fed up of going to the cinema by the end of the week, but we actually regretted it was over! Last night after watching our last film, we cycled to Telegrafbukta to watch the aurora from the beach, under a bright moon – a great end to the weekend 🙂

Waiting for the Light

Waiting for the Light

We’ve been back in Tromsø for a week now. A week with rubbish weather unfortunately – temperatures were above zero all week and we had lots of rain. The rain would still freeze on the ground though, which turned the whole city into an ice rink! One day I couldn’t even get up the hill next to the house – way too slippery. Our car doors keep freezing too, we’ve never had a problem with that before. Yesterday after we finally managed to open them, they froze while we were inside the car! Luckily they defrosted after driving around for a while. We need snow!

The weather finally cleared up yesterday, and we went for a little trip with Maiten, hoping to see the northern lights. They had been quite active, but by the time we got out of town they had died down. I only took this photo below, which does show a green glow, but I used an exposure of more than 7 minutes! Still, shows how many stars there were 🙂

The days have been getting lighter, and the sun comes above the horizon now. Not yet above the mountains, we have to wait until Thursday for that. I took this panorama just before 15:00, it was quite dark already but I loved the cloud!

That’s all for now, but I hope to upload some more photos of our Christmas break tomorrow 🙂