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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!
Christmas break part 1: The Netherlands

Christmas break part 1: The Netherlands

Happy 2010 everyone! Hope you all had a nice break 🙂 Ours was very nice and relaxing. I’ll post some photos from the past weeks in the coming days, today part 1: The Netherlands. We were very lucky to escape cancelled flights on the way to The Netherlands. It was actually colder there than in Tromsø, and they had quite a lot of snow.

The day after we arrived was my birthday 🙂 We went for a nice walk in the snow…

In the afternoon we celebrated Sinterklaas (St Nicholas) with my whole family. This is supposed to be celebrated on the the 5th of December, but this year we postponed it a bit! It was a really nice evening, we had lots of fun. As there are way too many pictures, I combined them to a collage. Plus a crazy photo of 2 Vikings under the Christmas tree 😉 if you take a closer look at the Christmas tree you can see that it has rubber duckies instead of traditional lights – the creativity of my crazy brother!

Snow in the Netherlands equals chaos with the trains, so we decided to travel to Amsterdam by boat. This “fast flying ferry” (aka hydrofoil) goes from IJmuiden to Amsterdam and takes only half an hour. A fun way to travel! Amsterdam looked pretty in the snow…

On our last day in the Netherlands we went to Haarlem, which was also looking pretty with all the snow and ice. It was very cold and windy though!

These swans were trying to climb on top of the ice, but it was too weak to hold them and they kept breaking it. Poor things, they looked very confused.

In the evening we went skating with my sister and my youngest brother. Paul had never skated before, so he started out with one of those “zimmer frames” as he calls them. We started out on the bit in the middle of the rink, where you can practice (while trying to avoid out-of-control kids!) Within an hour, his skating improved enough to join the “real” skaters on the outside ring, I was impressed! It was lots of fun, I didn’t realise how much I missed skating… I should find out about the rink in Tromsø.

The next day we flew from Amsterdam to London to have Christmas with Paul’s parents. To be continued…

Flying Home for Christmas

Flying Home for Christmas

I haven’t had time to write my blog for ages – in fact I even haven’t taken any photos for over 2 weeks which is probably a record for me 😉 The reason for this was that I’ve been working on the corrections for my PhD. It hasn’t been easy to work on that during evenings/weekends with a new job taking up most of my energy. Last Sunday I finally sent an email to my external examiner with a new version of my thesis. And today I had good news: they have been accepted!!! This means that all I’ve left to do is get 2 bound copies to UEA, and then I’m finally officially Dr. Hanneke 🙂 It’s a huge relief, and a great way to start our Christmas break 🙂

We’re flying to Oslo tonight, and on to Amsterdam tomorrow morning. I can’t wait! We’re having a (very) late Sinterklaas in the Netherlands, and Christmas and New Year in England. I’m really looking forward to it! I hope to find some time to put photos online while we’re away 🙂

As I can’t write a blog post without any photos, here is one I took on Sunday night, just before finishing the corrections. We went to watch the northern lights, but they didn’t get very active. The lights reflecting in the water were pretty though! And we saw several meteorites (Geminids), one so low we thought it might land in the water! If you enlarge the picture below, you can see one…

Merry Christmas everyone!!

Fun in the Dark :)

Fun in the Dark :)

Last week, I went out one evening to meet some fellow Dutchies/Flemish in a café. When I stepped out of the house, the sky was filled with beautiful aurora! Quickly changing plans, we drove to Telegrafbukta hoping to get some pictures, but by the time we got there (only about 10 minutes later) it was all gone… Paul dropped me at the café and drove to the north tip of the island afterwards, hoping the lights would reappear. And they did! Here are some nice pictures he took…

On Saturday we went to town for some shopping. The Christmas lights are hanging now, and there’s a Christmas tree in the square. (They actually put it there by helicopter, I would love to watch that but keep missing it!) It also snowed a little – a perfect Christmas atmosphere! After shopping, we stopped at our favourite place: Aunegården. They serve the best cakes in Tromsø! (And guess what, my new job’s “julebord” (Christmas meal) will take place there 🙂 needless to say I signed up!)

On Sunday, I had some work to do so I stayed at home, despite the beautiful weather. Paul went up Tromsdalstinden! He started from Tromsdalen, even though the walk through Tromsdalen valley is quite a boring one. But the first cable car is at 11:00 and that wouldn’t give you enough daylight to get to the top. He walked up via Rødryggen. From there he took this panorama, which shows how beautiful the light is even when we have no direct sunlight:

In the first photo you can see Tromsdalstinden from Rødryggen. He took snowshoes, but didn’t use them as there was very little snow, and it was quite hard and compact. Crampons were needed to get over the icy patches. By the time he reached the top it was dark! There was however a very bright moon that night so it wasn’t a problem. He took a self portrait on the top, very pleased to finally have conquered “the beast” in winter. He was hoping to sign the turbok (logbook), but the cairn was so snowed under that it was impossible to reach it!

Safely back in Tromsø we enjoyed a well-deserved (for Paul anyway!) pizza in town 🙂