Rotterdam (or Anywhere)

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

Hello!

It’s November already, time is flying and I have lots of photos still to post here…

On the 18th of October we went to a ceildh in the city centre. It’s a big dance evening with life folk music. It was a lot of fun! Here are some pictures of us dancing:

And here some photos of us not dancing ;):

Katja & Johannes, Veronika & Colin

Johannes & Veronika, Colin & Paul throwing his winning lottery ticket in his beer

Don’t you love the wallpaper??? 🙂

Katja & Claudia, me & Veronika

The weekend of 21-22 October, my parents came to visit. They brought LOTS of Dutch food with them!! :)) It was like Christmas, lots of presents 🙂

Everybody in the living room

On Sunday we organized a surprise for my dad’s birthday, we took them to Wroxham where we hired a boat for three hours. The weather wasn’t great, but it was mostly dry and it was really nice on the Broads! It took a while before we were used to the boat, but it’s easy! Here are the pictures of that day:

It was a really nice tour, and we stopped halfway for lunch. We brought food and made our own lunch. It was quite busy on the river, lots of people with hired boats. There’s some really nice houses on the water, I always enjoy watching those. After the trip, we walked around Wroxham for a bit, then drove back to Norwich.

My dad took this crazy picture of us in the garden centre where there was a big Christmas show…

My dad wanted to watch the last Formula 1/Grand Prix, he watched it at Paul’s place while we made them dinner. It was a nice weekend!

Last weekend was busy… On Friday afternoon we packed allllll my stuff (how did I get this much stuff??) and I moved in with Paul!! He has a really nice flat, very close to UEA as well. We spent all day Saturday unpacking everything, I was very tired afterwards but it was great to have it done (and not wait for weeeeeks to unpack the last boxes, as I did last time). Here’s a photo of me in the kitchen with some of the boxes:

I’ll try to take some more photos of the flat soon 🙂 It was fun filling the bookshelves, we have a huge collection of travel books 🙂

On Sunday we went cycling around Norwich. It was really nice! But there are so many hills around here, Paul calls it flat, well it’s NOT!! 🙂 We stopped in one of the tiny villages on the way for lunch, here are some photos:

This week flew by as well. I have had my medical for going to Antarctica, fortunately the doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with me. Next week I need to get my blood tested and I have an appointment at the travel clinic for vaccinations. I have never seen the inside of a medical centre so often as those weeks!! Tomorrow I’m going to Cambridge for a conference to prepare for the cruise.

And on Saturday there is Sparks in the Park, the fireworks show for Bonfire Night here at UEA! I’m really looking forward to it, I like fireworks a lot and the show last year was really good. I’m taking my camera of course, I’ll try to post some photos next week!

Take care,

Hanneke

Here are some photos of beaches I went to recently…

These are taken in Sea Palling. This is a beach where they have some kind of piers parallel to the coast, for protection (against erosion I suppose, a big problem on the Norfolk coast). You can reach some of them, and climb on the rocks – though that is very dangerous… they love warning signs here!!

Last weekend we went to Winterton-On-Sea. This is close to Great Yarmouth, so quick to reach from Norwich. Very nice beach! The tide was very low so the beach was big. We had fun playing with Pauls kite 🙂 Here are some photos:

All is going well here in Norwich! I moved to a new office last week. It looks ugly from the outside (it’s a container building!) but quite nice on the inside. The only thing I don’t like is that it’s quite far from everything on campus.

Other than that, have a lot of trips planned for the near future 🙂 I’m going to the Netherlands with Paul for 5 days in November. Should be fun! I won’t be home for Christmas or New Year… we booked a trip to my favourite country in the world, Switzerland!! We are going skiing in Zermatt for a week, then spend some days travelling, and then we’ll go to Celia’s New Year party. We fly back to London on the first of January. I’m really looking forward to this trip :)))

And I’m also busy preparing the trip that Patama and I will do in South America. After the cruise in Antarctica, we will be in the Falkland Islands for 5 days, then we’ll probably spend a week in Patagonia (Torres del Paine), some days in Santiago and Lima, then the Inca Trail for 4 days before we fly back to the UK. Very exciting!

And yeah, in between all of that I still have to try and concentrate on work… hmm 🙂

Ok this is the end of my enormous update, in case you haven’t noticed, I have uploaded three entries at the same time, so keep scrolling down!! 🙂