Southampton

Southampton

After a fun summer with lots of travelling, I was looking forward to coming back to Tromsø and not get on any planes until Christmas… but guess what, we’re in England now! Paul got a very last minute opportunity to analyse the samples from his cruise in a lab in Southampton. And I decided to come along 🙂 We only had a few days to arrange everything, but we managed to find a self catering apartment in a very convenient location – much better than being stuck in a hotel room!

Paul is making long hours in the lab, and I try to work as well as see a bit of Southampton and the surroundings. Southampton is not exactly the most scenic town in England… It was bombed in WWII and rebuilt with lots of concrete. It’s quite industrial as well, mainly as a harbour. But I do enjoy being back in England! No language barrier, less expensive, good cinemas… 🙂

Yesterday I took a little ferry across the river to Hythe. Quite a nice place! The ferry goes to the far end of Hythe pier, which is quite long (640 m). In the photos below you can see the pier with the ferry.

There are lots of planks with inscriptions on the pier, I guess people were able to sponsor the pier in that way. It’s nice reading all the messages as you walk along. If you don’t want to walk, there is also a cute little train! The train ride is included in the ferry ticket so I took it one way.

I walked around the marina of Hythe, from where you can see Southampton on the opposite side of the river. The ships here are enormous! Not only the container ships, but the cruise ships too. The cruise ship that you can see next to the container ship in the photo below is a rowing boat compared to the other cruise ships that are in port sometimes 😉 I also found some trees in spectacular autumn colours, very pretty!

I took some leaves home with me, and played with my new macro lens. The leave in the photo on the left has a wormhole in it 🙂

Today I watched a homecoming parade for British soldiers returning from Afghanistan. I had never been to something like that, and I was just curious. It was quite nice actually, they did a kind of show with different types of boats, explaining where and how they were used. The parade itself was not very long, but it was fun to watch the people there… 🙂

That’s all for now… hopefully more photos soon 🙂

September in the Netherlands

September in the Netherlands

I spent most of September in the Netherlands with my family. It was nice to be back home for a bit longer than usual! It had been much too long, especially during the last phase of my PhD I hardly had time to go home for longer than a couple of days.

Veronika came to visit me on a sunny Saturday, and we spent a fun day catching up and enjoying the weather. We cycled to the beach through the dunes. The dunes have changed a lot in recent times, they don’t get drinking water from them anymore (so it’s a lot wetter) and they have introduced grazing animals in certain areas. We spent a long time at the “Vogelmeer” (bird lake), watching several species of birds and lots of cormorants. And some Scottish Highlanders 🙂

The skies turned grey by the time we made it to the beach, but it was still warm. We walked along the beach for a while, and then had some lunch – and rosé 🙂 – at a restaurant where you can sit outside – very nice!

We continued our way through the dunes, and found some more Scottish Highlanders. In a different part of the dunes, we also saw horses! There were so many of them…

And they all seemed to love the basket on my mum’s bike! One by one they came to check it out, we were laughing a lot.

We briefly visited the ruins of a medieval castle (Brederode) close to my parents. Autumn is obviously on its way…

I went to the dunes a few more times, and also took this panorama below.

I also finally got to play with the lens baby that Paul gave me for Christmas. This is a very creative lens that gives special effects in sharpness, as you can see in the photo of the path through the forest. It can also take very nice portraits, like this one of my mum 🙂

My brother and I organised a dinner for the whole family (including aunts/uncles) to celebrate that we both graduated in September. It was a really nice evening! In the photo below I am cutting an enormous icecream cake for dessert 🙂

I also spent quite a lot of time with Mare, which is always fun 🙂 Though it’s a bit hard to use the computer when she’s near, hehe. She’s so funny, if you show a picture of a cat on the screen, she’s very happy and even tries to lure it towards her by making funny sounds!

My parents bought me a new lens for my camera as a graduation gift. I actually bought two 🙂 A 12-24mm wide angle lens from Tokina, for taking photos of the northern lights this winter, and a 60mm Canon macro lens. I’ve always wanted a good macro lens, and I’m so happy with this one! On the way back from the camera shop, my parents went to this large garden centre/nursery, so I had the perfect opportunity to try my new lens! And WOW, I am so happy with the results! Click to enlarge, I have made the enlarged versions bigger than I usually do so you can see all the details in them…

Back home I also took some photos of my mum’s passion flowers. I love these flowers, they are quite incredible! And the plant has a lot of these “rolled up”branches that are very photogenic too.

I cycled around quite a lot, happy to be back in a country where this is so easy 🙂 This is a view I came across when I cycled back from Bart and Kaya to my parents, somewhere in Overveen.

And these photos are taken in Spaarndam, a very nice village near my parents. I love the bench with the swans 🙂

That was a short overview of my time in the Netherlands, hope you enjoyed it!

Skiing in October!

Skiing in October!

We had a lot of snow last week. I thought it wouldn’t last, but it did. And so this morning we took the cable car up (which is now going to run all winter instead of closing down until March, yay!) and we went skiing! Up there (at about 400 m) there is a lot of snow (half a metre or so), and it’s quite good, though a bit wet. The weather today was beautiful, with bright sunshine and a pretty band of clouds over Tromsø island…

Of course we weren’t the only ones out to enjoy the first snow. There were lots of people on skis and snowboards. The group of snowboarders in the photos below made me laugh. They were walking up to more serious slopes in their snowshoe boots, but with the deep wet snow this wasn’t easy. We were zigzagging up while taking lots of photo breaks, and we kept running into them. They looked really funny walking in a line wearing their very bright coloured clothes 🙂

There was also someone kite skiing, and we watched him for a while. It looked beautiful and so much fun!

Us enjoying the snow and the sunshine…

Paul disappearing into the distance, as always a lot faster than me 😉

Before turning back, Paul wanted to get up a bit higher and I took a break 🙂 with a nice view!

We took the last cable car back down. When we entered the building, we ran into a new colleague of Paul with his girlfriend. They were a bit jealous that we were on ski’s, and they happened to have the same size boots, so we swapped our ski’s and Telemark boots for their hiking boots 🙂

It was a fun day! We didn’t expect to be able to ski this early in the year. I am not sure the snow is going to last, as the weather is supposed to turn warmer sometime next week, but at least we made the most of it!