Christmas

Anna left for Christmas vacation in Iceland on the 15th of December, while I came over on the 23rd. My parents are also here. We already had a good Christmas eve with delicious food and and good company. Today there is another big family party and this will continue for some more days.
The swimming-pools are closed for some days, which is a big loss for a person like me, who loves the warm waters of Iceland. The weather has been very changing with snow, wind, rain, frost and heat. Most of the time snow, though. The whole of Iceland is covered in a white blanket of snow.

I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy New Year

Lunar eclipse

Today we had a full lunar eclipse on Svalbard and absolutely no clouds.
Anna and I dressed up in scooter suits and brought camera and a thermos with hot tea, enjoying the magic scenery from the slopes of a mountain.

Tonight we have an other Christmas party, this time with my company and then we have dinner guests tomorrow for some Icelandic lamb;0)

Kautokeino

Last week-end some of my colleagues and I had to go to Kautokeino, the sami kapital of Finnmark in northern Norway. I took Anna with me, so she could also see some daylight and a new part of Norway. The reason for our trip was a meeting with the drilling company helping us with the drill cores for our exploration work. At the same time they had julebord, which is a Christmas party. I t was very nice, with cozy people, excellent food and they even had an out-door jacuzzi:0).

The journey was long. First a plane from Svalbard to Tromsö, then a new plane to Alta and then we got picked up by a sami and driven to Kautokeino.
Sunday we drove back to Alta and then we flew to Tromsö, where we stayed at a nice hotel and had a drink at "Rorbua" a new bar in the old fishing house style. Monday morning we had a few hours in Tromsö to see the town before flying back to Svalbard, cold, darkness and snow;0

my old job on tv;0)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15940985
Sirius in BBC

Northern-light

This late evening I suddenly saw some northern-light. This was the first time with soma major amount up here this fall. It is much better around Tromsö and Mestersvig, but it is not bad here;0)

It was minus 17, no wind, no clouds and an almost silence...

jo-jo temperatures

For the last week we have had some jo-jo temperatures in town. For almost two weeks we had temperatures between -10 and - 15 degrees, but then it changed and we had 5 days with temperatures around +4 degrees, making everything slippery, but luckily it did not melt all the snow;0). Last night the temperature started dropping and now we have -13, so I am a happy boy now. The young ones are driving around on their snow scooters, but the more clever ones are waiting for more snow so the equipment will not be destroyed...

I added a new link in the web-cameras. It is a new 360 camera situated at "Bykaia" the port of the town. I really like these, due to high quality and as an excellent viewer of the present weather situation and what is going on!

This week-end I will help my colleague to start building a sauna...

Rovaniemi

Santa Claus ad the exploration team

Last week I was in Rovaniemi in Finland. Rovaniemi is a fairly large city in Lappland. We (the Geologists in the company) where going there to meet up with the rest of the exploration team from Norway and Finland.
On Monday we flew in to Tromsö and from there we drove to Levi, a 5 hours drive. After a short sleep we drove the last 2 hours to Rovaniemi. For the next days we had meetings discussing databases and plans. Thursday we had lunch at Santa Claus park where we met Santa Claus and had out photo taken, this was a once in the life-time opportunity;0)
Thereafter we drove straight to Tromsö, which took 7 hours. Most of the way there was little day-light, the landscape was fairly flat, with trees every-where and loads of reindeer...
After a night in Tromsö with good food we flew back to Longyearbyen...

Tromsö to Rovaniemi