Autumn in the New Forest

My youngest brother came to see me yesterday! There are direct flights from Amsterdam to Southampton, so it was an easy trip for him. We decided to visit Beaulieu, a village in the New Forest National Park, famous for its National Motor Museum. Beaulieu is of course a very French name, but they pronounce it as "Bjooly". The museum was quite nice, but the most fun bit was "World of Top Gear", an exhibition about the popular tv program, showing all the crazy cars they built, like this Fiat Panda stretched limo...

The motor museum is part of a large complex which simply calls itself Beaulieu. There is an old abbey, a palace, a monorail and an old bus driving around, all on a large area with nice gardens. Below are two photos of the palace. The second one is taken from the village of Beaulieu.

The village is really picturesque, I loved walking around there. I was quite envious of the people living there, what a nice place! Just look at the garden below, who wouldn't love a view like that...

There are lots of ponies freely walking throughout the New Forest. We saw quite a few, also inside the village where they caused small traffic jams :)

Some more views of the Beaulieu river at low tide...

There is a really nice long distance walking path going through the village and following the Beaulieu river, I'd love to go back there and see a bit more. Unfortunately it's difficult to get to Beaulieu, as there is no train station and only one very infrequent bus service. What I really need is a bicycle I guess :)

The Seven Bays of Broadstairs

Last Saturday we picked up a rental car and drove to London. It was actually cheaper than going by train, which is pretty ridiculous! Anyway, we spent the weekend with Paul's parents, and on Sunday we all went on a trip to Broadstairs. This is a small town between Margate and Ramsgate on the east coast of Kent, surrounded by seven bays with white (chalk) cliffs. We started walking from Botany Bay, the most northerly one.

This part of the coast has a smuggling history, and apparently Botany Bay is named after the smugglers who were sent to Botany Bay in Australia... (to prison, not on holiday ;) ). I was really impressed by the chalk cliffs!

The cliffs are eroding fast, and you can find many caves. I took the photo on the left (below) from inside one of them. In the other, Paul and his dad are standing near the entrance of this cave.

A bit further on there was a (steep) path coming down between the cliffs. Paul called it the stairway to heaven because of the sunlight streaming through it (or because he found a toilet at the top??).

At the far end of Botany Bay, there is a cliff with a arch in it, large enough to walk through. On the other side is Kingsgate Bay.

The photos below are taken from Kingsgate Bay, looking back at the cliff with the gate in it. The cliffs in this bay have many caves, some very high up in the cliff. I found out later that they are connected by tunnels and were used for the smuggling activities. Some of the tunnels are still accessible, perhaps it's best I didn't know about this at the time ;)

On the other side of Kingsgate Bay is Kingsgate Castle, built in the 1760s but now converted into apartments... what a place to live! We continued our walk through Joss Bay and Stone Bay. At Stone Bay, we took the steps up and continued on top of the cliffs. The photo on the right shows the view from up there.

Broadstairs is a very pleasant town, with nice buildings on the promenade. It was a sunny day and temperatures even reached up to 18 degrees, warm enough for an ice cream :) The bay in the photo below is Viking Bay. The man-made sand bank apparently protects the coast against winter storm damage, we saw a similar one in Botany Bay.

The photo on the left (below) shows the nice seaside promenade, with a lift (!!) going down to the beach and three stories of beach huts! On the right is the beginning of Louisa Bay, with a big newish apartment building. They have some courage building it right at the cliff's edge, you can see they need concrete to reinforce the cliff. By now it was high tide and you couldn't really walk on the beach anymore.

What a wonderful day! I really enjoyed it, such a beautiful place. I've always been fascinated by the famous white cliffs. Last year we went to Brighton to see them, but there is no real beach there and you walk on a concrete path underneath the cliffs. This was so much nicer!

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

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!

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!

Oslo again!

I visited Oslo for the first time last month (see here) - little did I know I'd be back only a month later! This time with Paul, who hadn't been to Oslo either. We rented a really nice apartment right next to Vigeland park (Catalina Apartment Hotel in case you're interested - we can really recommend this place!). Unfortunately we woke up to a very rainy day on Saturday. We walked to the city centre, visiting some of the sights, like the Royal Palace in the photo below. We found a really nice cafe to shelter from the rain for a while :) serving good hot chocolates. Ordering a hot chocolate is a bit of a hit-or-miss experience in Norway, sometimes you get some kind of warmed up synthetic chocolate sauce, and the other day I even had a hot chocolate with soft ice in it instead of cream...

The next morning we woke up to a beautiful sunny autumn day. We had planned to visit 3 museums in one day, but the weather was too nice to be inside all day. We first went to Vigeland park to see the sculptures. We found this really fascinating oscillating fountain there... I am not sure if it's supposed to be like that, as there was an identical fountain on the other side which didn't do it. I did find this video on youtube, so it looks like it does it more often. We didn't have a compact camera to take a video, so instead I made an animated gif. If you click on the image below you can watch the fountain oscillate... (be patient, it might take a while to load)

We walked around the sculptures for a while, very nice to see them on such a beautiful day!

In the afternoon we went to the FRAM museum. Second time for me ;) but I actually didn't have time to see everything during my last visit so I didn't mind. For Paul (as an Arctic oceanographer) it was of course a must! The FRAM is a really famous ship from the history of Arctic and Antarctic expeditions. Fridtjof Nansen used it to try and reach the North Pole by letting the ship freeze into the ice and drift with the current, and it brought Amundsen to Antarctica on the trip where he became the first to reach the South Pole... so there is a lot of history there and it's great that they preserved the ship for everyone to visit.

This is what it looks like inside, I thought it looked quite comfortable. They have common rooms in the middle and cabins all around the outside. Note how they have a "rail" around the table to prevent things from sliding off in rough weather...

From the FRAM museum, we took the bus and subway to visit Mihailo and Marion (and their kids). Mihailo and I used to work for the same supervisor in Alaska, 5 years ago! It was great catching up and we had a really nice time.

My job interview was early on Monday morning. It went quite well, I am proud to say I managed to do the entire interview in Norwegian! I was scared I'd have to switch to English at some point, but the person who interviewed me was very helpful and it all went well. Of course I can't really compete with fluent Norwegian speakers, so I have no idea what my chances are of actually getting the job, but I'll find out in about 3 weeks time.

It was a really sunny day again, so after dropping our luggage in a locker at Oslo central station, we went to explore a bit more. We visited the Oslo Opera House, a really great modern building where you can walk on the roof (check out a really cool timelapse of it being built here). You have a nice view over the water and the city from the roof. Can you tell that I love my new wide angle lens? :)

We stopped for lunch and another hot chocolate at a nice bakery, and it even was warm enough to sit outside :) After that we went to see Oslo City Hall. This is the building where the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony takes place, and although it doesn't look spectacular from the outside, it is really beautiful inside! Lots of murals with scenes from Norwegian history and culture. In the photo below Paul is also showing off his new backpack, he was very happy to find enormous outdoor shops in Oslo ;)

In the photo below on the left is a detail from one of the murals that I really like: a queen sitting on a smiling bear being offered a crown, cheered on by Norwegian kids - cute! The other one shows just how incredibly detailed the murals (continuing on the ceiling in this case) were.

We walked around the Akershus fortress in the late afternoon. In the photo below Paul is sitting on one of the walls of the fortress, and behind him you can see the port (with some really beautiful ships!) and the brown brick building on the right is Oslo City Hall.

After our visit to the fortress, it was time to get the train to the airport. It was a really nice weekend trip, we both enjoyed it a lot. It was nice to catch some last days of nice weather too ;) Tromsø is turning quite wintry, we had snow yesterday and the roads are icy. Paul has changed the tires on his bike already, now I just need to do mine and the ones on the car and then we're ready for winter...

Back in autumnal Tromsø

Paul and I both came back to Tromsø last Friday - Paul from the Arctic winter and me from the Dutch Summer... straight into very autumnal weather in Tromsø! We had rain, rain, rain all weekend. Paul really wanted to go for a walk in spite of this, so we put on our waterproofs and braved the weather!

The landscape is really beautiful now, with all the trees yellow and the blueberry bushes a bright red. It would be stunning in sunny weather, but it was impressive in the rain too. This is a panorama Paul took on our way up. Note how it's white in the foreground - snow!

We were trying to reach the top of Grønnlibruna, at 401 m high. This would be my 7th "Ti på Topp" which is enough to get a reward (a mug). Unfortunately we never made it there. The rain changed into snow when we got out of the shelter of the forest. I started to be cold, I later found out that my waterproofs were no good and I was soaked underneath. I think the photos below say enough ;)

After taking these photos, we turned around and went back to the car to enjoy some hot chocolate and drive home to a warm bath :) Too bad I didn't make it to my last top, but I think I can live without the mug ;)

The next day I joined Sevim for a walk close to Tromsø. We were lucky, it was sunny! We went at sunset though, so we walked in the almost-dark most of the time, but I did manage to take a few photos of the autumn landscape - very pretty!

Life is getting back to normal, Paul is back at work and I should start working on my corrections soon. We're going to Oslo for the weekend, I have a job interview there on Monday! The job would be in Tromsø, but the head office is in Oslo, that's why they asked me to come there. Paul has still not been to Oslo, so we decided to use this opportunity to do some sightseeing.

I'll try to post some photos of my time in the Netherlands soon... stay tuned :)