After 3 weeks without a day off and 10 to 12 hours in the lab nearly each day, it is a wonderful feeling to be outside again.
I’m about to finish off the lab work for my master's thesis and hoped to be finished with everything before my friends would arrive. But that was already the plan for Christmas, and lab always takes much more time than assumed. Having a lab on my own, at least I can listen to music as often as I want to.
Being on Svalbard means being busy all the time and I barely realised how the days went by. The daily ski tour with my dogs was a good way to end the day and balanced the long days at UNIS. But it didn’t leave much time for being social. At least the once-per-semester icebreaker party was a must and also this time people were incredibly creative in making costumes out of nothing. This term the theme was “Global Warming” and it is impressive what people associate with it.
Still: Neither success in the lab nor any party can compete with the feeling of standing behind a sledge with polar dogs pulling, or skiing in one of the most fantastic landscapes I’ve ever seen. Like some other UNIS students I got a job as “handler” in a dog yard last summer. This mainly means shovelling shit and feeding, but also some training for the upcoming tourist season, as soon as the snow was good enough. Unfortunately this happened quite late this winter, but in any case now is a perfect time for doing sledding. Since there are still not sufficient numbers of tourists around for the dogs to be used daily for commercial tours, the dogs need to be trained. This gives me a perfect opportunity for a day trip with friends.
Picture: Daniel Zwick
Last time I had visitors was over Christmas and on trips then I could only describe how the landscape would look like if there were light. But now each day the twilight is getting longer. That the sun is still hiding behind the horizon doesn’t matter at all.
This week we are quite lucky with the weather, with little wind and some clear sky each day. It’s not so cold either. After some -22 or so degrees on Monday, now it’s around -8 to -10 degrees: Perfect temperatures for being outside.
As I demanded, the second day after my friends arrived the whole sky was full with yellow-green, nearly white and purple polar lights.
Picture: Daniel Zwick
Text: Eike Ingrid Stübner