Tromsø trip, part one

Bright and early Sunday morning I picked up a friend of mine and we drove to Norway. I drove for a big chunk of the flat, boring part, and he took the mountain driving. I was very good with this, because it meant that I could enjoy the view. We hit the road just after 08:00, and arrived in Tromsø around 18:00, which made for a full day, but it is not as long of a drive as going to Stockholm.

We are staying in a B&B very near the uni. It takes 15 minutes to walk up the hill to the geology department from here, and there is a grocery store less than 10 minutes walk down the hill from here, so I am fairly pleased with the location. I really like the part where I can use the kitchen.

I am in class from 9 to 5 all this week, which is why I am here. See my other blog if you want any details about the class. Because of my weird eating schedule (I want food every couple of hours during the day and not at all in the evenings) this means that I need to eat during breaks from class. My solution to this was to cook up enough food for the road and my first two days of class, so that we would have time on this end to find a grocery store and recover from the trip before I needed to cook. This worked, but by today I was a bit tired of eating the same set of things (rice cooked with vegetables, pumpkin, sunflower, sesame, and flax seeds; oat cakes; bananas; cardamon-almond bread rolls; peanuts; muesli; home-made marzipan; cheese; dried fruit) so it was nice to get to the store and pick up some fresh veg. Tomorrow's food is a blend of chickpeas, fresh veg, pine nuts, and the last of that rice. Sure it is similar to the rice blend I have been eating, but this time the rice is only a hint of starch, and besides, it needed to be eaten. The down side of not being able to cook until evening is that I didn't get to taste any of it while it was still hot--it looked really good, but I am just not interested in food at this hour. But I will be tomorrow...

I like visiting Tromsø. It has a much higher population density than I am interested in, but the setting is lovely--mountains on all side of the town, which is on an island. Today's walk home I went along the "Geology Walk" which connects the Uni to the botanical gardens. I am pleased to report that not only do they have a great display of a variety of different rock types and interpretive signs, there is also a lovely exposure of a major fault, which separates the rocks on the north end of the island from those on the south end.

The short course ends on Friday. Right now we are thinking in terms of staying through to Saturday morning so that we have daylight for the drive through the mountains back home, but we will watch the weather report and decide as it gets closer if we will head back Friday after class instead. On one hand going home sooner would mean seeing lord_kjar sooner, but then again, I get to spend most of my time with him, and I get to see mountains only rarely. And we are spending time each evening chatting on video calls...

Progress report: I have been too busy with class to work on my paper, but I have managed to read my 1000 words a day (and more many days) from the geologic literature every day since deciding it was time to restart that challenge.