What a wonderful welcome in Norway, a ‘warm' welcome is not totally the case early March. Although the thermometer in this train indicates temperatures around 10 C all the time. I can hardly imagine this when I look outside of the window. Huge lakes with ice, mountain slopes covered with a layer of snow and even frozen rivers and waterfalls! At most places the snow and ice are melting, after last weeks snow shower spring is slowly coming here as well.

When writing this, I am travelling from Oslo to Trondheim by train. A train trip of more than 6 hours, but very rewarding! This morning I had a flight from Schiphol to Oslo with very enjoyable views, I could oversee the whole north of the Netherlands. I could clearly see the ‘Afsluitdijk' and the Wadden islands. Short before landing at Oslo airport I would already observe the ice and snow cover of Norway, though this was interrupted by the waves of fjords like the Oslo fjord.

Aboard this train the lady next to me offered me to change seats, so I am now sitting next to the window, typing, staring and enjoying! I can even work here on my laptop, each seat has two sockets, Scandinavian luxury!

At this time (6.30 PM) it starts getting dark, and I still have 2.5 hours of train ride to go before arrival in Trondheim. There it become really exciting, can I easily find my key locker and room?, how does my room look?, are any housemates come and awake? Tomorrow will be another exciting day, because of some ‘bacteria-isolation' troubles in the lab, my original project can unfortunately not proceed. My original supervisor sent me this message last Friday.. Therefore I will go to a professor of microbial biotechnology tomorrow morning, and to have a talk about possible nice projects he has for my coming 5 months.

This was my first contribution to this blog, I will regularly try to contribute, dependent on the ‘how interesting my life is level', time and motivation. I try to keep the text a bit short. My motto: better more often some spam than very long spam. Sometimes in English, sometimes in Dutch and if time allows both! Will be continued soon...