Yesterday after days of rain and snow suddenly a sunny afternoon: time for spring? Nope, when opening my curtains this morning: about 10 cm of snow and the snow showers keep on coming. This good news for the Norwegians, the Norwegian students were the day before yesterday massively boarding the busses equipped with their cross-country skis. They were on their way to family or friends to spend Easter holidays together with them in the mountains. During the past week some were worrying that this Easter tradition would be in trouble this year, because of the early melting snow. Coming week it will be quiet here, no lectures in university, shops are open only limited and busses drive according to weekend schedule. I will have 1 week of holidays from Tuesday on, after only 2 weeks of work...

Last week I did quite some things; therefore a longer blog this time.

Last week Friday late in the afternoon the sky finally got clear and with my rented cross-country skis I entered the bus to experience at least once this typical Norwegian sport. And it was not too easy, quite some snow had melted and were the snow still survived an ice floor had formed, which was very slippery. On the straight pieces and moderate slopes I could manage, but it was not a big success this first time. So Sunday afternoon I just on hiking boots through the snow covered forest paths, each few meters I sank either into the snow or the mud.

As said, I will have holidays coming week. Via Facebook (appeared to be a very useful several times last week) I met some people that were planning to travel to Lofoten coming week. Sunday night we met at my kitchen table and we made som plans. The Lofoten are a wonderful mountainous island group about 800 km further north from Trondheim. After some more conversations we decided to postpone these plan, because there will be lots of snow coming week on Lofoten. So I made my own plan and bought a ticket to Oslo for coming Tuesday trom another student (again by Facebook). After three days of Oslo I'll travel to Ålesund by train and bus, a small, beautiful city at the Norwegian fjord coast. On Easter Sunday I will return to Trondheim.

Now continuing about last week. Monday I was home at 3 PM already, because I had a telephone meeting with the advisory committee for two new professors in Wageningen. A committee I join as a student member. A very efficient and distance meeting saving a lot of kilometers (the participants were all located between Paris and Trondheim). Only my mobile phone battery quit after more than one hour and I had to be called again. That evening I visited a Norwegian pub for the first time for Påskepils (Paasdrink) van Ski og Fjell (ski and hiking student association), a Dutch guy from the ‘Lofoten plan' invited me for this.

Tuesday night I visited another pub, this time with a useful goal: learning some Norwegian words. Each Tuesday in this pub a game is being played where you can learn some English-Norwegian with cards with some words or sentences which you have to say. This helped quite a lot to learn the first basic vocabulary and pronunciation in a nice and informal way. I should do this more often.

Wednesday was laundry evening. The laundry building is near to my building, but I had to go three times trough the rain. Luckily you can track the laundry machine online, so I knew when to go back to put the laundry in the dryer. Unfortunately the latter machine needed a bit too much time and my laundry had to dry some more in my room on some improvised lines.
Friday night I found out that innebandy training ‘took Easter holidays' already, so a quiet evening.

In the lab this week some less work to do, I had to wait for my primers, which I ordered. For the non bio(techno)logists among the readers: primers are small pieces of DNA for copying longer pieces of DNA and attach pieces of DNA. Friday afternoon my primers finally arrived! So I decided to still go to the lab on Monday, and run my first PCR experiments, which means: copying my first DNA pieces!

And then off to Oslo!