Spain with the Fosters

I just finally got around to adding the photos to this post. It's been awhile. :) I've had this sitting in my drafts folder forever. I figured it's better late than never though and I'm hoping you guys feel the same.

Ok so, shortly after returning to Longyearbyen from Christmas holidays, I took some time off and went to Spain. Such a hard life.

I arrived in Albir around 02:00 in the morning and was a tired hungry girl. The juice boxes in the fridge are what got me through the night. :)

The Fosters weren't arriving until the late afternoon the next day, so I used that time to do a little shopping for some much needed things: breakfast, toilet paper, seeing eye glasses! Yes, I now have glasses, and I can see again, it's great. This is old news by now! :)

Although it was February and we didn't have crazy warm weather, there were still several days where the adults sat outside in the sunshine during nap time and drank cava in our bathing suits.

We had a great trip to the zoo outside Benidorm. It's so smart to go to the zoo in the off season. There weren't a million people, it was still very warm for us, and all the animals weren't dying of heat exhaustion so they were actually up and walking around. The monkeys were especially entertaining. We saw everything, and Jackson ran almost the whole way. We also go quite close to the tiger!

The day at the beach was lots of fun. Jack was so excited about the entire beach being made of rocks and started throwing them back in the sea one at a time. We did this for quite some time. Kurtis was even ok with the beach time, because sand didn't get everywhere.

Thank you so much Fosters for meeting me in Spain and thank you so much Øyvind and Merete for letting us use the Spain house. We had a great time.

Some pictures from Zagreb

Jessica had done her research right, and had the idea of going to a valley thats listed on the unesco world heritage list. A couple of hour drive from Zagreb a really cool place opened up. Clearly it was low season, but it was still an amazing place with crystal clear water.

We walked along the water on paths and "bridges" that were only a foot over the water.

Limestone caves...

It turns out, as soon as you ask these sisters to pose, they both try to mimic the "Captain Morgan man"

The weather was warmer and so much better than we had dared to hope for...

Jackson had a huge obsession with Thomas the tank engine while we were there. Riding the blue prams was an everyday highlight.

This might not be the Fosters best pick out of all the family photos we took, but i love this one...

Charlie clearly figured out what the pieces of the puzzle are for...

Missing photos from Øyvind's visit

I have been meaning to add in these photos for quite sometime now, and I just never sat down and took them off my phone.

One night, the four of us went out for dinner and some drinks at Svalbar. Lars and Øyvind were feeling a little adventurous and wanted to try the floats. There was a porter float, made with vanilla ice cream and a porter, and then there was a good old fashioned root beer float. Which I grew immediately nostalgic for, and the rest of them just looked at me silly. They didn't have a clue what root beer was and what the deal was with the ice cream?

They asked the waiter (who was swedish) and all he could do was explain that it was a pop with ice cream in it, but that didn't quite quench their curiosity. They still didn't know what root beer was. The reason for it being on the menu is, the chef is American. So the waiter had to go in and ask for an explanation as to what root beer was. Sassafras! I could not for the life of me remember the name of the plant.

They ordered one of each, with the intention of sharing them. I died laughing when they came out, because here are these two large men drinking floats from fancy glasses in a dark bar! I loved it. Lars was not a fan of either the porter or the root beer float, so needless to say, Øyvind finished them both up! :)

Thanks again for coming up to visit! We had an excellent weekend with the two of you.

So way back then, last year.

Sorry for the big delay, but here are finally some pictures of our Christmas holidays in mainland Norway and from our trip to meet the Fosters in Zagreb.

I went to Oslo a week before Jessica, I spent some time in Oslo building snowmen with Julie and visiting my Dad's new office building. Super fancy.

Then Jessica arrived and we just spent one night in Oslo before we headed further south to meet with the Fosters. We had an amazing time in Zagreb, pleasantly surprised with how hot it was. We had great food, wine, weather and some more wine. Zagreb was surprisingly nice, I didn't have too high of hopes before we went, but it had a really nice atmosphere to it. Some how I think it might have to do with the fact that Zagreb is a big city, the capitol of Croatia, yet I recon they don't see a lot of tourism, compared to the Croatian cities along the southern coast. The country has a very strange history, leading all the way up to the 90's, they have just joined the EU, and in a way I'm happy we got to tour the city before the euro sets in. Best way to describe Zagreb was the market, where we had a fun time buying the christmas turkey. Led by a vegan, and a three year old holding hands, we found our way down to the under ground market (!) the meat section, looking for something she wouldn't eat and I had no recollection of ever seeing except packed in filet sizes at the super market. We ended up with a pretty big bird, biggest we had ever seen, and Steph prepared it perfectly. Anyhow, what I wanted to say was, the market was full of local Croatians. It seemed like everyone in Zagreb would come here, simply to do their everyday shopping. The market was huge, with a separate fish and a separate meat section, and fresh flowers for very cheap prices.

INSERT CROATIA PICTURES HERE - They will be coming we promise, just have to both be in the same place for a little while to get the photos from the camera :) stay tuned!

Heading back to Norway, Jessica ended up staying an extra day in Zagreb... for no reason at all it turned out... and we had some nice days with the Norwegian family, even managed to squeeze in a day in the mountains and new years eve with my parents who were babysitting Oliver and Mia.

I stayed in Norway for another week, topping off my long holiday with my grandmothers 90th birthday. 

UNIS Safety Course

Every January UNIS puts on a week long safety course for all of the new students. There is also usually a group of new staff or staff who haven't taken the week long course, or for those who want to repeat it.

Oskar is usually a part of this course every year because he teaches the avalanche safety part. This year I also got to be a part of the course, however I was a participant!

I've taken some of the safety courses at UNIS but never the week long one. I've only had rifle training and polar bear safety as well as polar circle boat safety (you jump in the water in a survival suit and then swim out of the water, nothing too big). 

The week long course has several topics: first aid, avalanche safety, glacier safety, sea ice, emergency camp, navigation and communication, and rifle training and polar bear safety.  There is then an optional snow scooter course, which I obviously took. Talk about awesome HSE training!

All of the topics had a theoretical part and a practical part. Then on Saturday, we were all up on the moraine and the Longyear glacier putting our skills to the test. My team was not so successful in the avalanche test, we were only able to save one person out of four. Really puts things in perspective, how important it is to make sure you go out with people who know how to save you!

I didn't take my camera with me, so I don't really have any photos to share, except when we had the practical part of sea ice training. We had to jump in the water and then swim and pull our selves out onto the ice. Apparently someone was taking photos ( I didn't notice) and they put them up on the 'all staff shared network' at UNIS so that everyone can see them!

It was a great week of work!

These are the band wagon things that we took to the hole in the ice, and where we had to walk back to after getting out of the water. It was a cold walk back. 

The hole was actually cut in our drinking water lake because there is no ice on the fjord. So it wasn't salt water. That was nice :)

We did a practice situation and one of us had to 'fall' in the wart and then get saved. 

Our victim just hanging out in the water.

Him being saved and then stripped of wet clothes and wrapped up nicely.

And this is me having no problems getting out of the freezing water! I even took my mitten off to grab for my ice spikes!

More visitors, way back in September.

A couple days after my mom left, Øyvind and his friend Lars came up for a short weekend visit. We're so lucky to have people come up and visit us. It's always so nice to have visitors!

There were trips to the dog yard, drives up to Mine 7, many a dinner out, and lots of beer, wine and cognac were had.

We went on a nice little trip up Platåberget where it was so windy that when I didn't have my bag on I was being pushed around! This just goes to show how heavy my bag was, not how small I am! :)
We had a little photo shoot at the top and then turned around and came back down. It was much too windy to be sitting up there for long.

On the way back down we had a stop at one of the wooden trestles that used to carry the coal buckets across town, from the mines to the quay. We sat in the sunshine for a little while and looked out at Hjortfjellet.

 Ivar was really into us taking a break and took advantage of everyone being down at his height.

On Saturday night there was a bluegrass concert happening at Huset with the local bluegrass band called Blåmyra Bluegrass (literally blue marsh Bluegrass, one of the areas in town that has blue apartment buildings is called Blåmyra) and then another (apparently famous in Norway) band called Lucky Lips. Our local band is just adored in Longyearbyen and no one wanted to see their show end because they haven't played since last year. They're not a very good band but they play fun music and everyone in town goes to their shows!

We also had a short private tour of the wine cellar at Huset with Tommy. I swear Oskar and I could give the tour ourselves we've been so many times, not that I'm complaining!

 

Thanks again Øyvind and Lars for visiting, it was really nice to see you up here.