today, after a snowy morning, most of the snow melted away during the afternoon, and at early evening, even the sun came out. the weather was so beautiful that we took a walk.

we even met some easter bunnies:

today i was at the pfäffikersee, not very far away from zürich. there are still some leftovers from this year’s seegfrörni.

this weekend, i was in oslo. the second time i was in norway, and the first time i visited its capital.
the weather was perfect – mostly sunny, only few clouds – and i had a great guide! (thanks again!) we’ve visited the holmenkollen ski jump, tried the best apple cake in oslo, visited the oslo opera house, paid a quick visit to the central campus of the university of oslo and to the royal palace, enjoyed the city hall place (radhusplassen), the akershus castle, visited the newest part of tjuvholmen, the vigeland sculpture park. we also visited a great second hand store, which resulted in me leaving with a stack of used cds.
below, you can find impressions from all these places (except the second hand store):

monday and tuesday i was in basel, attending the speedup workshop, including a tutorial on intel threading building blocks and cilk plus. something i have to try out, by writing some lattice enumeration code with it, to see how it copes with it. especially the tutorial was definitely worth the time spend there.
but besides business, i walked around a bit in basel during monday’s lunch break, this time with my camera. this resulted in some nice photos, and some of these are here:

yesterday i made a trip to arosa, taking the cable car up to weisshorn and walking down around 750 m (total elevation difference); it was essentially this hike, except that i stopped at prätschli as the sun began to hide behind the mountains and as i missed the turn somewhen before which lead to maran. anyway, it was a great day for a hike, with clear sky, a bright sun (i had to use my sunglasses; something i haven’t needed in lappland ;-) ), and lots of snow.
several parts of the trail were pretty steep, for example the very beginning, which was a bit scary at first. at these moments, i really wished i had some kind of stick, and was somewhat afraid to slip and slide down. but nothing went wrong, i got down safely and without slipping. i had lunch at the sattelhütte, and did a lot of small stops to take photos. well, the whole thing took me much longer than the anticipated 2 1/2 hours, but who cares. :-)

the way back was a little more adventurous. the idea was to take the regional train from arosa to chur, and then changing into an intercity to basel, jumping out in zurich. i was sleepy (the night wasn’t very long, getting up at 5 and going to bed at 1 isn’t a good combination) and dozed off several time. at one point i noticed we were still at the same point as before i dozed off the last time, but then dozed off again. eventually i realized we were sitting in the darkness, the only light coming from the other train standing next to ours. i started to get awake a bit, and to listen to the other people in the coach, to find out what’s going on. well, nobody really knew, until the conductor walked by outside and someone in my coach opened up a window and asked him. apparently, the locomotive had a defect. eventually they got light working again, though no heating, and we even started rolling a few meters, probably to enable the other train to continue, as the end of our train was apparently blocking its way. after some more waiting, almost one hour after we stopped there in the first place, a second train came up from chur and we changed into that one, which after little more waiting took us down to chur. with somewhat more than one hour of delay, and our intercity to zurich having just left the train station, i ended up in an interregio train to basel via zurich, which took like half an hour longer than the intercity. so, with around 1 1/2 hours of delay, i finally got home. at least, we had some fun in the darkness in that coach, and also later on with light and on the new train; it’s great to sit among nice people :-)

(and no, i didn’t write that text into the snow. and there was more text, like hearts and names and stuff. didn’t took pictures of these, though.)

flying southward. seeing more of the sun than during the last two weeks. such beauty.

one reason why i like the north so much are northern lights: aurora borealis. lappland is a good place to see them, as is northern canada. thanks to the cloud cover, i missed several great auroras (judging from shots people did in this area during these days), but i still saw something. the first set of aurorae appeared when i was outside of guesthouse husky, during one night:

while visiting inari with some other guests staying at the guesthouse, we met andy keen, an aurora hunter and photographer. he gave us a lift back to ivalo, and told us a bit about his history and his fascination on auroras. well, two days later, one other guest and me went on an aurora hunting trip with andy. unfortunatley, we weren’t lucky enough to get a full-blown aurora. but we still saw something, at least! for that, andy drove us somewhere north of inari, near to a lake, where we had a great view over the lake in the direction of norway. the moon was shining bright, and without the stars it almost seemed like daylight. (i guess without the moon the aurorae would have looked more intense as well…) here are some impressions from the lake:

we later continued to another very nice spot, of which i already showed two photos here, and on the way back we stopped on a bridge where we got another wonderful view. (the last four photos of the previous post show these locations.) unfortunatley, both times without auroras. but that’s the problem of aurora hunting, you’re depending a lot on luck. (according to murphy’s law, there probably was a wonderful intense aurora as soon as we were in bed ;-) )
if you’re ever around this area and want to see auroras, do not have a car (to escape the clouds) or just don’t know what to look for, ask andy. he’s a nice guy :-) and it’s nice to be able to start dozing off while someone drives you home in the middle of the night…

the following photos were taking during night. some of them look like taken at daylight, wouldn’t there be stars at the sky… especially with full moon, the snowscape is just so bright.
the photos in the second row show the guesthouse husky, and the left photo in the third row is from näverniemi lomakylä. the last two rows are somewhere north of inari, the other rows are near to the guesthouse and/or the lomakylä.

the following photos show the winterish lappland in its full beauty. the first two photos show part of the näverniemi lomakylä.
essentially all photos have been taken on the second and the eighth of january.

how is lappland in winter? how is polar night? something i had to find out, and so i was here for almost two weeks, staying in ivalo, a village in northern lappland which is now somewhat familiar to me.
the first three days i was staying at näverniemi lomakylä, and the rest of the time at guesthouse husky. two wonderful places!
i was somewhat lucky and unlucky. lucky in the sense that usually, it is much colder here, around -15 to -25 degrees; i mostly had -5 to -15. not that -25 scares me, having lived for two years in calgary. but doing a nice walk at -15 is just much nicer than at -25… :-) i was unlucky in the sense that most of the time, it was overcast. only very few days lacked the dense cloud cover which is painting the snowscape in grey. still, a beautiful grey! the first set of photos i want to present you is from the overcast daytime, and mostly looks like black and white, or blue and white. the truth is somewhere inbetween, as the light here is quite bluish.
i also did a husky tour on one of the greyish days, as you can see below.