last week, we visited tromsø in arctic norway for a couple of days. it is one of the largest cities north of the arctic circle, featuring a university (which, among many other subjects, also has a mathematics department – to my knowledge, the only one north of the arctic circle).

tromsø during daylight.

here are some impressions from tromsø during daylight. at this time of the year, there’s not too much daylight – the sun rises around 10 am, and is gone by 4 pm. the photos feature the tromsø gallery of contemporary art, the polaria aquarium whose form represents ice floes, the rica ishavshotel with its interesting form, the polstjerna (a seal hunting ship) museum, and some views on tromsø’s harbor, in part from the tromsø bridge:

tromsø at night.

most of the time, we saw tromsø during night. this is how it looks. the first picture shows the public library.

the last four pictures depict one of the hurtigruten ships, the trollfjord which was stopping by in tromsø one night. we used the chance to explore the ship a bit and have a nice midnight snack on-board.

northern lights over tromsø.

unfortunately, we only saw an aurora once during our stay. but it was a beautiful one! we were standing close to the public library, and later to the city hall:

polaria.

we also visited the polaria, the northernmost aquarium featuring bearded seals. here are some impressions from their feeding and training session:

tromsø airport.

finally, on our last day in tromsø, the weather was fantastic. that is, there was a lot of sun and not many clouds around noon. we were already at the airport at that time, but still managed to take some nice pictures:

a happy new year to everyone!

we spend the last couple of days of the last year in braunwald, glarus, for a short skiing vacation. the weather was great, much better than announced. it was sunny most of the time:

(sorry for the photo quality. i only took my tiny compact camera with me…)

it was also the first time i ever stood on skis. after a couple of skiing lessons, i even managed to get down the little hill (school to braunwald) and – with a lot of help – the bigger hill (grotzenbüel to school). it was great, even though i was pretty dead afterwards. skiing is quite exhausting, especially with regard to some muscles which i don’t really need for my daily life :)

just for fun, i turned one of the snow fall shot series from this morning into a little video. sorry for the perspective change at the end, this was not intended. i aligned the shots with hugin, scaled them down with imagemagick and converted them to a mp4 video and an ogg video using avconv. (if you’re interested in the commands i used, mention that in the comments, i’ll then post them.)

despite the not so great weather forecast, the sun came out this morning and bathed my surroundings in beautiful sunlight. i grabbed my camera, put on my winter gear, and went on a nice long walk. i essentially walked around the area from the first half of our easter walk, with the difference that this time, everything was covered in snow.

something very beautiful with snow is the effect when snow randomly falls off from trees. the effect is best with sunlight:

some more impressions:

anyway, shortly after arriving back home, the sun was again covered by clouds and the landscape bathed in grey. by now, it’s snowing again.

today, while shoveling snow, the sky suddenly cleared up a bit. i got my camera and took some photos, sometimes with more and sometimes with less shade. here are some of the nicer pictures:

afterwards, when we were in the shades again, i enjoyed playing in the snow a bit, for example by jumping into the snow and by creating a snow angel:

one of the best times of the year seems to have started ;-)

yesterday, we finally had sun together with the first snow. unfortunately, i didn’t have much time before i had to leave to work, but i managed to take some nice shots. i would have loved to walk into the forest and take some pics there. i decided to do that today, but today no sun was around…

well, almost. in fact, it is the second snow. the first snow started on the day we left to monte verità, and when i returned almost a week later, it was gone. today, it started snowing for the second time. everything’s in white, and there’s a lot of snow. i hope this time it’ll stay longer so i can take some photos with sunlight and snow! :)

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.)

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.