Well, I'm bloody behind.

Woke up this morning, showered, ate a quick breakfast, class. Lunch, lay down a moment, and then it was off to Polaria, which is a local museum/marine mammal place. We watched a video on Svalbard, saw lots of fish, invertebrates, and two bearded seals. There was a tunnel where they swam over you, which was pretty fun. I spent a lot of time watching a video on king crabs in the Barents Sea, which was interesting. At 3:30 they did an enrichment show, which had some pretty cool stuff. I got some good videos and a couple really nice pictures. They claimed to be doing it mostly for the seals' benefits... hard to say, but it was cool to watch. A little Q&A afterwards and we left. I argued with Allen the whole way up about the fact that Polaria sold seal fur products. I actually agree with him in a lot of ways, but his position was more extreme than mine on fur products in general... shocker, yeah? He's probably right though.

Chilled a bit, dinner was delicious. Pasta, sauce, vegetables, strawberries, blackberries, blackcurrant, lingonberries, and raspberries. And ice cream at the end! (Neapolitan). Absolutely fantastic. After that I chilled in my room, found out I missed the Northern Lights because no one got me, got bitter... but that got better.

Clay and Jake came up to get Vince and I, Vince passed. (To be fair Jake had been throwing snowballs at the window to get my attention and I just had been wondering what the odd thumping sound was.) On the way down we met Becky as well, and the four of us set out to find a good place to see the lights. We saw it pretty faintly, but it was still beautiful, though there wasn't much color to it. Just little light spots and ribbons in the sky. We got directions from a guy, half-followed them, eventually we ran into a guy walking his dog who offered to show us the best spot himself.

Oh, by the way, me in all this is sockless, unlaced boots, and no hat. I was in a rush to get out. It wasn't so bad, but just to let you laugh and shake your heads at me.

So this guy leads us, talking to us, and we eventually get out onto a frozen lake... maybe? I wasn't clear on that. But it was as little light pollution as you could get, and while the bright half-moon didn't help, the sky was BEAUTIFUL. It took a while to get going but we saw great green ribbons that turned white, even a little bit of pinkish-red at one point. Pillars or columns that rotated like a flame, ribbons that moved like snakes, lots of green and white. It was absolutely beautiful, and at some points huge. I also saw Ursa Major and Casseiopeia, though I was a little disappointed – no Orion. The dog turned out to be half German Shepherd, half Husky, and all awesome. Named something like compass or kombus, it means “buddy” in Norwegian. The guy headed back and we stayed out a while longer, though it never got quite that good again. Jake and Clay were talking Cavs the whole time, Jake's knowledge is truly astounding. Becky told him to be a sports announcer and she might be right. Eventually we came back in, though my ears got a lot of good out of borrowing Becky's toasty toasty hat for a little bit. Dunno what's going on tomorrow, but wow, that was amazing.

Thursday, March 25th, roughly 12:05-12:25 AM