Ok, so I’ve been in Tromsø for six days now. I haven’t had school all day every day for along time and it is exhausting! I get up, eat breakfast, take the bus with the others to the Uni. Then we have lectures and assignments all day, with lunch in the cantina at some point. I stay in a hotel without a restaurant and a kitchen, so we have to eat out. So then we either eat in the cantina or we take the bus to town and find a restaurant. Last week that ended in beers around town (still with our school books and everything) after dinner and a late bus home. Crash at the hotel, quite early, but exhausted and then the new day starts. No time for blogging. No time for the rest of my life.

There is internet, but it is slow. I have a room to myself, but the bed is narrow. I get hotel breakfast everyday, but I have to catch the bus and have no time to enjoy it. I have to eat at restaurants every day, but can’t really afford it. I am half bored and half drowned in really difficult stuff at Uni, but today I finally started to connect all the programs we have been using and understanding how all these parameters that we are estimating are connected (or intertwined, really) and even started working on my own data set for real! So exited! Ask me about Fst values, migration, pairwise differences, p-values, allele ferquencies, microsatellite loci or sequence data and I will keep you entertained for hours…

But, we had Sunday off and started it with a late breakfast (we is my new crew of PhDs from Uppsala and Göteborg. They are wonderful people). We walked into town (Tromsø is so not the Paris of the north. I have been to Paris recently. But the public transport system in Paris is easier than the one here. We often end up walking everywhere, because the buses never go anywhere) and found our way to Fjellheisen. It is a cable car up one of the local mountains. We were lucky and could see most of the view… (Tromsø is very far north and quite far out into the Norwegian sea and there is always fog/rain/something here). And since we were all botanists (almost, one mycologist as well), we mostly looked down at the ground… We had lunch in the fog, refused to pay to see Ishavskatedralen (it’s just a church after all) and were kicked out of Polaris, the polar museum, because it was late and they were closing (did get to see a bit of it, though). I might sound bitter, but it actually was a really nice day. We got a lot of fresh air and were out all day and that was all I wanted to get out of the day. And Tromsø isn’t that bad, it’s just very dark and cold here.

I am taking pictures, but all my electronic equipment is quitting on me, so there will be no pictures for a while. If you want entertainment, listen to Titanium by David Guetta and Sia (it’s from his last album) – I will see him in October or find yourself a fashion blog (or www.vogue.co.uk) and look at pictures from New York Fashion Week and London Fashion Week that are both going on right now.

Want to know what I think? Flowing fabrics, more neon colours, statement coats, patterns, choose the decade you like and stick with it. Nude is still not a bad colour, and animal print is still with us. I haven’t decided yet (and am spending all my money on food in Tromsø and concerts and theatre in Trondheim) so my wardrobe will stay the same for a couple of weeks. But if you’re in Trondheim and need an All Wardrobe Work Through or just a new dress for a gala, let me know 🙂 I’m staying put in Trondheim the whole of October.