Last week on a conference in Hannover …

A first sunny and warm springtime day. (click on the image to enlarge)

So langsam wandert alles in Kisten …

If I’ll find the time to write more about polarstern and the chile holiday – I dont know yet. But I found recently some avocados here which are not too hard and thus ready to eat right from the store. ok, the price is a bit higher, you get one here, in chile you get a kilogram.
typical food when I was at pablos place in the evening/afternoon: white bread with tomatoes, avocados, red wine.

From santiago back to germany via sao paolo. actually really relaxing, I had 3 seats for myself on the transatlantic part, nice

At christmas time in northern germany, right back from 30°C in Santiago into the freezing cold winter of the northern hemisphere.

And not long in northern germany, back to Heidelberg, to finish my diploma thesis. more or less.

New Year eve had to be celebrated with a cake: that’s actually the ‘normal’ chocolate cake made of butter, chocolate, nuts and eggs and in between some pudding with cherries. great! You know that TNT has just 1kcal/g and chocho-late, äh, chocolate has 5? just doesnt burn that fast …

Some sima was prepared once again …

Sometimes climbing was the only possible way to relax from writing.

Data, I had a sufficient amount of it. Actually too much. This is one trace gas for the atlantic transect from Bremerhaven to Punta Arenas. Havnt printed all of them. (Ha, and next time, dont forget the gridlines.)

Now here’s snow for already some weeks or something, I don’t have any feeling for time any more.

(keine angst, das ist zweimal ausgedruckt)

On keittolevy !!!
Kuuma (kilpikin!)

surullinen, että se löytyy fysiikan laitoksessa.

Traurig dass man so etwas in einem Physikinstitut auf eine Herdplatte stellen muss …

The first day, on May 14th we arrived at the R.V. Polarstern in the harbour of Las Palmas by Taxi in the morning. All the other scientists were watching us arriving, we just caring about our luggage and equipment and more or less ignoring everything – must have been a funny sight for them

This sign can be found at different places:

The first day we stayed in front of Gran Canaria because some tecnicians had to test some equipment and went back to Las Palmas in the evening on a small boat.

During the whole trip the crew worked on the ship, they painted one thing after the other.
I had some problems the first days working, since the horizon was moving, the screen wasn’t, it was kind of hard to concentrate on the data. Or fixing screws outside on the deck wasn’t easy either.
The waves there were around 4-4.5m high and quite regular. My favourite place to stay that days was in bed, sleeping always worked there, and outside was ok too, so the first day was more like 5 minutes of work, five minutes of calmly watching the horizon …

The color of the evening sun was always impressive …

One day we all were invited to watch the propellers through a small window. we had to crawl down a small service tunnel after which there was actually a bigger room were a member of the crew gave instructions and we had some minutes to watch.

On the deck where the labs were and the crew’s working places, some tourist stuff from home:

Somewhere western of Portugal we had a barbecue evening instead of normal dinner, a great variety of meat, salads and deserts as well as beaverages.

(work in progress, more text to come)

On our way from Heidelberg towards the Polarstern we decided to spent some days before in Las Palmas on Gran Canaria. On the one hand side to have some sort of holidays, on the other to already test our measurement equipment under realistic circumstances in the bay you can see above.  Our Hotel was the tall one in the middle of the next picture, we on the 3rd floor, our telescope on the balcony, the spectrometer inside and the cleaning personel was instructed not to clean our room to avoid having people tripping on our fibre cable which costed a couple of 100€.

A sunset from the top of your hotel:

But we also worked!

The first day after we arrived I took a look around las palmas. Not much tourists there, that was already clear, since the beach was fully crowded on sunday and almost empty on monday. And judging from the languages spoken around us, mostly spanish, a lot of ‘native inhabitants’ and/or spanish tourists were there.
In the town in a park I found a stone meant for climbing – but the grips downstairs were so small that it was hard or impossible to get up there with normal shoes:

Otherwise the town is a lot of others: not so beautiful, but a nice old town. and quite colorful. And the sea was to be seen from almost everywhere, the air was clean and fresh, quite a pleasant stay it was

View from the next bigger shopping center close to our hotel:

The second day I took a but to Teror. Basically to take a look at the village, but it’s quite small, thus I started to go the next hill, without much of an idea where to go, also the map wasn’t a big help. So I went up and up, sometimes on those weird small streets, sometimes more ‘off-road’, sometimes ending up in someone’s private garden – dunno about the spanish and the ‘every-man-right’ or however it’s called in english …
anyway, the way there was already sort of fun: the bus trip took about an hour, the street was quite steep and small, thus the bus had to use both lanes in curves – thus blocking the traffic from the other side. To tell those others that we’re coming, the busdriver just honked and continued with normal speed into the curve – quite exhausting to think about it and to watch it, after a couple of minutes …

From up there also Las Palmas can be seen.

I followed some road, continued up to some hill to write postcards and then go downhill on some downhill track for bikes. actually a not too good idea to go these downwards, the bikes are going down fast anyway, thus they might need less grip, but me, for me I would have liked to have a bit more grip a few times


The track:

Then somewhen I found a supermarket to eat something. It’s all not been planned, thus I had just water with me. and after 5 hours, some kilometers and about 800 height meters I was hungry. And a bus stop was close, too.
The bus then stopped in Aracuz and I had to change busses. I used the time to take a look around there:

Then the following day I made a trip to gargal in the northwest of the island. actually quite a poor village/town, nothing much to be seen, at least that’s the way it appeared to me. Interesting height differences within the town anyway.

And then there was the last evening in the hotel, the last evening swimming in the sun, packing our equipment, to get up around 6 in the morning to leave towards the actual purpose of this trip, towards the R.V. Polarstern

in case you havn’t got that link by email yet: a lot of pictures from gran canaria and the polarstern can be found here in a zip file.

Wieder festen Boden unter den Füßen …

Polarstern ANT XXV/5b Las Palmas Bremerhaven:

The R.V. Polarstern (de) is already on it’s way to Europe, to Bremerhaven. We’ll board the ship on Gran Canaria on 14th of May and go back to Germany that way.

(or also on sailwx.info)