Changes in Latitudes

The Christmas season has begun! Marius and I put up decorations last weekend, but they're only on the Christmasy red wall side of the living room...so it's time to turn up the spirit and complete the rest of the living room. Today I made a massive gingerbread house with Maria and Birgitte. They started at 2pm, and I didn't arrive til close to 4pm. We were finally finished with the baking, construction and decorating at 9:30pm. I'm looking forward to taking it apart and eating it in a couple weeks to celebrate the end of exams. [Maria used close to 2kgs of flour to make the dough for 3 houses and lots of extra cookies!] [My house put together - Lots of sugar to hold the puzzle together] [Our finished products! Mine is the one on the left, Maria's is the very professional one in the middle - you can tell she has done this a few times.] [After tricky transportation back home (on the bus and walking against gusting wind) and set up by the decorations]

Coffee: check! Notes: check! Flashcards: check! Textbook: check!

Jimmy Buffett can always get me in the mood for getting acquainted with marine species. I'm sitting in front of 30 pages (over 100 species) of Norwegian coastal species for my exam on the 29th. Sadly, this music also gets me itching for a tropical getaway!

Thursday, Marius and I flew north to Trondheim because he had a meeting Friday morning. No snow up there, but it was around freezing. We stayed with his friend Martin and we took a tour around their former university, NTNU. It was a nice old campus, and the rest of the town was cozy and rustic. I also got to see some friends who I had met in New Zealand. [On the "old bridge"] [Marius and Martin by Norway's Hogwart's - NTNU] [Trondheim's oldest cathedral, Nidaros Cathedral, established in 1152] ["Would you like to see my basket of heads?"] [Snow in the mountains seen from the plane back to Bergen]

I noticed that the sun was setting earlier and earlier each day...according to timeanddate.com , Bergen will lose about 5 minutes of daylight each day. By the end of this month, we will only get 6hrs and 26mins of sun! Svalbard (an island up in the Arctic Circle, waaaaay north of Norway) is already in complete darkness, but in February, they will start to gain an hour of sunlight each day. CRAZY!