Changes in Latitudes

The rest of this week's weather forecast: rain rain rain - but warm (9 degrees C)! Don't worry, the weekend looks much nicer :)

I'm sitting at Gardemoen Airport now, waiting for my flight to Bergen at 9. On Friday I flew to Oslo and was greeted by Tron (Marius' dad), and he made us dinner. In the morning I took their dog Uno for a walk and then Martin and I drove to the hotel were Marius was holding a presentation. We were invited to join for the buffet lunch before our drive north. I'll just get it over with and say now that I forgot my camera charger at home, so I'm not happy with myself since now there are no photos from this weekend. Typically the drive would only take 2 1/2 hours, but we stopped at Dokka to pick up groceries. The cart got more and more full, but the boys insisted that we needed tons of food because they would eat a lot and we were 9 people on this trip. They later found out that they were very ambitious. This could turn into a long story, so I'll just say that we had WAY too much food for the weekend. Saturday we were prepping for a long ski trip! The weather didn...

This semester one of my courses I chose to take is called 'Fishery Models'. There were four of us in the seminar today, and this lecture was an introduction to, what I like to now think of as, the Norwegian opinion of fishery operations. My lecturer stated that over-fishing should not be taken as a survey from several fishermen because of course as you add more fishermen into the equation, each boat's catch will be smaller. He also stated that we cannot say that there is over-exploitation when we have not yet overexploited the species. If a fisherman was not landing enough catch, then ultimately he would switch to a more abundant and/or profitable fish. (He spent 2 hours talking about this, so I'll leave it here for now) It was just interesting. There are scientific papers that say we have fished many species to the brink of collapse, but it appears that the Bergen (a major fishing industry area) professors (or at least this one)  are so strongly opposed to the hypoth...

This week was a great one! I am  now moved up to the level 2 norskkurs  I went skiing on Wednesday (two times in one week is great to me) Got my Norwegian personal number A bank account Added to the Institute of Marine Research's Pelagic fish group - I have a special email address and a land line (I wonder if there is a phone at my desk -- Tuesday morning I go get my access cards made) Oh and a birthday package arrived from home today!!