Dark Season Blues Festival and NORTHERN LIGHTS!!!!

This weekend, Longyear had a big festival on to celebrate the dark season approaching! I got offered to help at the festival so i could get in for free (it was £50 otherwise!). It was such a laugh, 9 other UNIS students helped as well and we had to sell tickets and watch the back stage door! Easy work! :D We also got free t-shirts to wear!!! The music was really good and there was around 500 people there! It was nice to see all the locals, as we don't really mix with them at all. It was also funny seeing drunk Norwegians, they are not like the British at all! They all showed up completely drunk, but caused no trouble at all... just continued to get drunk!! If that was Britain there would have been a fight or an argument.. but there was nothing!! I was very impressed! :) I also got to have my picture taken with Bobby Jones- the head liner! His body guard wasn't happy about this though!! :-S

Half way through the night we got a text saying the Northern Lights were seen Trondheim and when we went and looked we saw them too!!!!! It was amazing... i was jumping about like a looney and the locals were laughing at me because they are so used to seeing them!! It was like a big green V mark across the sky, im going out again tonight to see if i can see them again! :D

The Mine :)

After passing the mine on the hill every day for two months i finally made a trip up to it! :D it was well worth it!! I went with Jan and Annalena and we had a bit of a snow ball fight on the way up as it snowed the whole day none stop the day before! The mine was really cool inside, it was all wooden and still had the old tracks for transporting the coal. There was lots of stairs up to the top of the mine, and they took you to the old locker rooms and bathroom! The entrance inside the mine was completely covered with ice and there was also random sections of ice in the mine aswell! It was really dark inside and i was a bit silly and forgot my head torch and i walked right into a low door frame.. people must of been a lot smaller than me back then! On the way back down from the mine, we sledged using small bum sledges!! This was a bit sore as it was rocks underneath but totally worth it!! It only took a few minutes to get down but took a while to walk up!! :D on our way back to the barracks there was people out on snow scooters.. i was so jealous, i really want to have a go on one before i leave!!!

Ice Breaker Party!!! :)

The Ice breaker party was on Friday night and it was such a good night!!! So much organisation went into it so im glad that everything went so well! :) The theme this year was "Arctic Mutant Surf Party". This was decided because during the votes we were split down the middle between "surf party" and "Arctic Mutant party" so we decided to merge them together!!!

From previous blogs you might have seen that our group has some strange obsession with David Hasslehoff! So in tribute to him, we went as David hasslehoff and the baywatch girls!! We put so much effort into out costumes, we dyed out tops red and sewed Baywatch lifeguard badges onto them! We also made life guard floats out of balloons and newspaper and red spray paint!! And we also made fake big boobs out of balloons to look like Pamela Anderson!!! :)

We had a lovely dinner- Caribbean Chicken, rice and salad... and for desert we had a massive chocolate cake in the shape of Svalbard with jelly as the sea! It was sooo tasty!! We also had a play-list of all our our favourite songs! :) Of course the Baywatch theme tune was in there!!! We also played silly games, one of which was outside and involved putting your foot inside a welly that was stuck in the ice and going through an obstacle course! We lost that one!!!

Easter in the Arctic!!?

The last week has been very busy! When i got back from the student cabin, Anuschka was arriving for a visit! It was so lovely to have her here! I hope she enjoyed her stay! When she arrived I met her off the plane and gave her a tour around UNIS! We then went out for a meal and hot chocolate in a restaurant in Longyearbyen! It was good to have a girly gossip and catch up! The next day she started her videos for the SAMS website, which was very amusing because both of us were hopeless at technology!! She then came up to the barracks and i cooked dinner for her (yes you read correctly... i cooked, and i didn't burn anything!) :)

The next night i had a birthday party to go to! It was so much fun, we had a Mexican dinner with wine and lots of cake! It was nice to catch up with everyone at the party aswell! :) We got her a UNIS t-shirt and all signed it for her! :)

On Friday... it was Friday Gathering as usual! It actually never gets boring! I also had a VC meeting with SAMS to tell future students what UNIS was like and how much of an experience it is! I took my friend- Annalena with me so that was a giggle! After the meeting i got to chat to the students and lecturers for a bit. That was so nice to catch up... will need to get that organised again! :)

Saturday night we stayed in and prepared for Easter.... (Our barrack decided to celebrate Easter together as we wouldn't get the chance to again!!) We all picked a name out of a hat to buy a present for and we had to hide them somewhere in the barrack! We also boiled 36 eggs and painted them and decorated the kitchen with Easter eggs and Easter bunnies! It was such a giggle! On the Sunday, we all met in the shoe area of the barrack and counted down and had a race to see who could find their present first!! The barrack was torn up-side-down after but everyone found their present!! :)

Student Cabin! :)

Two weeks ago, me and a group of friends went to the student cabin for the night. On the way there we walked along the coast which was really lovely and on the way back we walked over the plateau. When we arrived, we had to go find coal and wood for the fire. There was lots of coal there left over from mining and there was lots of drift wood on the beach so that didn't take very long! We then got the fires going and the cabin took so long to heat up, when it did heat up it was very warm though! :) We made a lovely curry for dinner and sat around the table with lots of candles and had a glass of wine! There was no inside toilet, so if you needed you had to go outside with someone so there was a rifle!! That was a bit scary standing outside with a rifle in case a polar bear came! :-S Thankfully...it didn't! The student cabin was overall really nice! It had 5 bedrooms, a living area and a kitchen. I thought i would be cold at night but we kept the fires going most of the night so it was really cosy. Also i was in a down sleeping bag which could with stand temperatures of -30 so i was actually on the warm side! :) The hike home the next day was absolutely exhausting! It was so steep to start with then it was flat all the way on top of the mountain, but i was so exhausted from the first part that even on the flat bit i was tired! On the way back down to the barracks from the mountain, i just sat on my bum and slid down on the snow as i was too tired to walk!! :) It was also better way of getting down the mountain!