hello from Svalbard!

It's been a week since I last wrote, and in that time the light has started to come back! I haven't seen the sun yet, and it won't come up for a while, but around noon there is a blue twilight and I can start to see my surroundings. The moon is also up for 24 hours a day now, it circles the horizon and helps to light up the landscape quite a bit. The last few days we had serious blizzards here, but today is clear and not that windy. The weather has been so bad that no planes have been able to land here for a few days. The mail plane actually slid off the runway, but no one was hurt. Many classes have been canceled, because the lecturers can't get in and the store is running low on milk. The plane today should get in without any trouble.

Classes have been good this week, but so long! I have had class from 9-7 with 2 hour breaks in between, but 2 hours is not long enough to walk all the way back to the barracks so I have been mostly staying at the school and walking around town. This week I have had the sedimentary geology class, the physical geography of svalbard, and the history of svalbard. I am enjoying all of the classes, though I think the sedimentary geology class will be really hard. It's been hard to get back into the whole school mode thing again. We should have some good field trips soon, so that should help. I think we are going to go watch seismic explosions for some kind of geophysics experiment sometime next week so that should be awesome.

Everything else has been going great as well, I am starting to explore Longyearbyen a bit more. I went on a short hike back behind the barracks to the mountains the other day and it was seriously breathtaking back there being surrounded by the mountains and in absolute silence under the stars and moon. Unfortunately my friend Wes and I didn't bring a rifle with us when we went and started to hear noises so I got a bit nervous. I am totally freaked out about polar bears. I also went cross country skiing the other day which was pretty fun, but I am definitely working on getting an alpine touring set up so I can really ski these fantastic mountains!

That's about all for now. I think I am going to take a nap, we had class canceled this afternoon because we couldn't get the sediment cores we are supposed to be sampling up yet from outside because of the blizzard. We never sleep here, too much to do, and it's not even light yet so I might as well try to get some extra snooze time when I have the chance before my history lecture this evening.

Overall, still loving it here and loving all the people! If any of you ever get the opportunity to come here, please jump on it, it's a once in a lifetime experience!