Delayed return

Today has been a very quiet day at the base, really, you would not believe that these three connected blocks host more than 80 people... the reason? Oh, it was a Thursday yesterday! Of some odd reason, Thursday is the night to party in Antarctica, which was a surprise to us but apparently also to most South Africans as well.. Tobbes theory is that people can't really wait for the weekend, by Thursday everyone's had enough! And anyway, we work weekends as well as workdays, so a big party on a Thursday is as good as any other day!
Well, we tried to be useful anyway and spent the day moving the VLF antenna off the roof down to the snow, to see if that would help getting rid of all the noise. It didn't really, so tomorrow we'll try to move it even further away from the base.
We also learned today that because of the delay of the offloading of the ship, they are going to stay a couple of days extra, so that projects will get enough time to be finished while we're down here. The new plan is to return to Cape Town on 23 February... and we have our flight booked for 22nd! So we've tried to rearrange our tickets today, sofar without any confirmation but we will probably get back to Stockholm at the very end of February or beginning of March. We'll let you know once we know.

Last night Tobbe and I were asked if we wanted to participate in a radio interview for a programme called 'Science matters' on one of the South African radio stations! We were going to get our five minutes of fame each, in a one hour long programme, but just as we were about to start the whole thing, we were told that we're shoved down to next weeks programme instead.. Oh bummer! Oh well, one more week to try to get the instruments working before having to talk about them to a whole nation I guess..

A few days ago a group of us went down to the 'wind scoop', which is the area below Vesleskarvet (the mountain) where the wind has carved out a huge part of the ice, which makes it excellent for playing around! Without too much detail I can inform you that the maximum speed of a female scientist on a low-friction flat rectangular item is 86.8 km/h... as Marlie would have said: Whoopiieee! We had lots of fun down there! The photo below is taken from the wind scoop, on the way up to the top (featuring in the photo is Lowellen, our doc). It was absolutely beautiful there, I can't describe what it's like to just look out over vast vast landscape with just ice everywhere! It's quite flat too, no mountains really to catch our eyes (except for when looking south), which makes it look even more isolated and enormous I think. On the ski-doos on the way back we saw a whole group of white snow petrels, flying south in a formation high above our heads. I wonder where they were heading? Perhaps taking a shortcut over the pole, or maybe just sight-seeing.