Thank you and au revoir

Whirlwind.

That’s how I feel the past two months are best described. But that’s probably not entirely true either. Since I came home from California almost seven weeks ago the pace has been high and so many fun things have happened, though I have had a little bit of time to relax and have summer break. A lot of impressions though.

After a week my jetlag was somewhat fixed and it was time to start work with Stockevik swim school. This was my eight summer as a swim teacher running the show and it was as fun as always, though there are definitely days when you really don’t want to get in the water but all you can do is to put on a smile and jump in with the kids. Summer 2019 will still go down in the books as a pretty decent swim school summer, relatively warm waters and only a few days with rain and jelly fish. In addition we had one of the best team of teachers in a while. After four weeks of swim school was done, we headed up north to Lofoten for a week and a halv and these lines are written in he car driving back down to Skåne again. We left Moskenes with the 07:00 ferry to Bodö this morning and have about 30 miles left before stopping for the night in Östersund. Lofoten have been as amazing as always and my camera have been with me a lot. Below are a few samples.

I looked at my camera and realized that since I bought it a year ago I’ve taken almost 10 000 photos. I love photography and perhaps that is what this blog, my little corner of the internet, will morph into now that I no longer have the need to keep friends and family at home updated about my life on the other side of the ocean. Some photos and a little bit of text when I feel like it (but most photos will probably be on Instagram), and perhaps some information and marketing about me, I mean, it’s important to be on top of your digital footprint. This site will have to be rebuilt a little, but that will come at a later stage. First I want, for my own sake, to write a couple of lines about returning home and and sum up a year in California.

I stepped off the plane in Copenhagen and made my way home over the Öresundbridge. When I got out of the taxi outside the house on Körsbärsvägen, and rolled my suitcase up the driveway, I had to stop for a moment and pinch myself. Everything looked exactly the same as I remember from leaving almost 10 months ago. I opened the door and punched in the code for the alarm, without even thinking. Just muscle memory. My old room looked the same, the road to the grocery store and the city center of little Lund too. It was nice to ride my blue bike, to play my Fender and hug people I haven’t seen in a while. But I’ll also willingly admit that already after less than 24 hours I was able to diagnose myself with a pretty serious case of the   “coming home blues”. Perhaps it’s a tale as old as times, out traveling, returns home and finds home to be a little small and like “nothing has changed”, even though it’s not entirely true.

I am of the firm opinion that challenges and situations that push you a little bit outside of your comfort zone are excellent opportunities to grow as a person, if you chose to. But that doesn’t mean that you have to travel or leave home to grow. It also doesn’t mean that growth stops, or reverses, when you return home. I think that is what scares me, what I’m a little bit afraid of about returning home, to stop growing. Stagnation. To not be in a new situation all the time, to not have the new and exciting identity of  “exchange student in California”, that feels full of possibilities, but to be back in environments and situations where you have a set of old epithets and labels that you don’t feel fit or want anymore, but that are quite difficult to not pick back up with the thought patterns and habits you so very easily fall back into upon return.

But I guess that it is there the beauty lies. In the fact that you actually don’t have to pick up any epithets or labels if you don’t want to. That you are free to decide for yourself what defines you and that everything you do adds to who you are, for better or worse. That life goes up and down, but it always moves forward. Thus, even if I rather quickly once again got used to everything from writing the names of months and days of the week all in lower case letters, or not having to convert between pounds, dollars, miles and inches, there are some permanent changes in me (hopefully for the better) that are here to stay, even when I’m back on my home turf, and my year in California is something I’ll always have. Here are some of my personal favorite photos from the year.

Now I’m sat here in the backseat with a rainy Lappland (northern Sweden), covered in forest, rolls by outside the window, and I’m feeling immense gratitude. For having had the opportunity to do this year abroad, to have had an amazing time and learned so much,     and to be back home again with so many great experiences and memories. To everyone I’ve had the privilege to meet, learn from, laugh with and share impressions and thoughts with, in real life or through this blog, without superfluous embellishments, but all through honest and genuine: thank you.

Until next time,
Over and out…

Gloomy days and goodbyes

Then suddenly it came.
The day when it’s time for me to leave California (for now at least).

The fact that I feel as if this day came out of nowhere I hope can be a testamente to my ability to be present in the moment and make the most of my time here.

These words are typed 10 000 meter up in the air somewhere over Arizona or something, on the flight between LAX and Copenhagen and will have to be posted at a later time, and I feel like there will be some sort of full summary of this year written at some point when I’m back, but I still want a few lines and photos from these last days here on my little corner of the Internet. This blog was initially a way for me to try to keep friends and family updated about my adventures, but it has evolved into something I think I too will be happy to have and look back on.

Thus: the last days in San Diego were spent doing a little bit of everything. I spent a lot of time in the lab, and got to go down to the shipyard by Point Loma when the transducers were to be put in the gondola that will attach to the R/V Revelle. I must admit to quietly questioning if it was really necessary to put Velcro every 1-2 feet for 110 feet along the cable bundles I helped sort out a couple of weeks ago, but now I was very grateful for every single one of them strips of velcro, keeping 68 cables in order as we carefully threaded them though custom made holes. Unfortunately I won’t be able to watch in person as the transducers actually go on the ship, but it’s been great to be part of the journey.

The weather in San Diego has been the typical “June gloom”, that is, grey and pretty cold in the morning until the sun burns off the clouds. I’ve been hiking, sailing and surfing with different friends.

Cleaning out he house and packing up my things has taken some time too, but most of my time the last week has been spent hanging out with some of the amazing people I’ve had the privilege to meet here and give out a bunch of hugs. Saying goodbye when you’re leaving a place with out any real concrete plans to come back is always a bit strange, even though it’s relatively easy to stay in touch nowadays, at least the technology is there, but the human effort is still required. There has been many beautiful, honest meetings and conversations that I will cherish.

My last night in San Diego I ventured down to the beach, went for a surf accompanied by a sea lion and then sat down to watch the Pacific waves roll in one by one. The sky was covered in majestic clouds, and when the sun, at last, fell down behind the horizon it was obscured by them. But that’s alright, California has served up so many beautiful sunsets this year, and I was mostly caught up in thinking about how incredibly fortunate I am to have had the opportunity to do this year abroad, all the nice people I’ve met and how much fun I’ve had.

This morning I loaded my things in a rental car and drove to LAX airport where I, dressed in my winter boots, long pants, a hat and double swathers (gotta keep the checked luggage light you know…), boarded a flight heading east and that in about 11 hours will set me down on my home turf again. After that I have about a week to adjust back to Swedish time before I’ll work as a swim teacher for a couple of weeks, with the best sister ever as my sidekick.

Some form of summary/reflection/image-overload will come in time, but until then: as always, thank you for reading and take care! 

Graduation and good times

Hi there,
Did anyone press the time turbo button or what?
The last couple of weeks seems to have passed by in an instant, but so many things have happened. My last finals week here at UCSD is over and this weekend was the big graduation ceremony. In less than two weeks I’m back in Sweden. Crazy.

The last weeks of this quarter, well technically most of this quarter actually, has been focused on time spent at sea. The sailing team had a regatta a couple of weeks back that I took pictures of.

I’ve had two different courses where we spent a day aboard R/V Robert Gordon Sproul, a research vessel belonging to Scripps Institution of Oceanography. With the first course we spent a full Saturday just outside of San Diego harbor testing our sensors that we’ve built. My group made an open source CTD called the “CTDizzle” (on Github it is described as “the CTD Snoop Dogg would use if he was an oceanographer”…). We got a bunch of parts and some code to run on it, but had to figure out how to put it together, solder and test allt he sensors ourselves. This Saturday we strapped our sensor to the CTD rosette on the boat and saw it disappear down into the ocean, crossing all fingers and toes that nothing would leak. It went all the way down to 86 meters, and back up again, without a leak and despite the fact that our conductivity sensor didn’t really give us great values, we were very happy and proud of our work.

Less than a week later I was back on the Sproul, this time with the same gang that was on the Sikuliaq. It was a gray and long Thursday (Sweden’s National day and all) where we worked hard and did some deep CTD casts (300 and 700 meters) and the deployed one of the buoys we recovered while aboard the Sikuliaq. We got to see a lot of wildlife, both whales and dolphins and to my surprise also an Ocean Sunfish, or Mola Mola. They are big, clumsy looking fish known to hang out at the surface enjoying the sun and eating jellyfish, and are also accused of being rather lazy and bad swimmers. But, as I learned in my Intro to Marine Biology course here, they are actually pretty active fish moving up and down a lot and are good swimmers. Fun to see and a nice addition to an otherwise long day, we arrived back in San Diego around two in the morning after having been out for almost 17 hours. 

The next day it was time for a traditional “thank you sitting” à la Lund (for those of you that don’t know, a “sittning” is a very typical thing students in Lund do, kind of like a dinner party with songs and lots of alcohol…) that we in the ÅÄÖ-house organized for the rest of the group from Lund University. This was immediately followed by a party where many friends we’ve made in San Diego showed up. It was a party alright, the next day I had to fix both the microwave door, a mosquito net fro one of the windows, scrub bear from the kitchen floor and clean up puke from the carpet. Well well, people had a good time at least. And I must say, the Lund University gang looks pretty sharp, at least before the party…

Then suddenly we were in the middle of finals week, and I wrote one exam, handed in a report and had one oral exam while also spending several hours in the lab where I volunteer. I am helping out with building sensors and refurbishing and preparing a bunch of transducers that will be mounted on one of the Scripps ships. These will be used to send and receive sound signals underwater that will map the seafloor and measure currents in the water. In the picture I’m detangling and organizing and putting velcro around 10 wires, each 50 meter long, that have to be sorted in a specific order. Trickier than it might seem… Here is a link to a time-lapse video of some of the process.

The Friday of finals week came and suddenly it was graduation day at Scripps. I’m only an exchange student, so nothing special for me, but it was fun to see some of my friends graduate. At Scripps any sort of ceremony is pretty laid back and the dresscode is generally “Hawaiian” and the graduating students got leis (the flower necklace you image everyone in Hawaii walks around with). Saturday was the big graduation ceremony for the whole of UCSD and I had signed up to volunteer without really knowing what to expect. 15 000 students, friends and family filled the big field next to the gym and there was a huge stage, sound system, big screens etcetera. Everyone who is graduating wears black gowns and funny, square hats and sashes in different colors round their necks. On stage was Madeleine Albright giving a great speech with just the right amount of sneer towards the sitting president. I’ll admit to being quite surprised, because when I saw her backstage my first thought was that she looked very small and fragile old lady, standing at barley a meter and a half (5 feet), but she was one cool grandma and her speech was great. How I got to hang out backstage? Well, I’ve been volunteering at enough events at school that the guy in charge of the volunteers recognized me and asked if I wanted  to carry a gonfalon and walk in the procession instead of seating graduates during the ceremony. I said “yes please” and suddenly found myself carrying the Scripps flag down the big field leading the faculty members to be seated on stage and I even got to borrow a black gown and got my 3.5 second of fame on the big screen. I’ve said it before and will say it again, the dear Americans are pretty good at organizing events. There was photographers (yes, plural), video, live interpretation for the hard of hearing and the whole shebang. All the traditions behind it, with academic attire, aka medieval robes and funny hats in different colors, I’m not 100% sure I fully understand, but I was fun to get to be a part of it.

There is something special about graduations. There is a certain something in the air. Joy and excitement mixed with a little bit of sadness, and perhaps also fear, because it’s the end of a chapter in life and you’re no longer a student. I, however, was mostly thinking about missing my dear family seeing all proud parents and siblings hugging the graduates. Yup, I’m missing my mom…

I now have less than two weeks in San Diego where I’m going to have a proper vacation and take it real slow. Do some lab work, perhaps surf and sail a bit and then collect myself and my things before heading home to Sweden.

Some form of summary of this year is on the horizon, but until then, as always, thank you for reading and take care!

Buoys and boats

Hi,
I’m back in San Diego after great week at sea aboard the Sikuliaq.
The days were long, working past midnight most days, and there was so much to see and learn with a great bunch of people. Here is an image download from the week:

Heading into the last four weeks of this quarter and time just seems to fly by at lightning speed (though it of course is just as fast/slow as always). However, the time I have left here in the US holds promise to be pretty great.

As always, thank you for stopping by and take care!

The Sikuliaq and the sea

Hello,
These lines are typed aboard the RV Sikuliaq, a research vessel currently braving the waves off the coast of California just north of Santa Barbara. It was in one of the courses I’m taking this quarter where my professor asked the four of us who are in that class if we would like to join his lab on a weeklong research cruise – Ehm, yes!

We left San Diego Harbor early Monday morning and will be out all week recovering and deploying moorings (research buoys) that his lab runs. The buoys have both meteorological and oceanographical instruments measuring everything from salinity, temperatur, pH, oxygen levels, nutrients and PAR (photosynthetically active radiation).

We’ve been out for about two days now and it’s been action non stop. We’ve been doing everything from practicing “abandon ship” (where you have to put on a polar class immersion suit, that looks like a space suit in size XXXL, and climb aboard the life boats) to more research oriented things like doing CTD-casts. CTD stands for conductivity, temperature and depth and is on of the most fundamental measurements you can do in the ocean. The conductivity gives you the salinity of the water, and together with temperature at certain depths you calculate the density and energy content of the water which is important for understanding ocean circulation, locally and globally.

A CTD-cast consists of deploying a so called CTD-rosette, a circular steel frame to which several long and thin bottles are attached. The bottles can open in both ends and when the rosette is lowered into the water they are all open. The instrument is then winched down to the desired depth, which can be several hundred meters (yesterday we did a cast down to 1800 m). Once the instrument is in position down there you fire a signal via the line to close a bottle and in that way you capture the water at that depth inside the bottle. You then slowly winch the instrument back up and fire as many bottles you want at different depths to capture water from different parts of the ocean. Usually a CTD-rosette has 12-24 bottles and the whole process takes some time as you should only go at about 60 meters/minute both up and down, and you might want to stop for 10-15 minutes at certain depths to allow the onboard instruments to stabilize. 

Once the CTD is back at the surface you empty the bottles and collect the water in them depending on what measurements you want to make. For salinity you fill up smaller bottles that are sealed and packed for later analysis back on land, for plankton the water is filtered in a special machine and the filters with all the plankton in them are stored in the freezer until the can be analyzed on land, and for oxygen you add chemicals containing iodine to the water, seal the bottles and store them in a cool and dark place, which preserves it for later analysis. 

It is very crucial that the samples are taken in the correct way to minimize the risk of contamination. For salinity for example everything needs to be rinsed very carefully to prevent any dried salt from other places ending up in the sample. The bottle is rinsed three times, as is the cap and your hands, before the sample is taken. Your fingers get pretty cold taking samples from the bottles that were closed at depth (6°C or colder), but it’s also pretty cool thinking about how that water comes from about two kilometers down in the ocean, definitely not a place you would otherwise find yourself.

I have a lot more to tell and show from this week, more than would fit in one post, and as wifi on board is slower than a sleepy snail, this will all be posted in a couple of different posts once I’m back in San Diego. Thus, stay tuned!

As always, thanks for reading and take care!

Snow and spring break finale

Hi there and Happy Easter!
I’ll willingly admit that the fact that it’s Easter almost passed me by completely. We don’t get a nice Easter Break with days off school here. There might be some puns about eggs going around, and some candy on offer in the grocery store, but that’s about it.

I suddenly realized it is already about three weeks since I left Canada. The days are long but the weeks are short? I’m back in San Diego and almost halfway through this my last quarter at UCSD. My head fills with thoughts when I write that, and at some point I’ll sit down and gather my thoughts on this, but until that happens, here are some photos and text about the last part of my Canada spring break and a little about what I’m doing this quarter.

Whistler.
A legendary place for anyone who has been skiing for a bit and a place that seems to be pictured in any ski-magazine you pick up. I took the bus from Vancouver, which took less than two hours, and checked in to the hotel I had booked. It was a very chic “pod-hotel” where instead of a room, each guest gets a small 2×1.5x1m “pod” with a mattress, clothes hooks, a shelf and power outlets. Not much but just enough. Bathrooms and ski storage was shared with the other guests and there was a restaurant at the hotel. Though I didn’t try that one actually, because Whistler had more than you might ever need in terms of restaurants and cafes, plenty of vegan options, and every well known outdoor brand seemed to have its own store in the village. There was several spas, gyms, yoga studios, plenty of shopping, basically anything you could ask for if you don’t like skiing but have a bit (read: quite a lot) of money to spend. I ended up going to the grocery store most of the days buying hummus and crackers that I ate outside in the sunshine for breakfast and lunch. Oh the life of a traveller on a budget. 

Whistler Mountain itself was awesome. Just across a small valley is Blackcomb Mountain and the two are connected by a gondola that takes about 15 minutes and connects two ski systems to one – Whistler-Blackcomb. It’s huge. It’s so big that you could spend several days skiing without having to take the same slope twice, and all the kids in the ski school needs to have trackers on them during lessons in case they get lost. 

Even though the slopes that were unprepared could have used some more snow (many of them felt more like mogul downhill runs than skiable slopes) my overall impression of the skiing was really good. If you got of the gondola at the very top, put on your skis and pushed off you could travel from high alpine terrain and cold snow and about 17 minutes later arrive down in the sherbet-like slush down in Whistler Village without having to use your ski poles at all.

My favorite run was the Blackcomb Glacier. Taking a T-bar lift almost to the top and hoisting your skis onto your shoulder, walking the last 50 vertical meters or so, you stood atop a slope stretching over the whole valley. At the bottom of the glacier there was an ice cave. Having just finished a course about ice, of course I just had to go in and stod for a long time with my chin in my hand and just stared. Like swirling blue marble, massive and surprisingly warm to the touch. Beautiful.

I do also have to make a comment on how friendly the Canadians are on the slopes. Having skied mostly in Riksgränsen (a very small place in northern Sweden) where you don’t really get any lines for the lifts, or in the Alps where queuing can get a bit disorderly and you might get an elbow or two aimed at your sides, standing in line for the lifts was almost ridiculously well organized in Canada. There was always clear signs and ropes put up, zipper merging happened seamlessly without anyone being told what to do, and there were even “sniffle stations” where they gave out free tissues to blow your nose before getting on the lift, so as to avoid annoying your fellow passengers with your sniffles. There were even signs reminding skiers about not smoking on the mountain, and to please avoid foul language. Like I said, Canada is well organized.

After four days in Whistler I headed back to Vancouver and spent two days exploring downtown, went to a concert and an art museum, and did a hike outside town, before I boarded a plane to San Diego late on a Monday evening. 10 hours later I found myself in a classroom at Scripps and spring quarter 2019 had officially kicked off.

This quarter I’m taking four classes again, at least for now (I might reduce that to three, we’ll see). One course is about satellites and remote sensing, two are about observational techniques and instruments used in physical oceanography, and one is an engineering course called “Design for Development” where we are paired with a local community or NGO and tasked with helping them solve a problem. I chose that one in an attempt to revive my engineering skills. So far, all the courses are interesting and a fun mix between theory and practice. In addition to filling my days with school work, I’m also working one day a week in the lab where I can to get some dirt under my nails doing everything from stripping cables to cleaning transducers that are being refurbished. I volunteer at the Aquarium from time to time, and have also managed to join the UCSD sailing team. (I you might have guessed, I won’t have any troubles filling my days before I go back to Sweden.) The sailing season is almost over, and there are no more competitions left, so pretty much anyone can join the team and just sail for fun. I have sailed a little bit before and I know how to handle a Laser, but sailing FJ’s with two people and two sails is something completely new. The boats (FJ’s) are about 4.5 meters long and if you’re a newbie you get to be “crew”, sitting in the front mainly trying to redistribute the weight in the boat to make it as straight in the water as possible. It involves a lot of moving around fast on slippery surfaces and my legs and arms are covered in bruises from falling into things. But it’s fun and I’m learning a lot, not the least a bunch of sailing terms in English. When you’re asked if you know how to for example tie a bowline you have answer maybe, and when they show you what it is you can say: “of course I know how to tie a PÅLSTEK”, and  “paaaaulstekkkk” is what you get in return. Quite funny. Bruise-producing and a little head-spinning with all the new words, but I am enjoying it.

Now I’ll get back to studying for a bit, before I’ll take a guitar-playing break, making the most of the fact that my housemates are at Coachella this weekend and I have the whole house to myself. 

As always, thank you for reading and take care!

Walkabouts and whales

Hello from Canada!
It’s already been a week since I came here on my little spring break walkabout, and I must confess I really like it here. The nature is absolutely beautiful, the Canadians are friendly and it’s just wonderful to be able to understand what the speed limit signs say and what the things weigh in the grocery store, km/h and kg just makes so much more sense to me than miles and pounds…

This past week I’ve done a ton of things. I flew from San Diego to Vancouver, explored the city for a day, and spent the night in the crappiest hostel I have ever stayed in. The next day I picked up a rental car and drove north. Two ferries and many kilometers on bumpy asfalt later I found myself home at the end of the road. Quite literally. Lund, that is, Lund in British Columbia, is the end (or the start if you wish to see it that way) of Highway 101, a set of roads running along the American west coast. The other end is in Puerto Mott, Chile, more than 15 000 km away. Lund was founded by the Thulin brothers from Lund, Sweden, hence the name, but of course they were not the first people on the land. Canada has some very interesting and sometimes unsettling stories in the history books in regards to their “first nations”, that is, natives that don’t belong to any of the two biggest groups (Inuits and Metis). Read more here.

Calling Lund small is an understatement. 
There is a small marina with a couple of boats, a hotel, that according to the receptionist is haunted by one of the Thulin brothers’ wife, and a general store that is just as quaint as only a small store in a small place can be. They sell everything from fishing supplies to Disney Princesses coloring books, 13 types of glue for any type of home project and tabloids. The only food that does not come in packaging is potatoes and onions.

The drive to Lund was wonderful. The landscape seems to me like a mix of the archipelago of the Swedish west coast and the fjords of Northern Norway, all covered in the deep coniferous forests of northern Sweden. The air smells of cold, salty water and the sky seems extra blue.

In Lund I stayed one night with a family I found on Couchsurfing. I got to help out practicing reading (in French), learned about all the local oysters and discussed pros and cons with the education system in different countries. Very interesting, and a reminder that I need to practice my French more… heh…

The next day I got in the car again and drove to end of the road again, but west this time. The Trans-Canada Highway (99) has its pacific terminus in Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island. I spent the night in a motel in Ucluelet and was very amused by the sign outside the door to my room that reminded guests that it’s not allowed to process or store fish in the rooms. I mean, there must be a reason for such a sign, right?
I did some hiking in the Pacific Rim national park and enjoyed the views of rugged cliffs exposed to the North Pacific winds and waves causing the trees to bend and the shoreline to fill up with driftwood. The climate is precipitation filled and humid allowing for a temperate rainforest to bring some real lush greenness year round.

I took a whale watching tour in Tofino. Watching the beautiful landscape would have been more than enough for me, but we did get to see some wildlife too. Two types of sea lions, otter, a gray whale, tons of birds, including half a dussin eagles playing with their food, and some wild cows that apparently live on some of the islands where they eat algae they find on the beach mixed with regular grass. Very interesting.

After two days on Vancouver Island, and despite a malfunctioning GPS, no internet on my phone and a cancelled ferry, I managed to get myself and the car onto the very last evening ferry back to downtown Vancouver, spent the night in the same crappy hostel (hey, it was cheap…) and got up early to get on a bus to Whistler where I now find myself enjoying the mountains and snow for a few days. 

As this post has already gone on for too long, I’ll end it here with a picture of me in my fabulous whale watching outfit and might be back with more in a couple of days.

As always, thank you for reading and take care!

Super blooms and spring break

Good morning,
Or whatever the time happens to be when you are reading this.

When I am writing this it is morning at least. Early morning. It’s just before 5 am an I’m sitting in a corner of San Diego airport. It’s empty here, just me and someone in a janitor uniform who’s scrubbing the armrest between the chairs with a toothbrush. It looks difficult.

I am thinking about whether or not I managed to forget something important. I hope not. The past week has need busy, finals week you know, but now I finally have spring break and in about an hour I’m on a plane to Canada. I’ll be spending a couple of days in Vancouver and a few days in Whistler before I return back to San Diego. I promise to write a few lines and show some photos in a couple of days, but for now, here is a little recap of what I’ve been up to over the past couple of weeks.

In the beginning of March I went on a camping trip organized by UC San Diego. We drove to Anza Borrego Sate Park which is east of San Diego and does feel a lot like desert. During hundreds of thousands of years, water has slowly carved out caves in the sandy stone. We went in with helmets and headlamps and came out covered (and I mean fully covered) in dust. Some caves were wide enough to stand up in, others were crawling on all fours or on your belly only.

In one of the caves we got all the way in to the end where there was no opening to the outside and all of us turned our headlamps off. The darkness was some of the blackest I’ve ever experienced. It was so pitch black that your brain starts playing games with you, imagining shapes where there are none. You’re thinking “I see it, here is the edge”, and then, “smack” and you’re very happy to have a helmet on… We got to try to make our way out of that cave with our lights still turned off and just use our hands to feel our way. Much harder than you think it would be, but a really cool experience.    

After the caves we washed off the dust in some hot springs, saw the dark sky start to fill up with stars and went to sleep with all the clothes we had packed on (two pair of pants, a fleece and a down jacket and a home knitted beanie in a 0°F sleeping bag was just perfect…).

The next morning we want to look at the super bloom. California is a lot of desert, but when the conditions are right (plenty of rain, moderate temperatures, winds etc) all the flowers that have been laying dormant during the dry season (could be for several years) burst open in a colorful flowering frenzy trying to attract pollinators (butterflies pimarily) that swarm on the fields. Even the cacti bloom. Of course you then get “flower watching stations” set up, the roadside fills up with parked cars, resourceful locals sell waterbottles, sunscreen and flower maps out of their cars and you have to criss cross between the selfie sticks. You can make fun of this and claim the desert ha nothing on a Swedish summer field, but regardless, it is pretty.

As the winter quarter has come to an end, I’ve had to present all he projects I’ve been doing in my different courses. Everything from building chloride sensors, to writing papers on the prospect of using the Arctic as a global shipping route when it will be seasonally ice free before mid-century. In my programming course I did a little project where I used a database of stars, there location and magnitude, and wrote some code that allows you to enter your location and time and it returns a map of the night sky visible right then. I made it in to a little animation too, below is all the stars you can see standing at the north pole.

Last but not least I did a little photo project in my climate change and global health course where we were asked to document local climate change. I decided to look at water quality and the health of surfers (any excuse to hang out at the beach…). I’ve read a bunch of articles about how rain, especially heavy rain that we are expected to see more of in San Diego in the future, affect the water quality in the ocean through washing off all sorts off pollutants and unpleasant things from sewers et cetera from the land before it ends up in the sea. The Tijuana River is a local problem that ofter floods when it rains leading to poorly treated sewage being released right into the ocean. Let’s just say there is a reason why the recommendation is to wait 48-72 hours after heavy rains before jumping in. See some of the photos I took for my project below.

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It’s been an intense couple of weeks, but now everything is handed in and presented, all the exams are written and I’m officially on spring break for almost 10 days. Kind of funny that when the spring temperatures finally came to San Diego, I’m getting on a plane to go north to the snow. But I am very excited.

I’ll end with some pictures I took on an early morning road trip to the mountains south of Los Angeles with a friend to watch the sunrise over the poppy fields. I hadn’t seen orange poppies before, but apparently it is the state flower of California. They like orange here, their state fish is also orange, the Garibaldi. Funny.

As always, thank you for reading and take care.
I’m about to get on my flight. Canada – here I come!

Night chill and nature

Hi!

(Howdy, hello, how’s it going? – I’m always a bit unsure about how to start off a blogpost…)

February is coming to an end, and we’re patiently awaiting spring temperatures in San Diego. Wait, what? Is it cold in southern California? Everything is relative I guess, but this winter has been unusually rainy and cold. We’ve had frost in the morning and 10-15°C during the days. Sounds like a regular Swedish spring one might say, and it might have been just fine if it wasn’t for the fact that most houses here are badly insulated. We’re talking ”visible-spring-under-the-front-door” and ”windows-where-you-can-feel-the-wind-blowing-though” badly insulated. Especially mornings and nights are cold, and thus we have extra blankets for breakfast and double sweaters during the night. Of course there is heating in our house, but electricity is expensive, and with the bad insulation it kind of feels like a waste of energy too, and so, it is clothes on.

My courses in school continues to be fun, but time consuming, and you can tell that we’re approaching the end of the quarter. Out of 10 weeks of regular classes, we now have three left and then there is finals week during which most things are supposed to be presented or handed in. I could write a ton of things about what I’ve learnt in school lately (that Sweden has the longest running glacier mass balance program, how to make a conical lambert projection in Python, how a spectrophotometer for pH measurements work and how to connect climate change models with future food security and vector borne diseases), but instead I’ll show you some photos that I took in one of my classes, the one about ocean instruments and sensors. We’ve disassembled, cleaned and reassembled something called a ”SeapHOx” that can measure temperature, salinity, pressure, pH and oxygen concentration. As a part of the calibration process we’ve put some sensors in a big tank of sea water and manipulated the pH by throwing in some dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) and took independent pH measurements on a spectrophotometer (a very accurate pH instrument, depending on the isosbestic point of the indicator dye used). Dry ice was fun, lots of smoke and bubbles. All the Chemistry is a little less fun, it was never my favourite subject, but it is still very interesting to learn about. 

Other than that, things are chugging along here in San Diego. I’m doing gymnastics at school once a week, which is super fun, but also a very humbling experience as you realise the level of control of your body that you need to fling/twist/spin yourself in the air/on your hands. Being somewhat strong is oen thing, but having the ability to have all your muscles, including the small ones, to cooperate to do complex movements is something completely different. It is fun though, even though I’m pretty bad at it. Less fun was to sprain my ankle badly a couple of weeks back. I ended up on crutches for three days. I might have myself to blame a little too, trying to play tough and not ice it and walk around like normal the rest of the night, which I regretted the next day. Some lessons you got to learn the hard way I guess…

The weekend before last was a long one, with Monday being ”President’s Day” the ÅÄÖ-sorority decided to go on a roadtrip. On a Thursday night we boarded an overnight bus to San Fransisco and nine hours in our seats, and only a few of them asleep, we found ourselves in downtown SF. Might not have been the most comfortable of trips, but for the fair price of 15 bucks to get from San Diego to San Fransisco, you can’t really complain.

We spent all of Friday in San Fransisco, sightseeing and eating, and the next morning we picked up a rental car and headed south on Highway 1. The skies were gray and intermittently poured a bucket of rain on us, but we stopped for some good views in between the showers.

When we landed in Monterey in the afternoon we embarked on the famous ”17-mile drive”, an especially scenic coastal drive between Monterey and Carmel. It sure was pretty, but… I couldn’t really help being a little amused about the concept of paying USD 10.50 to enter a gated community of wealthy people, drive along a well paved road and see nature from the comfort of your car only to stop at designated vista points to take the same picture that hundreds of thousands of people have already taken.

When we towards the end of the drive arrived at ”The Lone Cypress”, a single Monterey cypress tree standing on a cliff, properly supported by a brick wall and wires holding it up, the whole thing reached a new level. On the way down the stairs to the terrace from which you can se the tree in its full glory there was a sign informing visitors that the Lone Cypress is the registered trademark of Pebble Beach Company, the small community nearby, and that any reproductions of the tree (painting or photograph) for commercial purposes is illegal. Good thing I’m not making so much as a dime off this blog, so here you go, behold ”The Lone Cypress”, one of North Americas most photographed trees. You’re welcome.

The next day we continued our trip, driving south on Highway 1, did some more stops for photos and food and by Sunday evening we arrived in Santa Barbara where we got to stay with some other students from Lund University on exchange at UC San Barbara.

Santa Barbara is an interesting place. Beautifully located between the mountains and the sea, nature is very present, but there are still some ugly oil rigs on the horizon (though they rarely show up on the postcards you can get from the boardwalk shops). There are a lot of people with thick wallets, and also lots of homeless people. The architecture very clearly has Spanish influences (from the Spanish founders of the town), but is very american over all. A city of contrasts in the land of contrasts.

Enough philosophising, time to return to essay writing and coding for python homework.

As always, thank you and take care!

Rain and ramblings

Hi,
Feels like forever I sat down to write a few lines here. I guess ”forever” is a relative term, but anyways, here I am again with a couple of photographs and some more or less well formulated thoughts on life in general.

It’s ben raining in San Diego lately. A lot. A lot for being this place anyways. The water has been rushing down the hill to Scripps, and in one of my courses I’m taking this quarter I’m writing a paper on how rainfall relates to the water quality in the ocean. All the studies I’ve read about what the runoff carries with it have made me quite hesitant to jump in the water right after the heavens have opened.

I barely even noticed at first, but all this water kind of kicked off spring over here. The tree by the neighbourhood pool that all of fall and winter have been dropping its leaves into the pool (to the dismay of the pool keeper) is now suddenly covered in tiny white flowers. The rosemary bush on the path behind the house is purple, as is the unidentified tree next to it. On the way down to Scripps I’m suddenly seeing burgeoning fresh grass on what used to be dust, and where I thought nothing could grow. It’s February already and I guess these signs of spring are similar to finding snowdrops on the ground back home. It’s pretty anyhow.

Four weeks of this quarter have already passed and I’m taking four quite different courses. The first is about the cryosphere and the climate system. The cryosphere is what you call the parts of Earth containing frozen water, that is, sea ice, glaciers, snow and permafrost. It’s very interesting, but the articles we get to read are not very uplifting. Melting ice, disrupted precipitation patterns that will effect millions (California for example is heavily dependent on snowfall i the High Sierras for its water supply), enormous amounts of green house gases (carbon dioxide and methane) that will be released from thawing permafrost as the world warms. Ironically, it’s extremely cold in many places in the US right now. The Midwest have experienced temperatures of almost -30°C and a certain president that doesn’t seem to understand that this is also a part of climate change (the polar vortex is disrupted by abnormal high pressure zones) tweets ”bring back global warming!”. Sometimes you start wondering where the world is going.
(The picture is from Riksgränsen, Northern Sweden, I’m missing the snow a little bit.)

The second course I’m taking is a course where we’re looking at instruments used in marine research. My group is focusing on a pH meter that we’ve brought back from deployment in a lagoon just north of San Diego. We get to pick it apart, clean and service it, build new battery packs for it, and the calibrate and test it before we put it back out there. Very hands on, which I enjoy. 

The third course is a programming course where we’re learning Python (yep, it’s actually named after Monty Python). Also very hands on, that’s the only way to learn how to programming, and much more fun than I thought it would be.

Last but not least I’m also taking a course called ”Climate Change and Global Health”. Our professor is from France and sometimes a little hard to understand, but it’s such an interesting course. We’re people from a bunch of different programs and majors (but I’m the only Earth Science student), and the class discussions are always good. We learn about different aspects of climate change, toxicology, epidemiology and look at different studies and how they’ve used statistics. The main conclusion we’ve reached is that climate change definitely is a socioeconomic issue. In each and every area we’ve looked at, heat waves, food security, vector and water borne diseases et cetera it’s always the already vulnerable that will be hit the hardest in the future. Climate change will primarily cement the gaps that already exist.

It’s interesting to realise that not everyone has realised what issues we are facing. I feel I’ve had this explained to me about a gazillion times and I believe that you could ask any fifth grader in Sweden what the green house effect is and they’ll explain it to you. It’s been an eye opener to come here and realise some people are not necessarily seeing it the same way. Some are hesitant to wether it’s really as bad as they say, drive their car 500 me to the grocery store to get milk and won’t sort their trash (I mean it is messy and smelly, right?), and maybe think that this is a problem for future generations, or that it won’t matter whet the individual does (there are so many people who are s much worse). It’s definitely a more convenient way of thinking about it than actually scrutinise your habits and make those changes (sort your trash, drive less, change your diet etc).

You could feel a little angry and disappointed for less I believe. Sometimes it seems like people just don’t get it and lack respect for nature, and by extension themselves and everyone around them. This weekend I was supposed to be going to Joshua Tree National Park on a camping trip organised by the sports club at school. But as there’s been a government shutdown (Mr T does it again…) all the government employees that normally work in the park haven’t been payed, and for the past month the gates have been open. People have been running all over the park, littering, cutting down trees, and destroying roads and campgrounds. It’s going to take years for the park to recover and our trip there was cancelled. Tragic.

Instead I’ve been home in San Diego all weekend studying with the rain pouring down outside the window. Maybe not as fun, but productive and I had time to sit down and write a few lines here.

As always, thanks for reading and take care!