2008-06-16

My return to civilisation went very well. It turns out that twenty four years spent learning to act like a normal human being aren't erased by twenty four months living without regular deliveries of lettuce. In fact, it doesn't take long at all to settle back into the usual scheme of things, and have conversations that aren't about snow or penguins. The details of my trivial rehabilitation don't need to be recounted but here are some highlights of the last few months...

There was nowhere left to hang my coat so I left Halley

the ice cream team took me to Cape Town

where even penguins sunbathe

people forced me to drink wine

and elephants ate my elephant-mix

There were the mountains that inspired Tolkein

and border posts that did not

There is sand in Namiba

and some trees

back in the UK it was raining and misty

while in Prague they have air guitar gargoyles

Antarctica has grown on me, or at least the cold has, and I'm now embarked and arrived on the next stage of my life, in which I'm studying sea ice physics at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand including fieldwork based out of Scott base on McMurdo sound. This journal therefore lives again as "Solid Seas and South Island". The main URL will become http://the.earth.li/~alex/otago/ and the RSS feeds will be merged together. Along with some mountains and lakes and forests I can even promise further pictures of penguins along with my continuing adventures in Antarctica.

Oh, and it's stunning in New Zealand