Luana Lins

We are back to Christchurch. We landed last night and for the first time in 31 days, we saw the darkness of the night. I was happy with the smell in the air, and seeing plants again! It’s a bitter sweet feeling to be back to “reality”, I have been missing my husband and being able to communicate with my family but the idea of not knowing when I will be back in such a special place is hard to grasp. What’s especially hard is the thought that we will never be together as the gr

We woke in the morning to our flights being confirmed! Yay! Some of us went for our last walk on the island! Kate, Virginie, Tess and I went towards the polynya on the Observatory Hill loop trek. It was very pretty and snowy. And we even got to see an emperor penguin on the left side! I was very excited to see a penguin on my last day, even though it was quite far away. We got our last things in to our carry-on, put our ECW on for the flight and off we went to check-in. It ge

The day started with Harriet giving a Python tutorial, unfortunately because of our internet restrictions we could not all download some of the modules needed, and she had to adapt her planned class a lot. She did a great job though. We finished in time for brunch (which is a big deal here). Some of us went for a quick walk to the hut point just to get some fresh air. Ana was very nice and offered to take portraits of us with some of her left-over rolls of film, we got our ye

Today is the day we were scheduled to leave, and we have confirmed that our flight is rescheduled for Monday. Today is also Tess’ birthday and since we got here she has been excited that we would be back in Christchurch for her birthday and she has invited us all to a party in her place. Needless to say, she is a little disappointed we did not fly on time. Luckily, Ewa and Chelsea have been super nice and ordered a birthday cake for her for tonight, and we were all there to s

It is a weird feeling to be finished with our research project, but we are still busy with the logistics of packing up and getting ready to leave. This morning we had the lab clean up, which was kind of fun to go around and organize everything. It was funny that after our end of course party last night many people were late for the clean up, and only about 20 min past the schedule time did we have more than half of the group there. The other news is that our flight is likely

Today is the day that we presented our projects, and the official end of the scientific part of the course. We ended up forming 4 groups working on different aspects of Antarctic Biology. The presentations went well and it was great to hear the ideas of the other groups. We have been working hard for more than two weeks and have had many limitations due to time constraints, not being able to go to the ice, and other unpredictable things. But in the end we all had data to pres