With the start of my new week came more blue sky's and great adventures. On Monday it was a holiday here which came as a surprise to me because I wouldn't think that they joined the US in our Memorial Day Celebration. After a little research I found out that it was the celebration Forste pinsedag, which in english is Pentecost. This Forste pinsedagis a celebration of commemorates the descent of the holy spirit upon the 12 apostles and due to the fact that I am not Christian I had no idea of its existence. This then resulted in a work for me where I simply got UNIS all to myself. Although Edvard did insist on coming in to help, so I let him takes notes for me while I was working in the lab.

Today I got the chance to take part in a Svalbard safety course put on by people who work at UNIS. In the morning we went through a slide show discussing the different dangers on Svalbard and how you can get into trouble outdoors during the summer. Of course everyone wanted to hear all about the polar bears, there were several student who shared experiences about seeing or having to scare off polar bears. It is a very interesting thing to learn about because they are portrayed in such different ways to the general public then they are when you are here. I somehow doubt that Coco Cola shows commercials with cuddly polar bears to the public up here. They are considered a serious danger and are treated that way. For the second part of the training we had to learn how to use a .30-06 large game rifle. They drove us out of town and up into the mountains a little way to a shooting range settled in the middle of a valley. After going though a lengthy and comprehensive training of how to use the rifle we set up some targets and had got some practice shots in. This was probably the best part of the day, and luckily having grown up in VT I'd had some practice before.  As I was putting one of the targets back in the shed at the end I saw another stack of targets, they all had a large polar bear on them. It seemed funny to me that you would never see that back in the States and that anyone using that target would seem cruel to a bystander. I guess that simply goes with the territory and it was good to see how serious they took the threat. It was also good to see how many steps and strategies they had in place and taught us for scaring off the polar bear.

Now with this training complete I will be able to venture out to the KHO when the sun come up tomorrow.

This time I will not forget my camera and I will be able to show you the observatory that I am doing this work for and the beautiful view from 500 meters up.