“We are never satisfied the place we are” Antoine de Saint Exupery (Le petit prince)

“Men are not welcome in Antarctica. It’s one of the first impression I feel while I’m discovering, far from the sea, the first human buildings”
Jean-Christophe Victor, ‘Adieu l’Antarctique’

Good evening every one,

Hope you’re all well, there’s no reason cause for most of you, you are in week end! Wish you to enjoy it so. Here we already are on Saturday evening, and before going to warm the dance floor, I just wanted to sum up the last days before giving up!

Let’s go. New pictures and comics have just been uploaded on the website. The first ones show our ‘Happy camper field training’, a 2 days + 1 night on the icepack to learn different things: how to use a radio or a stove, how to built different igloos, to set up the tent… It was nice and will be for sure one of the good moment spent here. This night spent in the 2 levels quincy (a big igloo shown in some pictures) was wonderful, beautiful light and not too cold. And plenty of place cause by moving the inner quincy snow we broke some ice blocks that opened to a second room 1 meter below ours.. finally we had the impression to live in a palace!! Really cool! This second room must be an old quincy made sooner by a previous team.
For the second time, I went to Observation Hill, with Wolfgang this time, and yesterday we went to see an ice cave. It was really beautiful to see, I invit you to look at the picture to understand… So nice but unfortunately, since it’s an expedition, we went there with a big vehicle, spending 1h30 on the road, polluting, just for 20-30 minutes on the site. My ecological mind is still pissed of! It would be so better to go there by feet, and to enjoy even more the cave; but unfortunately it’s not allowed I think!

Otherwise, no big surprise. Not a lot of things to do in the job cause we are still waiting to go to the field so we can’t start anything yet… it would be certainly frustrating if I’ve never lived this before 2 years ago, but now I’m feeling like used to! Maybe a bit too much… cause I can see the difference with Wolfgang who’s moving as soon as he has the impression to hear something!
But finally, we received 2 bad news that don’t push us to go quickly to the field: we’ll just have about 50% of the kerosene asked so our time of analysis will be reduced consequently… and we’ve just learnt that one bottle of gas is missing and we’ll probably receive it in 3 weeks if every things go well! And of course, this bottle is crucial to validate the data we are presumed to obtain… Who said that living in Antarctica was easy??? in fact it seems to be the life of the graduate students… so that’s part of the contract!

Don’t know if you’ve ever gone there, but I changed a bit the index page of my website in order to go directly to the pictures and the blog, www.zeglacio.com is easier to remember (I hope!)

Another time, I wish you a good week end and we will probably see each other next week!