Hello! / In Transit

My first blog post! I guess that's one silver lining of a delayed flight - increased productivity...

I'm currently in Reykjavik, Iceland with a 5 hour layover. The internet tells me that 5 hours is not enough time to go to the Blue Lagoon, so I'm sitting in a cafe eating lots of food because the folks at Iceland Air were kind enough to give me about $50 worth of food vouchers.

With my newly acquired time to ponder, I actually realized something pretty spectacular. I departed from Seattle yesterday, June 21st. My flight took me up through the arctic circle - through the Northern reaches of Canada and Greenland - before I finally arrived in Reykjavik. Something curious happened during the flight - I flew through the night, about 8pm to 3am Pacific, and the sun never went down!  I didn't think about it before my flight, but it makes perfect sense - on the summer solstice the sun doesn't go down if you are north of 66.5° N. Most people think of the summer solstice as the longest day of the year, but it's also the day when the largest portion of the Earth will receive 24 hours of sunlight. And my flight happened to be almost entirely in the portion of the Earth that experiences that. So night never came! Sweet right?! 

Well that wasn't much of a blog introduction... 

To bring everybody up to speed, I recently received a grant from the Valle Exchange Program (big thank you!) at the University of Washington to conduct independent research on the relationship between architecture and storytelling. To do this I will be trekking around Norway and staying in various hytter (basically backcountry cabins). The Norwegian Trekking Association owns and operates over 500 of these public-use cabins. To better explain what I'm interested in, here is an excerpt from my proposal: 

          As havens in the remote wilderness, these cabins provide necessary shelter to a revolving door of multiple occupants.  Each of these visitors comes with their own stories, accumulated along the trail. Spoken aloud around a fire or left behind in the form of forgotten objects or traces of activity, their stories become part of the cabins themselves.

Observations and data will be collected via photographs, sketches, and log book entries - some of which will be posted on here!

Before embarking on my adventure, I will spend the first week in Oslo talking with some people that are interested in the research and have been super helpful thus far. Very excited! More to come.

Lastly, I plan to end every post with a "Learn Norwegian" section - kind of like a fortune cookie.

For this post:
LEARN NORWEGIAN
Adam i Norge = Adam in Norway!

(I was going to try to add a phonetic pronunciation, buuuuut that's more difficult than you might think. I recommend typing the phrase in on google translate.)