Sunday fun

The soil harvest is done! We completed it yesterday and are now returning to some kind of sanity. Saturday was a bit hard going as there were only five of us working on the last four cores and it was taking ages longer than usual. Luckily for us our knight-in-shining-armour; Fabian happened to pop by on his day off just to help us out. I think we would have been there for a good couple of hours longer if he hadn't shown up. (Obviously our lab, with the cheesy music blaring out and silly dancing scientists, is the place to be!).
Today was our day off so we decided to take a relaxing 8 hour walk to Laporten. OK, the relaxing part was slightly sarcastic, but it was good fun and we saw a lot of amazing wildlife. Laporten, which we call "halfpipe mountains", is the nearby mountain with the large U-shaped glacial valley (that's probably not the technical name for it as I'm translating from Welsh - here's a picture anyway). 
We were hoping to find some reindeer antlers but unfortunately we only found a couple of broken pieces. But we did manage to see an adult rough- legged buzzard, an arctic skua (that we got about a meter from before it flew off!), a Ptarmigan, three lemmings (two of which Jenny and I nearly trod on) and a reindeer. Ok, so the reindeer was quite far away but we still was bit of it.
Plus we saw mosquitoes. Numerous.
We climbed one of the Narbens (a hillock of rocks made from glacial till) and climbed to Paddis.
When we got back, Jenny and Dave decided that we were all low on sugar so it was necessary to make very yummy, sugary Swedish cinnamon buns (which I'm allowed to mention in the blog because they are Swedish and awesome).
Anyhow as of Monday we're moving on to or continuing our specialist subjects. My subject will be on lower plants and I have already been identifying many of the different species. In particular I have been studying Hylocomium splendens and will be learning how to calculate retrospective growth analysis from the annual growth of this moss. So that should be interesting. With any luck the others will be writing a little about their subjects too in the near future.
I can't believe there is only one week until we're back at home in the UK - having a proper night time rather than a couple of hours darkness is going to be strange!