Thursday, December 18, 2008

Jet lag and then some !

Greetings from Concordia!!

We arrived safe and sound last night, in the aircraft shown above (a very comfortable DC3). The journey to get here has been long and tiring (3.5 days of flying), with a lot of waiting around between planes and little sleep, but it has been otherwise uneventful. There are a great many people here this year who were also here last year, which made for a good reunion.

We are now happily installed at Dome C. It will take a few days to get over the jet lag (we've changed time-zones so often in the past four days we're totally confused) and to get used to the altitude (sleeping is difficult, any physical activity makes my head spin right now) and the 24 hour sunlight.

Dome C hasn't changed much from last year: it's still as flat and white as ever! Little has changed at Concordia base itself either, except that women now have a proper toilet they can use, and no longer have to rely on buckets: hooray for civilization !!

I should go start my day now. A quiet one as far as work goes, as it is important not do overdo things for the first few days. My task for the day: figure out where everything has moved to during the winter, and what the status of all our instruments is.

2 comments:

Callan Bentley said...

Welcome back! Looking forward to reading your updates from there...

Silver Fox said...

You're back! Flat and white and cold. (Good that you now have a proper toilet.)