2017: my year in review

Thu
28 Dec
2017

It is almost frigh­tening how time is fly­ing. Again, a year almost gone! It was an inten­se, rich year. What did the last 12 months bring, for Spits­ber­gen, for spitsbergen-svalbard.com and for me? I’ll review the year with a cou­ple of blogs over the next days.

Janu­ary is polar night in the far north. A good time for wri­ting table adven­tures. Wri­ting arc­tic books is not bor­ing, but the actu­al pro­cess is often not ter­ri­bly exci­ting. In prac­ti­ce, it means to spend an awful lot of time on the com­pu­ter. Rese­ar­ching, wri­ting, editing, loo­king for images, pro­ces­sing images, making illus­tra­ti­ons and so on and so forth.

In Janu­ary 2017, my big­gest pro­ject in many years was about to be finis­hed. I can tell you that it was not bor­ing! For a long time alre­a­dy, I had had dreams of a Nor­we­gi­an trans­la­ti­on of my Spits­ber­gen gui­de­book. And in 2015, I was bra­ve or cra­zy enough to go ahead with it. Inten­se work on every oppor­tu­ni­ty for a good year, invol­ving a num­ber of nati­ve spea­k­ers who hel­ped me in trans­la­ting and “språk­vask” (pro­ofre­a­ding lan­guage). I am still almost fee­ling diz­zy when I bring the­se weeks and months, which were very inten­se, back to my inner eye. I don’t want to bother you with the details of the pro­cess, but it was wit­hout exag­ge­ra­ti­on cer­tain­ly my big­gest pro­ject sin­ce the very first ver­si­on of the Spits­ber­gen gui­de­book came out in 2007 (that was the first Ger­man edi­ti­on, that very hea­vy book, if anyo­ne remem­bers). And at the same time, I had a litt­le series of pre­sen­ta­ti­ons, while public atten­ti­on in Lon­gye­ar­by­en was tur­ned on a polar bear fami­ly who had sett­led down for a while in the neigh­bour­hood of town. A polar bear fami­ly, mother with 2 cubs, even wal­ked through way 238 (the neigh­bour­hood clo­se to Advent­da­len, lower­most road – that’s whe­re we also have our litt­le home).

And I did mana­ge to fina­li­ze the files with the Nor­we­gi­an book for prin­ting befo­re I went down to Ant­ar­c­tic in Febru­ary. Hal­le­lu­ja!

My arc­tic adven­ture in ear­ly 2017: Sval­bard – Nor­ge nær­mest Nord­po­len.

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