Leaving Abisko

*Although the title of this post is Leaving Abisko, I actually left Abisko a few weeks ago. But we'll just pretend like this is happening in Real Time anyway.*

So I finished my research and then had a choice to make: Do I stay in Abisko for the rest of my "vacation" time until I need to be back in Stockholm, or do I leave now and make my way back slowly on the Inlandsbanan (a historic/scenic train that goes through the center of Sweden)? I was kind of leaning more towards staying in Abisko, since it's so beautiful and there were still a lot of hikes I wanted to check out.

An example of the beauty in Abisko

But then it snowed one night and I was freezing and decided right then and there I was going south the next day.

We'll pause here for a sec and look at some random pictures from Abisko that didn't fit anywhere else:

At the only store in town: Slippers for your guests to wear

Trenches left over from WWII. They were all over the place. Kind of creepy. 

This word is so long it looks like it should be Finnish. 

Food pictures (my favorite)! This was one of the lunches I got at the Mountain Lodge. I figured I needed to try some real Swedish food. On the right side we have a nice green salad with blue cheese dressing, and a really good chickpea salad with sun-dried tomatoes, parsley, and rosemary. And on the left-hand plate we have the extremely popular crispbread, lingonberry sauce (I can't tell it from cranberry), reindeer pudding, and a piece of smoked ham. 

A close-up of the reindeer black pudding (aka, congealed Rudolf blood). I did eat the whole thing, but I drowned it pretty heavily in lingonberry sauce. 

A Rudolf free breakfast

Yikes!

The inside of a sauna. That's the little copper bucket with a wooden ladle that you use to put water on the stove. Every sauna that I've been in (there haven't been so many in Sweden, but in Finland at least) has been exactly the same. 

A typical shower with a typical giant shower squeegee. With all of the clever Scandinavian designs, I don't know why they haven't figured out that if they just make a little rim around the shower, or the shower floor lower then the rest of the bathroom, you wouldn't have the squeegee the entire bathroom every time you take a shower. Maybe they just think it's fun. 

Note: Being a "medal winner" in a world beer cup does not mean you are good. It is NOT the same as winning a blue ribbon. 

A crevice

Check out this giant pterodactyl nest behind my tent. I'm really glad I didn't notice it until I was packing up.  

Okay, back to the story. To summarize: it had snowed, I was freezing, and decided to leave.

I packed up my cat pee tent and all my stuff, and went to buy my train ticket to Gällivare, which is the southbound starting point for the Inlandsbanan.

All packed up and ready to go. With my leaf press in one hand and my walking stick (to support my-not-even-close-to-being-good-as-new bionic hip) in the other. 

Since there is nowhere to buy tickets at the train station in Abisko (there is just an empty room where you can wait for your train) I went to use the internet and buy them online. I wasn't really sure how I would do this since I didn't have access to a printer, but it turned out there was an option where you could have the ticket sent as an SMS to your cell phone. It then took me (literally) an hour and a half to figure out my new Swedish phone number (and that was with the help of Google). Once I was pretty confident that I had it figured out, I went to purchase my ticket. The website wouldn't take my credit card. Tried another one. Nope. And a third (because yes, I do have that many credit cards), but none of them worked. I then spent the rest of the day trying every possible combination and searching internet forums for advice. It turns out SJ's website has a reputation for being fickle and predigest towards American cards. Since I couldn't get a ticket online, my only other option was to buy it on the train. But you can only pay for a ticket on the train with cash. And I didn't have enough cash. And there is no ATM or bank in Abisko. And the closest ATM is in Norway. I was pretty much having a cow at this point. I will skip over much of my deliberating and vexing and get to the solution I finally arrived at: I was able to come up with enough cash (by actually looking for change in the couch cushions at the Mountain Lodge (thank goodness for European currency and it's high value coins)) to get me to the next station on the line (Kiruna), where there was (I was told) an actual ticket window and I could buy a ticket for the rest of my journey with a card. After I got to Kiruna I would have to wait 5 hours until the next train to Gällivare, and then I would have to spend the night in Gällivare before taking the Inlandsbanan south. And the next train to Kiruna wasn't until tomorrow. So, just because the Swedish railway company's website wouldn't accept my credit card, what should have been a 2 hour journey was now taking 2 days. At least I had some time to spare and this wasn't causing me to miss the beginning of school or something terrible like that. But I'd be darned if I was going to spend another night in my cat pee tent in the snow in Abisko. So I slept on the day bed in the toy room of the hotel.

Preparing to sleep illegally (yet warmly) in the toy room. 

On a positive note, I did go for a lovely walk down to the lake that I wouldn't have done if I had left that day.

It would have been a perfect swimming pool if it wasn't ice cold. 

Hej då, Abisko! 

Abisko - Research

I finished my research! Just in time before the leaves started falling. Let's take a moment to see what I was/am doing:

Having a little snack break

For my thesis work (at both NC State and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences) I'm looking at Fluctuating Asymmetry (FA) in birch leaves. Fluctuating Asymmetry in birches is when the two halves of a leaf are not the same width (the leaf is not symmetrical). When living things are supposed to be symmetrical, but they are not, this is usually due to some sort of stress they were under during development. This was first used in animal studies a lot (your eyes are supposed to be at the same level, your arms the same lengths, etc (btw, my eyes and my arms are both different. That could explain a lot), but then it was found to be useful in studying conditions that put plants under stress as well. It's been used a lot in studies of birch trees at pollution sites and for climate change studies (birch being one of the last tree-line species).

This is the mountain where I did most of my sampling.

Way up there

I climbed up here every day

To calculate FA all you have to do is take a leaf and measure it on either side of the mid-rib. With zero FA the two halves would be the same size. Pretty simple and requires no special equipment. Plus, you can pick the leaves, press them, and then measure them at your convenience. So this is a pretty useful technique for evaluating stress. What I'm interested in is if it (wow, that was a lot of 2 letter I words right there) matters where you pick your leaves from on a individual tree. In all the studies I've looked at, they either pick a leaf from the tree randomly (which could be okay if you pick a lot of leaves, but some of the studies they pick as little as one (count 'em, one) leaf per tree), or picked an arbitrary point on the trees to take the leaves from (say, second branch from the bottom on the right). But it's been shown in other plants that it can make a big difference where you take your leaves from, and that's what I'm trying to find out about birches: does it matter where you pick your leaves on the tree.

My highly scientific research notebook. It was either this one, kittens, or dolphins. 

I'm looking at trees from 3 different groups, those that grow in the valley, the ones at the forest limit (the highest place up where the trees still resemble a forest), and the tree-line (those brave little stunted tress on their own at the top of the mountain).

A typical valley tree

A hardcore tree-line tree

I selected 10 trees from each of these groups, and for each one I divided it into top middle bottom, north south east west, and inner outer sections, and took a leaf from every combination of these three (i.e. bottom north outer (BNO) or top east inner (TEI)).

An example from my highly scientific research notebook

So 24 leaves per tree, 720 leaves total. And as I collected them I put them in a press. I have to wait for them to dry and then I can measure them. THAT'S gonna be time consuming. And I don't even know how I'm going to do the statistics on all those variables. But that's a headache for later.

So not really that tedious of work, but lets not forget about those mosquitoes, and the fact that I had to climb a mountain every day (and these are no old, Appalachian mountains around here. These are some tall youngins). And it was raining a lot so that slowed me down some (can't press leaves in the rain or they get moldy). But otherwise pretty pleasant work.

Here's the research station, which I didn't really do much in besides escape the mosquitoes and use the internet. And walk around feeling like a cool scientist.

Some of the buildings. duh. 

The library where I would mess around on Facebook, but pretend like I was doing something much more scholarly. 

An appropriately scientific painting of frogs "getting it on."

The awesome ceiling lighting in the dining room

I discovered the mosquitoes weren't quite as bad in the morning (and by morning I mean 2:00 in the morning). So I got in the habit of either staying up until 1:00 or so and then setting out up the mountain, or (more typically) going to bed around dinner time and getting up at around one. Time was so strange in Abisko. Since it never got dark, and I wasn't doing anything that had to coincide with anyone else's schedule, it was kind of like I was living without time. I ate whenever I got hungry and slept whenever I was tired. It was an interesting lifestyle.

Heading out

It's foggy down below

I didn't build these rock sculptures or put the artistic fog there, but I did find them and take the picture!

An approaching storm

So just how much better where the mosquitoes that it made climbing a mountain every night at 1:00 worthwhile? Here's some examples of "manageable" mosquito levels:

Trying to bite me through my glove

And this was a first: Being bitten by a mosquito, but my finger is too cold and numb to feel it. 

But one of the perks:

Blueberries!