The 23rd of February

First morning at Gabriel de Castilla base, we had been woken up by the Spanish national anthem. It was really loud and I found it not so different that the other national anthems actually. I already was hoping that it would not be like that every morning. I am not a morning person – as you may know – and I need to wake up smoothly to be in a good mood. Well, time for the “desayuno” it smelled coffee and toasted bread; “Buenos dias”, “buenas”, “hola, que tal” could be heard from/by everyone.

Good mood on. Let’s start the day by the unofficial visit of the base, I was just exited to walk outside after all these days on the boat. I went for a – very – short walk with my gopro and cameras to capture the first impression I had from the Antarctic land. I should say I thought it would have been colder. But afterwards, I figure it out that the weather was especially nice that day because it went worse and worse later. Plus: staying in the cold for more than 10 minutes is totally different than staying the whole day outside with hands in water. This is another story to tell.

Back to the station, it was time for the official presentation of the military staff and the rules of the station. It lasts 2 hours in Spanish (sometimes they translated in English hopefully). Anyway, I was able to understand some things in Spanish! Now I almost understand the topics of the conversation in Spanish 😊

During the presentation, they also gave us the timetable of the days… Here it is:

8:00 Wake up

8:20 Breakfast

15:00 Lunch

20:30 Meeting

21:00 Dinner

Quite hard to be used to this late lunch and dinner but finally with the work we had, it was just well handled! Moreover, the food was always so good it was the reward of the hard work. *Special thank to Dani and Victor – our cooks*

After lunch, we started to take all the material off the boxes and started to make the wet lab container our perfect lab.

At the time of dinner, we were really far from the perfect lab, still a lot of things to do before to start working…

After dinner we took it easy to meet everybody: military staff and other scientist that were in Deception Island since the beginning of January. We relaxed a bit and played Futbolin: