Bergen reloaded
On Sunday I flew to Bergen once more. While it had been sunny a few days ago, it now presented itself as Bergen is known for: rainy.
It was not the normal rain with raindrops falling from above. It was more like an omnipresent moisture coming at you from all directions. Invisible to the eye but you get wet anyway.
On Monday I went to work. I went from the hotel in the centre to the Port of Bergen, where it took me a while to find the entrance and then to get on the list for a day visit aboard the icebreaker Kronprins Haakon.
My pocket was full of cards – one for my hotel room, one visitor card for the port, one for the ship.
One of the instruments on the bridge is a radar used for sea ice navigation. On this day an engineer from Sea Hawk was installing additional hardware that delivered the radar video signal and additional data such as GPS and gyro to an auxiliary network. My responsibility was the other half: the laptop and the software to read and store the data. And so my workplace looked like:
After some hours of work the “radar” laptop showed the same data as the large overhead display on the bridge. The engineer calibrated the scan streamer unit and I used the rest of my working day to catch one hour of radar data as an example. As expected the amount of data was immense: about 74 GB per hour.
Then it was time to head back to my hotel in Bergen, the city with about two hundred days of precipitation a year. Even the shops here reflect the omnipresence of rain.
Tor te rest of the day, I was a tourist and took some tourist photos in Bryggen, the famous historic quarter.
