nearly there

Its the last Friday before we leave, and this is the first time I’ve had time to write on this blog (its Megan, the furthest right on the winners photo) because everything has become so hectic. What with all the coursework, the slow accumulation of artic stuff, and the amount of times I’ve had to explain why I get to go to the artic.

Only 4 days before we go and I’ve only just started to realise I’m actually going. When we were coming back from London after winning it just seemed so far off, but now, now I’m starting to decide what I need to bring.

To all of you from other teams, I look forward to seeing you there, and to all you others well you have good reason to be envious.

What we're up to now...

For the next two weeks we have left of school, we're knee deep in Shakespeare coursework, science GCSEs, a very peculiar media coursework (don't get us started on that) geography, history and photography coursework, and just generally, lots of work at school.

Which, to be quite honest, is probably fair, but it IS the summer ... so morale is low......


BUT the one thing that keeps us going is knowing that in just 2 weeks and a day we'll be off on an awesome adventure (yes, cheesy as it sounds it's actually true) that we won't easily forget.


So on behalf of all of us green gum team members, we'd like to thank all the wonderful teachers and friends who spent their time helping us, and also those cocky people we know who knew we'd make it all along.

we'll keep you posted!




Melinda
xxxx

Blog is just getting better and better...

Hi everyone, it's Ruby again (How cute are the Svalbard doggies in the photo?!!),

You may have noticed the video bar at the bottom, or you may not have, so scroll down now and take a look. Basically it's just a load of videos from youtube on svalbard doggies!!which you can watch from the comfort of our own blog. It took me a while to work out how to use it though, because when you click on the video, it actually plays right at the top of the blog, so you have to scroll right back up otherwise you just hear the music and that's a bit weird. That was a bit mentally challenging for me at first.

Here is a nice website I saw where you can look at webcams for Ny Alesund and Longyearbyen (and did you know that longyearbyen means town of the long year in - um - Norwegian!)

http://www.svalbard-images.com/

Ruby xxx

yea, carrying all our stuff to London was quite a workout..

Svalbard... we really got lucky with the prize didn't we?? It still hasn't really sunk in, the full depth of it, it comes in waves to me =] but we're all ecstatic, the scenery will be breathtaking, the weather'll be perfect, and it will be a ton of fun too!!

We've built it up quite a bit so we can only hope it'll be as nice as we think it will be.

We hope for the best

melinda (one on the far left in the winners photo)

xxx

After the finals...

We got back from London, pretty tired from carrying all our equipment on the tubes in rush hour (nearly taking some people's eyes out along the way with our 7ft metal poles), and were told we'd be on BBC news breakfast TV, live, the next morning at some crazily early time - god, it's tough being famous - but it was really worth it, because we had quite a long interview (Ben Saunders was there as well) and it was great to see the BBC studios, see a few famous faces...(well, you can't prove that we didn't) and get our make-up done! I think the hype has pretty much calmed down now, there's only a few paparazzi still outside my door.

I know everyone's saying this, but Svalbard is going to be A-M-A-Z-I-N-G! I was in New York last week and saw these gorgeous polar bears in the zoo, swimming right up close to you, and now I can't wait to see them in the wild! Even though they can rip your head off, they're just the cutest! But what I really really can't wait for is - dog sledding!!

Hi to everyone else on the trip, looking forward to meeting you again soon!

Ruby (second from left) xxx

the blogging process

our blog will be to write to all of you guys about the amazing trip we'll go on to the Arctic!!We are very excited and can't wait to be there!