Evolutionary Biology Lab

Our trip log of the XXIVth Willi Henning Meeting in Fagernes, Norway.

Willi Hennig Meeting XXIV

Fagernes, Norway

We arrived in beautiful Copenhagen in the morning and Prof was at the airport to pick us up! We stayed at Prof’s flat while in Copenhagen (saved us a lot of money for accommodation since Scandinavia is like BLOODSUCKING EXPENSIVE).

Here are the pictures of Prof’s living room & Prof in the kitchen making us breakfast! Of course he only did this for the first day then thereafter he orders Gwynne around the kitchen to make breakfast for us (poor Gwynne).

Here’s us having dinner around the table.

And yes, we do work very hard on this trip, and every night we would present our slides to Prof & the rest (and Prof would always ALWAYS make changes).

And at night we would role out the futons and go to sleep! This room is just so multifunctional!

Finally its time to embark on our journey to Fagerness for the conference. We rented 2 cars. Here are pictures of our very cool drivers Farhan & Shiyang!

After driving for 2 days we finally reached the Quality Hotel Fagernes, where we were warmly greeted by:

??? is the décor like so 60s or what?

But the surroundings were really nice. Norway is a really beautiful place, and our hotel was right next to a fjord. Since I’m not very poetic so I will just quote Gwynne:

swiftlets over golden fields over silent rivers,
waterfalls everywhere
clouds that touch the mist on the mountains
rivers
grayblue mountains everywhere
fjords. FJORDS.
Wild strawberries
Rockfalls
Plate tectonics
the chill and the dew on my legs in the mornings
Sweet water.
Beautiful room.
Beautiful view everywhere you look
Rivers
fish.
Plants.

See! Gwynne’s version was much better than mine right?

Ok back to work, the conference was really interesting and we got to mingle with other researchers and students from the field of cladistics which was a really good experience. All the while we were still FIXING our presentations… And we even had help from members from the conference like Kelsey!

Then the day arrived where we had to give our talks. Everybody gave 30min talks with a 10min Q&A session.

On the last day we had a conference banquet, where we were fed lousy food served on nice plates. We even tried Ratfisk, which is similar to this preserved fish thingy that is kept in a barrel until it ferments/rots so bad that the barrel is bent out of shape from the noxious fumes from its fermentation. And to the people in Norway, that’s a delicacy, maybe something like a different version of the smelly fermented beancurd of the west.

See! Everybody looks so uninspired by the banquet food. Especially Gwynne.

At the banquet they also announced the winners of the Student talks. There were 5 awards given out at the meeting and our lab won 4 of them.

Kathy won the Willi Hennig Prize, which is an award for the best student speaker. Farhan won third prize, and Nalini and Shiyang both won honorary mentions for their talks.

Here’s a picture of all of us with James S. Farris and Mari Källersjö.

So now that the conference was over, we all got to kick back, relax and finally stop spending all our nights changing our powerpoint slides!

Our trip was not just solely academic, we experienced a lot of Scandinavia’s landscape and also learnt a lot about the natural flora and fauna. After the conference we went to visit one of the oldest wooden churches in Norway, the Rienli church. Kathy got to play on an organ that was built in 1808! Nalini got to experience what it feels like to be a convict during the olden days where convicts were all chained outside the church where coming-and-going church goers would kick and spit at them (ewwwww).

The view from the church was really spectacular and the guide tells us that the church is still used by the people today! Then she started singing Christian songs in Norwegian… surreal…view the clip.

Sigh… Farewell Norway….

After a few hours of driving, we stopped by some cows and horses to try to collect Themira gracillis. We had to crawl under electrified fences to get into the field to check out the dung for flies. The Swedes were really nice, also much amused when we asked them permission to check out their horses’ dung.

Here’s a pic of Prof in action: Run flies run!

There were also beautiful barley fields with very interesting ladybirds!

After all that hard work we stayed over in this quaint little hostel in Malung, Sweden. Took very nice, scenic walk around the hostel. Sigh… Isn’t it just gorgeous? Everything is so still you can see their reflections on the water. Learnt more about the Scandinavian flora from Prof and Gwynne.

As usual the guys all had to compete and see who could make the pebbles skip the most number of times on the water. Guess who won?!

This was our last sunset in Sweden. After all that excitement touring the rest of Scandinavia, it’s time to go back to Copenhagen, where the temperature is never too warm or too cold, too windy or too humid, it’s always just right.

We finally got our act together for our sight-seeing itinerary (actually also on Prof’s insistence) and on our second last day in Scandinavia and visited three castles in Copenhagen! But first, we had to do some FLY collecting!

We drove on to the coast of Denmark where we tried to collect the ever infamous Orygma on the beach! These guys are found in the brown algae, so we had to get a big plastic bag, position it carefully against the wind, then quickly chuck the algae into the bag and beat the sh*t out of the algae!!! All of us had to get down and dirty, except for Shiyang (pooh pooh BMS). CLICK HERE FOR THE ALGAE BEATING VIDEO.

Gwynne seemed to be the one who had the most fun and satisfaction.

This was the first castle we visited, Amalienborg. Doesn’t the name just sound so pretty?

We had a very nice walk through the park in front of the castle, where Prof showed us how to date trees.

Though seriously, it’s just so much more fun to just hug the trees.

And take funny pictures!

The next castle we visited was at Frederiksborg. This castle was different from the rest as it had a more Renaissance motif that made it look very grand, and somewhat ostentatious, but still very nice to look at.

If there’s one thing we learnt from visiting all these castles is that EVERYTHING HAS TO BE SYMMETRICAL.

The last castle of the day was Hamlet’s castle. A very beautiful castle by the sea overlooking Sweden. There’s Shiyang in his NUS Judo jacket looking very happy.

The next day we toured around Copenhagen. This was a little cruise that we could take around their very famous harbour.

Behind us is the Royal Copenhagen Library.

This is the Copenhagen opera house.

Which marks the end of our short tour of Scandinavia. Farewell Copenhagen!