In other posts on the blog it was written about research work at the project in Bergen, therefore I will rather tell more about the everyday life at marine biology station. One major aspect that has to be taken into account in such projects is eating and its organization. Does everyone cook for themselves (which is time consuming), do we hire someone only for cooking or do few people each day cook for everybody? How to decide, whose turn it is to cook? How to cook for 35 people? Well, we cook as our time schedule allows us, in small groups of three to six people.

Next question is how much food 35 people need for a day, and for an entire week? The answer is unimaginably a lot! The first few days were tough when it came to buying enough food for everyone, as the quantities were calculated according to how much does one person eat. So when we came to the supermarket, easily filling up 2 shopping carts, and we were absolutely sure it will be enough.

Well, it barely lasted for one day! Of course, you will say, you did not count on being outside at the sea for few hours, and then continuing with long working hours in the lab, often also after dinner. Now we learned and we buy much more food, but it somehow doesn’t manage to stay in the fridge for more than two days. Therefore, you can never really buy too much food when it comes to 35 hungry people. How do we manage to cook for everyone? It can be difficult at times and it did happen that in the middle of dinner we realized we had to cook more and improvise with things we had, as the cooked quantities were underestimated, but so far, no one is really hungry 😉