Despite the fact that the Polaris Project is funded by the American National Science Foundation and its founding father is based in Woods Hole (US), the variety of nationalities here in the Siberian Arctic is huge. Actually, this morning we discovered that the crew of students that are involved in the Aquatic Survey team consist of nearly all the non-Americans of the Polaris 2011 group! We have Juan-Carlos from Puerto Rico, Ivan & Mantsa from Moscow (Russia), Anya from the little village Zhigansk along the Lena River (also Russia), and Eirik from Tromsø (Northern Norway). On top of that, it is me from the Netherlands, working now in Switzerland but before in Sweden. While we were processing a water sample that was taken earlier this morning from the Kolyma River, we talked an interesting mix of broken English, Russian and Swedish/Norwegian. And … it worked perfectly well! We did however notice English is not always the best way to communicate… when I asked if anyone had seen the tweezers I got five pairs of surprising eyes in return! When I instead said “pincet” everybody suddenly knew what I was talking about – it apparently was nearly the same word in Spanish, Russian, Norwegian and Dutch. So besides doing fun research this will be an interesting linguistic experiment; who knows what we’re gonna speak by the end of this month? Maybe the native English speakers will then be lost listening to our Aquatic International language…