- Dr Marvin Minsky, co-founder of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, in an interview

- The Arctic Week Trainees of 1999

We arrived at Å by bus with forty crates of beer bottles, about two-thirds of which were empties. Some of the locals stopped to take pictures as we unloaded our cargo and brought it into the cabins that became our homes for the next two nights. Once again, I found myself in the most populated cabin, but this time it was going to host not only eight, but a full compliment of sixteen! We were split into rooms of threes and twos, and I was fortunate enough to end up with the ghr-reat Scots, Amy and Eilidh.

The big one that's covered in seagulls (and seagull droppings) was ours. In fact, those open windows under the nesting seagulls lead to the big room that was to become the eye of the storm on Thursday and Friday night.

There wasn't even supposed to be a party on Thursday night. We should have been saving ourselves up for the ''End of the Lofoten Days'' party on Friday night, at which we were to demolish the remaining crates of beer. But Jenny, an IAESTE trainee from America, had come prepared with a stack of CDs brimming with appropriate party music. We liberated Liz-Iren's CD Player from her bedroom and busted out.

The party was off to a quiet start until the sounds of Venga Boys' ''Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom,'' boomed through the cabin. (At this point, with the volume cranked up and a couple of ''normal people'' in the rooms around us, we were most certainly the Offensive Foreigners.) Three minutes and twenty-one seconds later, ''Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom'' ripped through the cabin a second time. Then a third time. A fourth time. And lo and behold, I found myself in the middle of a dance floor.

But, as Minsky expected, the result of this redundancy was to suddenly and strangely free the higher levels of our brains from their mundane bondage to reality. We were free to create new things, like the Bread and Cheese lyrics above. Who knows! Maybe the IAESTE trainees can get back together, and be like Toy Box to Venga Boys' Aqua! Just think of the possibilities. By the seventh time through the song, everyone in the room knew the Bread and Cheese edition of the lyrics, and most were singing along.

A beer or three later, I found myself on the sidelines of a drinking competition unlike any I'd ever witnessed. The challenge was to see just how quickly one could quaff a pint of brew.

I'm not sure what Espen thought of this idea.

The time to beat had been reduced to just over five minutes when Steve stepped up to the plate to represent Sci '00, Clark Hall Pub, Queen's University, and Canada as a whole. At 4.77 seconds, he blew the pants off his competition to uproarious cheering and praise. I'll never call him frosh again. Sci '00 rocks, baby!

Later in the evening, Amy, Eilidh and company led us in a traditional Scottish dance known as the Gay Gordon. Amy's official report was that I was doing fine until the waltzing bit.

The next morning, we were up early for our last action-packed Lofoten day. We departed early in the morning for some deep-sea rafting, so, alas, I have very few pictures of our adventures that day. Thirteen of us at a time piled on board the high-speed boat to ride the waves. We landed the rafts on a beach just beyond the Cliffs of Insanity, the tops of which were hidden in the fog.

Tamsin spent some time analysing the geology of the cave we explored, and the two of us mustered up as much first-year geology knowledge as we could manage in an attempt to understand what forces had shaped the caves. Resident geologist Tom, who arrived in the group that followed us, made an assessment that was actually quite close to ours.

Espen felt that we were overanalysing things, and in the process taking the mystery and beauty out of them. In his words, he'd rather ''see a sunset than an earth-rise.'' I'm a firm believer that understanding something doesn't necessarily take the beauty out of it. If we can ever create artificial life, it won't lessen the majesty of ''real'' life in my eyes.

Speaking of artificial, the one part of the cave that all of us were a little sketchy about was the so-called thousand-year-old cave drawing on the wall. Tom in particular didn't think it was credible.

We returned to Å on the deep-sea rafts via a route that took us further out into the ocean and near a whirlpool. The overcast, foggy weather for once provided an appropriate backdrop to the warp-speed ride.

When we returned to the cabins, a group of us decided that we'd rent out some of the smaller boats that were available there. Nadia, Espen, Tom and Donna jumped into one boat, while Eilidh, Paul, Amy and I jumped in the other. After our high-speed rafting trip, we found ourselves mocking the 5-horsepower engines on our boats and building up, as Paul put it, some considerable ''sea rage.'' After all, as he explained, ''a boat should be powerful enough to scare ya!''

We took out our sea rage by transforming the boats into bumper cars, much to Espen's chagrin. On two separate occasions, we broadsided eachother ''James Bond''-style, and generally used the boats in ways they probably weren't meant to be used.

Espen later explained to us that, maybe it was his Norwegian upbringing, but we had petrified him as we broke almost every rule in the boating book. He provided us with the following list of ways we shattered the rules: Rocking the boats, standing up while the boats are moving, climbing from one boat to another, tying boats to eachother, revving the motors in the dock area, playing ''chicken'' with other boats, and turning the boats into go-karts.

Guilty as charged, I guess, but we turned what was about to be a let-down into a great experience. In our defense, he pointed out that we were sober, and all of us were wearing lifejackets. On the way home, we spotted a seal surfacing near one of the small islands, and we played hide-and-seek with it for quite some time. As Eilidh recalled, we named the little fella Seamus. Seamus didn't seem to be too worried about us coming quite close to say hello.

When Tamsin and Shannon tried to rent a boat an hour later, they had to sweet-talk the lady at the desk, who said something to them about the previous drivers using too much fuel. But with only five horses pulling you, you need all the throttle you can get!

Anyway, from what I recall, the End of the Lofoten Days Party that evening was a tremendous experience. We did demolish all 40 crates of beer. We did dance to Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom until the wee hours of the morning. The massage clinic continued. The barriers between groups of friends broke down, and we all found ourselves hanging out together. And when the sun had spun far enough around the sky to mark the fact that morning had come, none of us wanted to leave the merry old land of Å.

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