I love the yellow and red Norwegian houses!
Fair warning before I start, this post (and the following Norway posts) will likely be picture laden!
pre-Norway tea
This week feels like it's been very long, and yet I can't believe it's over. I want it to go on, but I know I'm so lucky to have had it, and I wouldn't change it for anything. The fun started on Thursday February 11, when my mom flew in to Edinburgh to visit. She arrived early in the morning, and we went out for tea at Tigerlily (very nice - I would highly recommend tea there) and then walked around Edinburgh, stopped into the portrait gallery, and went to bed moderately early in preparation for our departure Friday morning to Tromso, Norway! We met our cousins Marianne and Celia at the airport, and set out at 9am for Oslo, our connection. In Oslo, we had just a few hours in the airport before our next flight (and ended up losing one suitcase, Marianne's ... uh oh) and we were able to find a nice resteraunt serving very good (especially for the airport) smorrebrod. We split an open face salmon smorrebrod, a delicious beginning to our trip! We arrived in Tromso in the afternoon, and checked into the With Hotel. The hotel serves coffee and tea anytime, and has complimentary make-your-own waffles in the afternoons. This, plus the friendly staff and clean, simple rooms (decorated with the Scandinavian "less is more" mentality, which I like) were enough to win me over. After checking in we walked around the small town of Tromso before dinner and drinks.
the waffles
breakfast fruit
our first night
Tromso harbor
There are mountains surrounding the town, which gives it a wild feel. Beautiful.
Tromso streets
Our second day in Tromso we walked around the town some more after a big breakfast at the hotel. Somehow, even though it is winter, cold, and snowy, they had the most delicious melon and pineapple for breakfast. Yum! Tromso is right on the sea, and we could see the harbor out the dining room window. It's nice to watch boats coming in and out while drinking morning coffee and waking up, and I love hearing the water and the sea birds - ocean life is the life for me I think. We discovered two museums while strolling the town: Polaria, the Arctic Exploration Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. Both were a little odd. We discovered that Polaria is more of an interactive kids' museum/aquarium, full of seals (bearded and harbor seals) and mini tide pools. The real, or should I say more museum-like, Arctic Exploration museum is called Polar Museet (the Polar Museum) and details the life and travels trappers and arctic explorers. We went to this mueseum on our last day in Tromso, and it's a very cool museum with detailed and interesting exhibits. The Modern Art Museum had three modern art movies playing, and that's it - a little bizarre, and not really appealing to our group, so we left fairly quickly.
The best part of that second day was definitely the night. We went out with a guide, Dan, to hunt the aurora! Dan picked us up near our hotel and we drove out to a rather remote spot just off a mountain road. We were dressed pretty warmly, we thought (I had mid-calf length boots, fleece leggings, jeans, a t-shirt, base layer wool under armor shirt, two sweaters, my knee length down jacket, and a big hat plus two hoods) but it was still freezing. Below freezing, in fact. With the wind chill, it was about -15C. Cold! We had to borrow some army-grade over boots, which really helped warm up the toes.
I will admit, going into this evening I really didn't expect to see the northern lights. I wanted to so badly, but I thought it was pretty rare and in all likelihood not going to happen. To prepare just in case, we used my camera, and Olympus Mini EPm-2, the night before to practice night shots, but we just weren't getting them. So, I though, even if we do see the lights, I'll just enjoy them without getting photos. Luckily, when we arrived at our first lookout spot, Dan both gave me a tripod to use and managed to correct my camera settings so they would capture the northern lights if we saw them. We waited outside the van, cameras pointed to the sky, for about two to three hours. Nothing. Dan said that if the aurora were to show up, we would likely not see her with our eyes, only the cameras. And if we were lucky enough to see her without the cameras, green was the most common color to see. So we should look for green in the sky. While we looked (in vain) I practiced some night shots. It was my first time doing both long exposure photography and night photography, and I was excited!
This is the moon and stars over the mountain. It's cool because outside it was pitch dark, but you'd never know it from this photo.
This is light pollution from the town - again, we could not see this at all with our eyes.
more stars
After seraching for a few hours, Dan decided we might have better luck elsewhere, so we packed into the van and drove about an hour away to a new spot. I'd had to pee from the start of the journey, so at this point it was getting a little desperate, but I decided I had to hold it in case we had more luck here. We pulled off onto the side of the road again, set up our cameras, and almost immediately I got this:
Could it be? Was that green? We were all gathered around my tiny camera screen, squinting at the image. I think it is! Is it? I took a few more shots. It was! The lights kept getting stronger, and they were green AND pink! Even better, as we watched, we began to see them in the sky with out bare eyes. At first, we just saw a white streak moving across the sky, like a skinny milkyway, but as we kept up into the dark night we began to see the colors for ourselves. We could see green and pink aurora, with our naked eyes, and she kept getting stronger. Soon, there were two points where she was beginning, and from those two points over a bunch of trees she streaked out over the sky above us, getting wider and brighter, until she was dancing overhead. Legend has it that the aurora is a fox that runs across the sky, and I could imagine that she was just that, leaping through the Heavens. The aurora moves so fast, we could see the streaks appearing one after the other like pawprints. After what felt like just a few short minutes, she had passed over and was gone. I had almost forgotten I had to pee, but once the lights left I sure remembered. The snow was too deep go in the bushes, so I just had to wait a while longer...Once the aurora started slowing down, Dan built a fire for us to huddle around and handed out home made vegetable soup and carrot cake. Could we have possibly found a better guide? I think not.
See the streaks? The vertical lines - these are how the lights moved across the sky - streaks would appear and appear, moving as if she were galloping above us, one streak after another.
These are some of my favorite shots. I have a lot more, which I might put up in a different post later! I still can't believe we got to see the northern lights, and especially that we got such an amazing display. I'll never forget it.