To Tromsø!

This weekend, I returned to the Arctic! A few months ago, my friend Nicole and I decided that while she was here, we would take a weekend trip somewhere, and that Arctic Norway was a good option.
I finished my Topology exam on Friday (so glad to be done with that one!) and then we packed for our Saturday morning flight.
On Saturday morning, we left my dorm at 4:30 in the morning to get to the Oslo airport. The flight to Tromsø was absolutely stunning (really happy that I had a window seat!) as we got to watch the sun rising over the snow covered mountains of Northern Norway, and then, as we went further north, watch the sun retreat below the horizon again. Our air bnb host picked us up at the airport and drove

us into downtown Tromsø. We spent some time wandering around the city (which is really pretty impressive for a city of 70,000) and booking a northern lights chase at the visitor center for the night.
The northern lights chase started at 7:30 and was kind of bizarre. The concept was to get on a coach bus that would take us to places in the Tromsø area with the best chances of seeing the northern lights. On the way a guide told us things about the northern lights and Tromsø in general. I learned that the Sami think of the northern lights as somewhat sinister in that they take children, blonde people and people wearing white away (unclear to where?) and it is mostly a sign that children should be in bed. Other arctic cultures apparently see them as either the brush strokes of the tail of the arctic fox or the wings of some sort of arctic bird.
We couldn't see any northern lights the first place we stopped, but we did see the headlamp lights of someone skiing down a mountain in

total darkness, which was kind of fascinating. I felt like the kind of person that skis down mountains in the dark with only the light of their headlamp is the kind of person I aspire to be, but that that specific activity is not something I would ever want to do.
The next place we stopped did have visible northern lights, though what I think most people don't realize is that northern lights look somewhat more impressive in photographs than they do in person. The view we actually had was a slightly green grey glow in the sky that was moving, but otherwise kind of looked like clouds. In the pictures we took however, they look bright green! (And of course, that is the important thing ;) ).
We drove to another location, after getting some pepperkaker (Norwegian christmas cookies, basically gingerbread) and hot chocolate. I basically fell asleep on that segment of the bus ride, and there weren't northern lights to see when we got there.
We ended up seeing more northern lights on our walk home at

around 1 in the morning from the bus stop than we did on the actual chase, but what can you do.
The other note about this trip was that the bus driver was this older man from Tromsø who was super into southern rock (Creedence Clearwater Revival, Willie Nelson (who apparently did a concert in Tromsø at some point?) and Johnny Cash) and really into talking to us as Americans about it. Very Cute.
On Sunday morning, we had breakfast with our air bnb host before setting out to hike up to mountain lodge that has a lift going up to it (doing the hike sounded way more gratifying!). On the way to the beginning of the hike, we got to scope out the Arctic Cathedral, which as absolutely beautiful.
When we got to the trail head we had the option of a 3.9 km route or a 1.5 km route. We chose the former, figuring that less steep was better given how much snow was everywhere. For a while, it was super chill and the snow on the trail was well packed by previous footprints. However, there came a point where it started getting much steeper and the footprints thinned out and then disappeared. We were looking around, wondering how/ if we should continue upwards when a friendly looking Norwegian man came up the trail behind us!

I asked him if he knew how to get to the top of "Fjellheisen" (the mountain elevator) and he replied that he was going there himself and we should join him! He knew exactly where he was going since he's lived in Tromsø his whole life and enjoys running the route in the summer and hiking it in the winter (supposedly the trail gets more packed in as the winter goes on), so despite the lack of markings he went confidently and alarmingly quickly through the knee deep snow up and across the ridge line as the wind and snow began picking up. He was super friendly and we had a nice chat on our way where we learned that each time he and his wife had a child, they picked up and moved (once to France, once to the Caribbean) for a year taking advantage of the Norwegian maternity/ paternity leave system, and that he works as a web developer for social media platforms for the tourism industry in Tromsø, with parts of his job including kayaking around Tromsø and going to Italy to pick out

wines for a hotel. What a life!
When we got to the top, we connected on Facebook before he headed down the mountain to bake christmas cookies with his kids and we began a lovely afternoon of chilling in the café of the mountain lodge eating waffles and drinking coffee. The view left something to be desired to to the fact that it was snowing pretty intensely, but otherwise it was incredibly idyllic. We decided to take the lift down instead of attempting another hike due to the combined facts that it was snowing pretty heavily, it was quite dark and the chance of us randomly encountering another friendly norwegian mountain guide seemed low (though if I have learned anything about Norway, it is that you are never alone on the trails). The lift down provided a beautiful view of the lights of the city and another vision of life in Tromsø from the lift operator, who was a Brazilian guy who is really into snowboarding essentially uses his lift operator gig as a free chair lift.

After a nice dinner, we walked across the bridge between the main island and the island with the lift/ cathedral and then hooked up to the ski trail that runs down the middle of the island to get home. This trail is completely incredible to me, as it was well groomed, well lit, well used and could get you basically anywhere you would want to go since all of the development on the island is on the coast, leaving the center as park land. All in all, it was a beautiful 2-hour walk to end our day.
On Monday, we took the trail back into town for a day of museum exploration. We started by visiting the Polar Museum, which is run by the University of Tromsø and was fascinating to me! It had a lot of exhibits about earlier life in the polar region, including trapping and seal hunting, with discussions about the lifestyles, hunting methods and animals of the Arctic, which all seem completely insane.
It also had exhibits about famous polar explorations, explorers and personalities including a man known as "Isbjørn Kongen" (the polar bear king) who spent many winters hunting polar bears and killed hundreds. I actually learned a lot of new information about Roald Amundsen (I knew about his famous South Pole expedition, but I somehow did not know about his disappearance and death on a rescue flight over the Barents Sea!). I also really enjoyed learning about the Fram expedition that attempted to float over the Arctic Ocean in a boat, and ended up resulting in the captain and another man spending two winters out on the ice on skis doing things like

falling through the ice with their skis on, swimming out to retrieve necessary kayaks and surviving it all.
After spending a while drinking some truly incredible hot chocolate, we walked down to "Polaria" which is an aquarium built to resemble ice sliding into the sea. We managed to unintentionally arrive just in time for the seal feeding and training! It was such a joy to watch the seals (two harbor seals and two bearded seals) swim and roll off the the land into the water. The museum also featured some weird looking arctic fish and other aquatic species and a couple short movies. One about the northern lights (I think I actually understand the scientific explanation now!) and one about wildlife in Svalbard that was too beautiful and inspiring to be at all good for me.
After dinner, we walked back on the ski trail again and called it a night early (both of us were completely exhausted).
We ended up sleeping about 12 hours on Monday night, and on Tuesday morning we had a leisurely morning including a breakfast discussion about the dialect they speak in Tromsø and Sami culture before going into town and having coffee and honey, walnut and goat cheese omelettes at what was supposed to be the best coffee shop in town (seems right to me!) and then heading to the Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum (Art museum of Northern Norway) which is devoted to art that is somehow related to Northern Norway from the 19th century and on. I absolutely loved the landscape paintings, again, kind of dangerously inspiring. The featured exhibit was from a sculptor named Håkon Anton Fagerås, whose work was absolutely beautiful and focuses on representing normal humans throughout their lives, not unlike Vigeland really. After that, we got some early dinner (I had some fiskesuppe!) and caught the bus to the airport. Our flight ended up being delayed about an hour, which wasn't so bad for me, but meant that we didn't get back to my dorm until around 11:30 and Nicole had to leave for the airport again at 5:30 in the morning.
Though we did a lot of walking around, there was somewhat less mountain exploration than I might have hoped for in such a beautiful mountainous place due to the fact that it doesn't seem wise to wander out into unfamiliar mountains when they are covered in a few feet of snow, the weather changes frequently and it is always dark (risk management!), but it was a lovely trip nonetheless and now I have a more concrete vision of Northern Norway in my head. Dangerous!