Norway Day 3: Where Did the Sun Go?

Our first full day in Tromso. It’s Sunday, which later proves disappointing for Jonmikel, as the Olhallon Pub is closed for the day. However, we do start it early enough; we get up for our breakfast (I should mention now that I LOVE soft-boiled eggs and meusli, so the breakfast was perfect for me!), but Jonmikel’s flu-like symptoms are coming back, so we veg all morning in the room while he takes a nap. The TV has a channel that sometimes shows BBC stuff, and a movie channel that most often plays American movies subtitled in Norwegian.

Not to worry; most stuff here doesn’t even open until 11 or 12, the lightest parts of the day. We manage to haul out at around noon (still dark outside), play in the show for a while (real snow! I knew this was a good choice) and head to Polaria, the Arctic Aquarium in Tromso. As an aquarium, it isn’t much, but they are the world’s most northerly aquarium, and they do have some interesting things. Like giant Atlantic crabs, of which Jonmikel announces that, “I usually don’t look at animals and think of food, but those crabs look like they taste amazing.” They also have an interesting panorama movie of Svalbard, a group of islands to the north of Norway used mostly for mining and hunting, though neither are currently very active. There is one town with about 700 people in it, but the rest of the “towns” are merely research or hunting stations with maybe 2 or 3 families living there. But the landscape was beautiful; next time we hit up Norway, we may have to make our way even more north. The large town, Longyearbyen, is the most northern town in the world to benefit from regular, scheduled flights.

There is, at Polaria, a collection of what they called wolf fish, these large-mouthed, almost eel-like fish with piranha-teeth. Scary dudes. They were used to being fed by people, so when you came to stand over them, they would reach up with gaping mouths at you; I almost saw a stupid tourist lose a finger to one, but I was disappointed when she appeared to be a tad quicker than I imagined.

They aquarium also boasts a family of bearded seals; visitors are welcome to watch their training session twice a day. It’s amazing how intelligent seals seem. Much more than a dog, more like a gorilla. When they look at you, they are really looking at you, sizing you up, and you can tell they find people amusing. I hear stories of people who SCUBA dive in areas with seals and sea lions (and inevitably, sharks) and how these marine buddies love to scare the living daylights out of divers by swimming up to them quickly from behind, bumping them, and swimming away just as quickly. And when you look a seal in the eye, you can see their amusement with people, you can feel them laughing at our awkward limbs and stupid grins of amazement.

A note of importance: while looking at the “wolf fish,” Jonmikel thought of their tough skins and how they would make good shoes. As we exited the aquarium and entered into the ubiquitous Exit-oritented, Don’t-Leave-Without-Shopping Gift Shop, we noticed wallets made of those same fish. So apparently, you CAN make shoes out of them. Much like alligators, they don’t look as unpleasant when they’re made into fashion accessories. Also, we noticed an abundance of slippers, etc. made from seal fur. I found this most interesting, because in the seal enclosure, it clearly stated that there were four seals, three females and a male; however, according to multiple sources, there were only three seals total there. It makes you wonder… was Sally the seal not living up to standards? How can a place built around the idea of educating people about seals go on to sell dead seal (in fact, toy seals made of seal; how ironic is that?) in their gift shop. Though, that does remind me that the Newport Aquarium outside of the Cincinnati has an extensive fish menu at their restaurant. Hey, at least you now it’s fresh.

After this aquatic experience, we found some 7/11 noodles, at in the comfort of our nice, warm hotel room, and noticed soon afterwards that it was semi-clear outside. Northern Lights, anyone? So we gathered our complicated photo equipment (our digital camera and our light-weight, cheap tripod we bought in Edinburgh) and, upon deciding that it was not quite late enough to see the lights (the earth is in the best position to receive the solar wind and charged ions or what-have-you between 6 and 11 pm), we made a hike across the waterway to the “mainland” to see the Arctic Cathedral (not actually a Cathedral, just a glorified, and very modern, church) to take some shots of it in it’s well-lit (for maximum cool-photo opportunity) glow. The entire thing looks like a stack of pointy books laid next to each other, with intricate stained glass on the back, facing the mountains. It’s pointedly visible from out hotel room, and it definitely adds a little Soviet Architectural character to the city. The best part was the walk across the bridge, which allowed an up-close from above view of a large, Russian fishing vessel docked in Tromso.

After this little outing, it was late enough to try to see the lights, though it was getting cloudy again. We checked out our handy tourist map, and found a lake up above the city located near a cross-country skiing trail that looked like a decent spot to get away from at least some of the city haze. The first time we see the Lights, it is a single strip of light green trying to hide itself between clouds and the lights of the city. Jonmikel notices it while walking up the main road, hovering just above the antenna of a house. A good sign. When we hit the lake, we are both unsure as to how far into the frozen tundra of a pond we can walk out on. But there are ski tracks across it, so we figure we can follow them. We step where we can see plants coming up from the snow (though when I scrape below the snow, I swear it is ice below us, not land) and settle next to a community of hardy bushes. Seems safe enough (we later discover from the plane on the way out that those bushes were, in fact, in the middle of the lake and were an island, as opposed to the edge of the lake). We set up camp and wait. The clouds form an inconvenient strip over the surrounding waterways, and the city itself (to the north/right of where we were) is perpetually covered by what I came to call the City Funk, low-lying clouds that manage to capture the light-pollution orange coming from bulbs that are supposed to reduce such unattractive color. But there, as we strain to see into the small, intermittent gaps in the clouds, we see green. It’s a green that, had it been cloudless, would have stretched across the entire sky in a fuzzy wave of blurred light. We struggle to get a picture in, something to prove we actually saw the Aurora Borealis, but mostly we just watch. Postcard quality, it is not, but it is beautiful. It is entirely surreal to see pale sea green where there should be just stars and night; it should be a gimmick or the reflection of a green billboard somewhere, or a green spotlight. Only, where you can see the green, there is nothing to reflect it, only blackness. The show lasts only a handful of precious minutes until the clouds close in on our theater, and the green is hidden once again behind a layer of cloudy creamsicle orange. We pack up and head home, satisfied, elated even, at having seen the Northern Lights, a spectacle that both the Weather Channel and the local tourist office predicted we would not see at all.