July 21, 2010: North Norway

After very quick introductions, it was back to the carousel to watch for the baggage. Among the nicest things about having friends at the airport is the ability to dump the rest of your baggage with them while you stand near the moving conveyor belt watching other peoples luggage pass you for the billionth time before your bag shows up.

While they waited for me to collect luggage, I gave the smallest Holm her first gift - the armadillo from Texas and a small book children's book about them - the Finns all perplexing looked at the creature trying to figure out if it was some sort of possum. I wanted her to have something memorable from Texas that none of her friends could possibly have in Finland. Somehow the nine banded armadillo suited my needs.

Baggage and American collected, we proceeded to their car in the garage. The Norwegians do some things very nicely at the airport - they have two doorways to board the plane and you pay for your parking in the garage instead of wasting gas collecting the tickets.

GPS systems really are lovely little gadgets that I may need to invest in. I don't know if it's going to help or work for me, but I'm starting to think it can't hurt. A lot of my American friends with the units give the different voices names based on regional accents and personalities of the voice. Their GPS speaks Finnish of course and worked just fine in America last summer for Birger.

Tomso is a large city in North Norway. It's past 69 Latitude and conveniently two hours from Longyearbyen, Murmansk, and Oslo by plane. It sits on a fjord (like most of Norway) with a surrounding human population near 100,000. Tromso is a popular destination for fishing, technology, education, and tourism. Tromso is a major center for seeing the Midnight Sun and for seeing the never ending dark night at other times of the year. I was there during the Midnight Sun.

Popular attractions in Tromso include the Polar Institute, the statues, Mack Brewery (next to the British Consulate), fjords, the Arctic Cathedral, and the mountains. I was asked if I wanted to climb a mountain. Always a good idea right after lack of sleep, so I said "sure". We drove across the fjord bridge, past the Arctic Cathedral and made our way through narrow two way streets up to a mountain as I started to contemplate if this was really my best idea. Having decided prior to the start of the trip that I would accept any adventure thrown my way, I figured it was too late to worry about the decision; even if I did keep thinking about how I had been planning to exercise extensively before the trip - which didn't quite happen.

I gazed up at the mountain and started to seriously wonder again what I had gotten myself into. It was already after 4pm and the climb would take a while. I'm by no means an experienced mountain climber and looking at the mountain I couldn't quite figure out how we were going to do this as I could not find a trail, but I was game and figured we could go about half way and return down.

We left the car in the lot and start moving toward Storsteinen Mountain. Walking toward the entrance, I wondered what all the people who live on the narrow streets by the parking lot think of the traffic that comes here for holiday. As we approached the base camp of the mountain I started to take in more of the surroundings. Only when Birger told us "I'm going to get the tickets" and my new small friend tugged my hand and said "look" did I even notice the cable car moving toward the top of the peak. Giddy relief flooded me as I had really been wondering just how much mountain climbing I could do after my non-stop travels.

Piling into the cable car, it really did look as if we were brushing the tree tops below. The chatter grew as we climbed upward and I was sure at one point we were going to run smack into the trees that loomed infront. The car safely dropped us off 420 meters above sea level at the cafe/gift shop with its beautiful panorama views of the city. Somehow climbing a mountain became much more manageable with half the work done.

Marta decided to stay at the cafe/gift shop and let the rest of us climb. The snow didn't look all that far away and we made that our goal. The rest of us, with Jimmy in the lead, climbed upward. We stopped several times to allow me to catch my breath, take in the scenery, and rest. The altitude and excursion were starting to factor in with the travel exhaustion. Once we reached the snow bank, we had a great time throwing snowballs and falling down. I am not quite flexible enough to remain on my feet and had a fantastic time sliding around. We walked to the snow melt and watched the stream. This was my first experience watching the power of water from the snow melt in Norway. It was just a small trickle, but looking down the weathered path, it was easy to see the continued power the rushing water created after a good storm or with the seasons first melt.

Finding our way back down the mountain was much easier. We stopped at a small rock pile in the clearing. In Norway there is a tradition of stacking rocks on top of each other. Once you stack your rocks you make a wish. They are also called rocks from home.

Driving even farther North opened new landscapes. Mountains are something we have in the lower 48 states. Mountains streaming with huge flows of water from glacier melt is something I don't see everyday. I'll admit I've never seen anything like the water flow. It's as if someone turned a huge spigot inside a small room and forgot to turn it off. The sound resonates through everything. The only time these streams don't flow is when they're frozen. It would not be until my second night that I realized there was no huge highway outside my bedroom window with rushing traffic, but the stream leading into the fjord; that is how loud the water is. The water just gushed from a couple places on each mountain. You can see evidence of other streams that have dried for the season from the mountains as water poured down huge streams just meters away. We drove around Balsfjorden with Birger pointing out the house across the wide span of water.

The house I was visiting was built by his grandfather many years before. In Norway to keep the property in the family, you must live on it. Because the local economy is still tied to farming and not much else, it would be hard to make a living in Northern Norway. Birger's retired German cousin owns the house now and lives on the land. As a girl who lives in Central Texas where the sun shines most of the year and the skies are wide open, I'm not sure I could live in a place where the sun hides and shadows loom over the land for several months a year.

Arriving at the house, I became acutely aware of my mono-linguistic issues. The problem with being an American who has no aptitude for languages, is I have to hope and accept the fact that I'm dependent on the goodwill of others. Before leaving Austin, Birger asked me what other languages I spoke. I find it depressing we don't emphasis basic knowledge of languages in America. Luckily, everyone in the house understood or spoke English and made the trip easy for me. Fredi spoke mainly German, but understood my English fare enough (and his English skills are quite good) and made the trip stress free. The Hellman-Holm household is delightful, warm, welcoming, and comforting. The German-Finn-Norweigian-American household was a joyful place over the next few days.

I was shepherded inside and like most Norwegian households, asked to take my shoes off at the door. Most people (both in north and south Norway) will wear house slippers or socks inside. Many people have a small area or room by the front door to leave shoes (Every place we entered in Svalbard would be the same including the museums, hotel, and even some of the gift shops. In Svalbard many of the museums had shoes for you to borrow or blue coverings for your socks).

The house is beautiful and picturesque. Fredi and Girlinde have built a sun room off the back room. She felt that if she was going to live in a place where you don't get sun for six months, she wanted to make sure she could have the sun available at all times. The room really opens the rest of the house and floods it with light.

Norwegian homes are comparatively the same size as those in America. However, in America I'm use to big appliances. Huge refrigerators, stoves, and washers dominate rooms, appliances are quite smaller in Norway. It was a quiet reminder of how much power and consumption we use in the States without thought. (The Solheim's dishwasher is slightly bigger than a large microwave oven and sits on the counter top.) Everything is compact and made to save space. Bathrooms contain showers with two doors forming a triangle for the area in which to bathe. Europe really is known for using space wisely.

Before dinner I ran up to my room and collected the presents I had brought. We laughed and decreed it Christmas in July. Although nothing was wrapped, I think everyone had a great time opening the gifts.

We had a fantastic evening. I ate freshly caught fish. It was served still with the tail attached, but happily no head. I generally dislike fish - I'm not a fan of the fishy taste that lingers on everything. My new friends all taught me how to eat fish and watch out for the bones. I've determined fresh Norwegian fish tastes significantly better than frozen Norwegian fish flown in to the states. I ate one side of the fish and my hosts pointed out I could flip it over and eat the other side after scraping the skin away. I was quite full and declined the offer, thinking from where I stood it looked pretty well-eaten with the small bones fanned out along the carcass. Jimmy would get to eat the rest of my food after it had been scraped by someone much more proficient at it then I.

After dinner we talked about school and kids and classes. My young friend left the dinner table early and bounced back and forth with the conversation. It's hard to be a kid when all the adults want to do is talk and chat; she had much more patience then I had at her age. We had a lot of education to chat about, it's not every day we get to talk about students, programs, and expectations from another country and life in America. In America, we're so focused on what other American schools are doing right and working to improve our own school -- it's interesting to get a fresh perspective on what's working. We have the same overall problems - dress code, lack of respect, parent support... somehow its nice having verification that what is working for us, and not working for us, is the same in another country. Birger and his wife teach in two different schools, so between the three of us we had different and yet similar experiences. He teaches a series of history classes including one on American history, she teaches English and I had to try and explain how I teach World Cultures - a combination of history, culture, and geography. (Everyone on the trip, found it fascinating - in a horrified sense- that the State of Texas expects the children to learn history, culture, and geography together in the same year. Of course most people were pretty shocked to hear our kids have two years of Texas history in the 4th and 7th grade. Seeing as the Texas Education Agency just past the history standards for the next ten years, our children will still be receiving two years of Texas History for the foreseeable future.)

Going to bed that night it was good to be in Northern Norway knowing I had survived the Oslo airport and airplanes on my own and while not quite ready to tackle living in a foreign country by myself, I proved to myself I could navigate from point A to point B on my own.