Trip to see the northern lights!

Side remark: I renamed this article at least twice before settling for the current title. First, I wanted to name it "Tromsø weekend trip", analogously to the Stockholm one, but then, however, unlike Stockholm, this wasn't exactly just a trip to Tromsø city. "Trip to northern Norway" would have been more accurate on the one hand, but on the other hand, it might not have been my only trip to northern Norway: I still have this dream of experiencing the midnight sun in Norway in summer. Anyway, this was most likely the only trip to the north of Norway during the time period in which you can see the northern lights, so that's what ended up giving this post its name.

Enough introductional blah blah, I kind of need to keep this short, because life continues, I'm doing other stuff as well - and I also have a bit of school, just saying...

So we went to Tromsø last weekend, hoping to see the northern lights there. They are also called polar lights or Aurora borealis, so don't be confused if I'm using these terms interchangeably. These bright and colourful lights in the sky can sometimes be seen in the winter months if you're far up north. (Or far down south, but then the phenomenon is called Aurora australis.) If you're interested in how the polar lights occur: I'm not gonna explain it in this blog post, as the article is gonna be too long due to a lot of pictures already, but feel free check out this website!

Northern lights

As the polar lights are the main reason to make a trip to Tromsø in winter, but it's always a gamble if you'll be able to see them - it's just always a gamble -, I'll start with them instead of artificially creating suspense by keeping them for the end. Plus, it also goes with the chronology of the events: we were able to see them on the very first night when we had basically just arrived in Tromsø! They were so strong that you didn't even have to go to a dark place outside of the city (which we still did afterwards), you could literally see them just outside our accommodation! And they were extremely bright and colourful, green and a bit of pink (the weak ones are just white streams in the sky), and they were actually "dancing". There's slow and fast northern lights, so I'd assume we witnessed the fast ones.

Still wondering how visible they were? Well, I was able to take photos of them with my old compact camera, and the others managed to capture them with their iPhones, I guess that tells you everything you need to know!

Tromsø

Ok, having ticked off this highlight of the Tromsø trip, let's move to the "but where were you anyway?"-part. Let me start with the usual Google Maps screenshot:

If you're wondering: nope, we didn't drive all the way up, I just wanted to illustrate the location and distance in relation to Oslo. We went from Oslo to Tromsø by plane, and even that took two hours, which is more or less the same as going from southern Germany to Oslo. By the way, thanks, UNDER26 campaign code, for making travelling with Nordic airlines such as Norwegian more affordable!

I'm not going to stick to the chronological order of events now but just add a few photos of Tromsø which I collected during our weekend there.

View from our accommodation.

Tromsø Cathedral

Tromsø city library

Probably the prettiest scenery for a gas station...

Tourist information with a ticketing system...

It was all quite nice, but if you wanted the really amazing view over Tromsø, you had to take the cable car!

Fjellheisen (cable car)

Going up...!

Yup, we stayed a bit longer after sunset.

Fjord cruise tour

We didn't stay in Tromsø for the whole weekend. For one day, we had booked tours. The others did a Sami experience tour. If you're not familiar with the word: the Sami people are the indigenous people in the north of Norway as well as Sweden, Finland and Russia.

From a cultural point of view, I might have been interested in that tour. However, I felt this tour was mostly about reindeer sledging, not about Sami culture. And since "just leaving animals alone" (partly inspired by PETA Germany) is kind of my "job description" as a vegan, I opted out of this event and booked a 5 hour fjord cruise tour instead.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to evade the issue of humans not leaving the animals alone there either. At some point of the tour, the boat stopped on the water for fishing activities. But at least, that was not the main attraction of the tour - the main point was still the stunning nature! Before I'll present the photos of the amazing views to you though, I want to make one point here:

So people were encouraged to try out fishing during this tour, and the fish at least partially ended up in the soup that was prepared for us during the tour. (They managed provide a vegan option for me, by the way!) However, when one of the boat crew members filleted the fish just recently removed from the sea, nobody wanted to watch that. Everybody but me (I happened to take photos at that time) was on the other side of the boat or under deck, which I found quite ironic.

I mean, if you can't stand their glassy dead eyes staring at you, maybe you would like to consider just not killing and/or eating them?

Anyway, except for that, the fjord cruise was really nice! We travelled the fjords even further north than we were already. I'm not sure how Norway does it, but during the whole tour, I still had internet and GPS, so I can actually show you how far north we made it:

From there, you could even see the open sea!

I did my best to stay outside and enjoy the view as much as possible. Despite the cold, it was an extremely beautiful day, and I definitely took a 3-digit number of photos during the tour. Don't worry though, I'm not gonna post all of them in the following. Just almost. :P

When my bachelor exchange friends asked me for more selfies...

Hi eagle!

The Arctic Cathedral (which we didn't manage to visit)

Senja

You might have figured it out already, but I should probably make it explicit at this point: we had rented a car for this weekend. Or rather two, as we were up to 9 people on this trip. However, we had rented one car under my name - mainly because I had turned 25 exactly five days before we went to northern Norway. For some reason, 25 is the magic age for car rentals. They don't check for how long you've had your driving license or how much driving experience you possess - they just check IF you have a license and what your age is. As it's only the age doing the trick of pretending you're a "mature driver", I ended up renting the car, but somebody else (who felt more comfortable driving on snow & ice) was the driver. However, may I present the very first car I ever rented:

Well, and as we were already somewhere in the north of Norway and had a car, we decided to make a road trip to Senja, Norway's second biggest island. Just for the record, that's here:

Nope, that's not exactly next to Tromsø. It was something like a 2.5-hour drive, plus some more time until we had figured out where exactly on Senja we wanted to go. But well, for Norwegian standards, that's probably kind of around the corner...

So we actually spent most of the time on the car, but that was great, as we got to see a lot of gorgeous landscape!

Hi reindeer?!

The final destination of our trip to Senja was this, by the way. And we made it there before it got dark! :)

Another selfie of proof. :P

Oh, and if you're interested in everybody's earworm or, if you will, the soundtrack of our trip (as in: the whole weekend, not only Senja!), that would be this one:

Do. Not. Ask.

The day after the Senja road trip, we had to go back to Oslo already. Most of us with the 8 a.m. flight - after 3 hours of sleep. I still don't know how I managed to go to school on the very same day and not fall asleep during class.

Anyway, I'm gonna end this post with the view at the airport at 7 a.m. or something...

Goodbye, Tromsø!

Just daily life things...

If you're wondering why you didn't get another "tiny hike" (the Norwegians among my friends would probably claim what I'm doing here isn't even remotely close to hiking, but never mind) post last weekend: that's because I didn't go on another Oslo adventure for once. It was my birthday on Sunday, so I decided to invite a few people to my student dorm to have waffles, cookies, summer rolls etc. (I actually taught one of my friends how to make summer rolls. That's an important element to have in your skill set! :D)

Two of them were so nice to make me a birthday cake:

(The photo was the result of my friends from my bachelor exchange asking me for a birthday selfie on my master exchange. Just saying, I usually don't do selfies.)

Anyway, since you won't get an article this weekend either - because I'm finally going to Tromsø! Don't expect to hear anything from me until next week! -, I thought I'd give you a bit of a summary of the "highlights" of my week or so.

Let me start with the obligatory comment(s) on the weather. Last week, we experienced the calendrical beginning of spring at around -10°. And that was not only the 1st of March, it was basically the whole week. I was talking to some Norwegians, and even they admitted that these are not standard temperatures for "spring". But at least you got a bit of a nice sky from time to time:

And after a period of cold, it started snowing again on Monday, I think. At Nydalen T-bane station, it finally occurred to the public transport provider that the entrance might get slippery if there's a lot of people coming in with snow at their shoes:

Seriously, it's been dangerous around there all the time! I've literally seen Norwegians slip and fall close to this spot (ok, it was icy outside and they were drunk, but still...)!

But yeah, there was some snow this week. When I walked from my place to the T-bane, I was actually able to observe the kind of vehicles which are used here to remove the snow that's piled up on the pavement:

In the meantime, things at BI went on as usual. Well, almost. There was supposed to be another one of the uncounted company events last week Thursday. However, "Coffee with Facebook" had to be postponed due to the weather conditions. Not the conditions in Norway though, but the ones in Ireland! It seemed like Dublin actually had more snow at the end of the week than Oslo.

(A fellow student of mine did a short trip to Ireland and wasn't exactly excited about this view.)

Obviously, since Ireland hardly ever experiences snow, they couldn't really deal with it. As in: Dublin airport was literally shut down for a while, which was why the Facebook people couldn't make it to Oslo. They still managed to have the event a few days later though:

Yeah, I collect free pens...

Oh, and speaking of stuff that happens at BI: there was also a big event called "Inspire" this week. Even though I did not go to any of the presentations (the interesting ones either clashed with my classes or were in Norwegian - and I fear having Jo Nesbø talk about his books in Norwegian wouldn't have been very satisfying for me, even less for most other exchange students...), it was hard to ignore the event. I mean, they decorated BI in purple and had a ship in front of the main entrance. xD

Seriously, they even decorated the bathroom!

(I think that had to do with some female leadership event, so it might have been the women's bathroom only...)

What I liked most about Inspire was that they had a cooperation with Kreftforeningen, the Norwegian Cancer Association. On BI's campus, you could get a bracelet or even make one yourself, and the money you had to pay for it went to Kreftforeningen. Most of them said "FUCK CANCER", which I didn't like too much, but I managed to find one that said "CURE CANCER" instead. :)

Sorry for the quality, I just took that photo in class. :P

I also tried to learn a bit more about Norwegian culture. Nope, I didn't attend the "Norwegian culture and history" class again. I went to the ESN movie night this week. This time, they actually showed a Norwegian movie (with English subtitles, fortunately):

Fjols til fjells is a Norwegian comedy film from 1957 and is supposed to be one of the most popular Norwegian movies ever. (According to Wikipedia, not necessarily actual Norwegians I talked to.) The name translates into something like "Morons to the mountains". And yeah, it takes place in a hotel somewhere in the Norwegian mountains. :D

Oh, and if you're wondering: yes, I also have classes! I'm literally just writing this article in my Strategic Management class. Nope, that's not the most interesting class ever, and I wouldn't do that in Change Management or Managing Workplace Diversity, as they are more interactive and/or more exciting.

But there's one good thing about Strategic Management (except for the fact that it's more of a "strategy for beginners" class, so I'm hoping to pass the exam nevertheless): there's only one session this week... Since the course didn't take place two weeks ago (that's when I seized the chance to go to the Natural History Museum) because of a concept called vinterferie, we had two sessions last week: one on Thursday afternoon, and another one on Friday afternoon. Boring class on Friday from 14:00 to 17:00, that's as bad as it can get, I guess...

But hey, our teacher at least made an effort and brought candy to the Friday session...! (His handwriting is a mess though. :P)

Norsk Folkemuseum and BI-nner (27.02.)

Ok, so I guess I should publish this article in the month to which it belongs, which ends today unfortunately. :D

Yesterday, the Norwegian Culture and History course for exchange students did a field trip to the Norsk Folkemuseum. I'm not really in that course, and I haven't been attending the sessions in the last few weeks anymore. (The teacher didn't seem particularly excited about teaching and therefore had the students hold presentations instead. I decided there's not much of a point in preparing presentations for a course I won't even get credits for, and I'd just consult books, the internet or Norwegians if I felt the need to find out something about Norway.) Still, the opportunity of visiting a museum and having BI pay for it was one I just couldn't miss. A friend who's officially in this course - but not attending the sessions anymore either - was so nice to share the details with me so we could go there together.

It turned out the Norsk Folkemuseum is mainly an outdoor museum. There are some indoor exhibitions which we had a brief look at before the tour started, but the heart of the museum are 160 buildings from different eras and regions of Norway that were brought to or reconstructed at the Norsk Folkemuseum, trying to show how people lived in Norway.

During the tour, we entered exemplary buildings from different centuries and social classes. I didn't take a lot of photos inside though, since I was busy warming up again. This week just happened to be one of the colder ones in Oslo. On one morning, it was close to -20° (nope, I didn't leave the house early in the morning). During the tour, it was "just" something around -10°. Which is still a bit too cold for an outdoor tour. I didn't see the teacher of the course anywhere before, during or after the tour, by the way...!

Anyway, here are a few pictures I managed to take during the tour:

The highlight of the tour came at the end, when we were slightly frozen already: the Gol Stave Church! Stave churches are medieval churches made out of wood and represent Norway's contribution to architectural history.

The stave church and our tour guide

Looks a bit like an element from the Viking ships.

The painting is the Last Supper.

After the tour, we were given the option to spend some more time in the museum, but my friend was frozen and I had to head directly to BI because I had an actual class afterwards. So we just took the bus back from Bygdøy peninsula to Oslo city.
____

Speaking of stuff that BI pays for: once per month, there's an event at BI that's called BI-nner. Yes, that's a linguistic hybrid of "BI" and "dinner" - and I'm still not sure how to pronounce it correctly. But never mind. It's a free dinner organised by BI's studentprest, the chaplain, that also took place yesterday.

I've been bothering them to offer a vegan option for the BI-nner since January, and I might continue doing so for the rest of the semester. But unlike in January, I didn't refuse to go there this time. I realised nobody would join me for the quiz at Kroa student bar at the same time, as all potential candidates for my team went to BI-nner. So I figured I might as well go there, too, which led to the same result for me: no food, but a social life and a fun evening.

For some reason, they had named the event "Cupid's revenge"; however, the decoration was more like "Cupid's late by two weeks". Heart-shaped balloons, chocolate and what not everywhere. Plus a playlist with I Will Always Love You and the like.

At the entrance, we were given envelopes with numbers telling us which table we should join. Since that was not what we had signed up for, we ended up being rebels getting our own table. In the end, the envelopes were just for the Valentine's cards we were supposed to write for random people anyway.

My table turned out to be rather creative when it came to this assignment. :D