Rotterdam (or Anywhere)

The reindeer races took place last week. Unfortunately it was a rainy day, the temperatures were above zero – it makes a horrible mess of the snow. Luckily there was enough snow in Tromsø’s main street for the races to take place (I actually think they cheated and got snow from elsewhere!)

The races were really impressive, I had never seen anything like it! Very fast… Here are some photos I took. In the last one you can see that there was also a race for children!

Here’s an experiment, see if I can show a video of the races!

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The races are organized by Sami people, I love their colorful clothes!

By the end of the races we were all cold so we went for some soup/coffee inside a Sami tent, sitting on reindeer skins around the fire… very cosy! As you can see in the photo below those tents are made of wood and reindeer skinds, with a big hole in the top to let the smoke out.

It kept raining on Monday and Tuesday, and then finally temperatures dropped below zero again and we had fresh snow. A lot better than the mess you get when the snow melts and it rains on top of that! Unfortunately today that happened again… blegh. We’ve been trying to find a second hand car this week, no luck so far. Would be great to have one and explore the area aroundTromsø a bit more!

After all the snowstorms, this week was mostly sunny! The views from the flat are so amazing, often distracting me from my work… We had some big icicles too, though they have all melted away now. It’s getting much lighter now, and sometimes there are very cool lenticular clouds forming over the mountains. The last photo shows the last sunlight on the mountain…

Something interesting I discovered on my way to town… a snow zen garden 🙂 I have no idea what’s underneath it and what causes this pattern, but it’s pretty cool!!

Last night we went to a birthday party on Kvaløya, the next island. We decided to take the bus instead of biking, hmm… Due to a series of misunderstandings and mistakes, we got a whole tour of the island and it took us 2 hours to get there!! The birthday party was actually a BBQ!! It was at a really cute wooden house near the water and they made a big campfire and BBQ. Lots of fun! The aurora was out too, with a very impressive display. Due to previous experiences in Alaska, I was not too surprised to have an outdoor party in the snow, but it’s always a really nice experience. If you stay close to the fire that is 😉 On our way home in the bus people around us were complaining they could smell fire… ooooops….

Today I bought my first serious mountaineering gear: crampons! We decided to walk up the hill to the cable car station which was really nice, lots of great views, thigh deep snow in places (where snowshoes would have been a better choice!), a very windy top with an amazing sunset, the sky turning pink everywhere. On the way back we took the quick/steep way down right underneath the cable car, so we could just sit down and slide… easy 🙂 It was getting dark and it was cool to see all the lights of Tromsø from there. A very nice day! We took lots of photos, here’s a selection:

That’s all! Tomorrow are the reindeer races in the city centre, I’m looking forward to that! I’ll try to post some photos of that soon!

Yesterday we went skiing for a couple of hours, on the ski tracks on Tromso island. It’s very beautiful, you forget that you are in a city (not that Tromso is such a metropolis 😉 ). Everybody lives around the edges of the island and the middle is basically a big skiing area in winter.

It was a fun day! Hard work but it was great to be outside like that. The most difficult part is downhill cause it’s very difficult to brake on those kind of skies. We fell a lot! We went with two guys from Paul’s work and I was the slowest one – I would sometimes find myself at the top of a downhill, with three guys standing at the bottom looking at me and waiting for me to fall (as they all did…) – nasty guys 😉 Luckily I managed to stay upright better than they did, hehe.

There were lots of people enjoying the “good” (as in “no snow storm”) weather. It was fun to see people skiing with dogs! I had never seen this before, but they attach a rope to their middle and the other end around their dog, and use them to tow them uphill. All kinds of dogs too, we saw poodles and even little puppy’s! We also watched a competition at the ski jump, very impressive!! Paul has a better zoom on his camera so he managed to get some nice pictures of the jumpers. Here are some photos…

At night we went to the concert and reception organized by the Dutch embassy. We figured it would be quite smart, so I was wearing a dress and high heels, not very practical in this town! We had to get a taxi to town, it takes a whole 5 minutes… 😉

The concert was really nice, it was the soloists of the New Dutch Academy playing “early music”, meaning classical from the 18th century, played on instruments that are not very common anymore – a lute, a flute, an early (and very small) version of the cello. Simon Murphy (the director) explained a lot about the music and he was really funny – it made the concert a lot more accesible I think. Very nice!

The reception afterwards was good too, I was impressed how many Dutch people live in (and around) Tromso! Some for over 30 years… I even met a woman who comes from a village less than 4 km from where I grew up! Unfortunately there were no bitterballen (even though everybody seemed to be hoping for them!) but they did serve jenever.

Today we didn’t do much, my muscles are hurting too much from yesterday!! We did ski a little bit around the lake. It’s been snowing again today. I’m looking forward to next weekend – there will be reindeer races in the city center! I’ll try to get some good photos of course 🙂