Packing up the luggage and heading up North by night train for the Arctic...
The night train; in other wordes, 10 hours of extremely uncomfortable sleep. I spent a good 2 hours talking to my Friend Henny using a mixture of 3 different languages: English, German and Norwegian. I thought it was pretty cool. Anyway...
7:00 AM Inger came around and woke us all up because we were passing the Arctic Circle.
We were in the middle of Nowhere and the arctic circle didn't look like much. So that was that.
2 hours and several hundred kilometers later we arrived at Fauske, where we jumped on a bus to Arran, the location of the Lule-Saami center.
We were all tired and smelly and not ready for a day of learning..but that's life, I guess.
We all ate lunch together when we arrived, then we had a tour of the center and the museum with the most informed woman I've ever met. I think she could have talked for 3 hours about every single thing in that museum, she would have, too, if Inger hadn't pressed her onward. It was very interesting, in any case.
So to inform those of you who have no idea who the Saami people are: They are the indigenous people of Norway/Sweden/Finland, found predominantly in the Arctic regions. The different tribes or groups of Saami are separated by the language/dialects they speak. (This happened to be the group that spoke Lule-Saami.) The Saami people traditionally do a lot of reindeer herding and fishing; they have their own cultural identity, but I would say that they are quite integrated as part of Norway's soceity. They have their own parliament at the capital (which in itself is a controversial issue, that I won't go into detail about now) and they have schools and kindergartens for Saami children where they speak primarily Saami. In fact, there was a Lule-saami kingergarten right across the street from the center we were at.
So...some pictures from the Museum:
clothes made of reindeer skins
Our guide and the map of where we were
A display at the museum
There was a guy who played some traditional Saami music called "yoiking" for us. Its music that basically has interpretive/emotional sounds rather than words...he did a really cool one about the wind that had some cool whistling techniques in it...it was neat..
After the tour of the museum, we had a lecture with the President of the Saami parliament. It was very interesting; there we learned about the problems facing the Arctic today and some of the social and political situations of the Saami people as minorities. It was very interesting.
After we finished at the museum, we were left for about 2 days of fun in the arctic. We went to our campsite in Hamarøy, where we spent the evening fixing dinner, relaxing, and taking freezing cold showers.
Here are some pictures from our campsite:
I'm not a skilled photographer--you should know that by now--but I think the beauty of the arctic is clear. Seriously, it was breath-taking. I never wanted to leave.
This feeling was only intensified after spending Thursday in the arctic landscape. The first place we went was an old light house. It was amazing.
This is a picture of the glacial water..its so fresh and clear, you can see the bottom of the fjord through a good 10 feet of water.
From the light house, we went out to a field you can walk through along the coast. (There was supposed to be an art exibit along the walk, but for some reason we didn't find any art...must have been eaten by a reindeer...)
Our group in the Arctic
This was seriously the best day ever. When we returned to the campsite we went canoeing in the fjord. It was SO FUN and beautiful!!
All of us on the canoes
Our professor, Inger, was enjoying herself as well...
After canoeing some of us went over to the waterfall across from our campsite...and some of us decided to climb it...
The waterfall...
The group at the top of the waterfall...
Britt Inga, Kristin, and I at the waterfall...
It was all in all a fabulous day. Friday we headed down torwads Bodø and went to a museum at an island called Kjerringøy. There ferry ride over was AMAZING. The water was PRETTY choppy...we got a some air going over those waves. Good times. Half the group didn't think it was as fun though, specifically the half that were hung over from the previous nights activities. Needless to say there was a good amount of vomiting that day.
Saturday we went to Bodø, and walked around town before getting on our plane back south. While walking downtown we stopped and got fresh shrimp (reker) from a boat that had caught them fresh that morning.
*see the next post/video for some shrimp cracking/peeling/eating action*
Some pictures from Bodø:
So...we landed safely in Oslo exactly one week ago. Sorry that took so long to post.
I wish I could share the real essense of the arctic...because it was AMAZING.
I could have stayed forever...
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