Category: travel

Today we walked around Fauske and came upon a farm with (probably emo, judging by their hair styling) horses and a marble mine. Manual focus rules, but now I need a decent viewfinder, which is not really cheap. I probably should just wait for the prices to fall.

I have been to Oslo on Saturday. I managed to take a whole lot of pictures, but nevertheless I also want to tell you something that did not quite fit in the camera. Foremost, one of the main problems of Oslo is that you have to look very carefully for a spot to make pictures from — the city is somewhat dense. Another thing that strikes really hard is the contrast between different parts of Oslo. When you are riding to Holmenkollen (where we were heading to) on the tram, you see a lot of cute little, mostly wooden, houses and you might be inclined to think that spending a significant part of your life in Norway does not sound that bad. Near the train station, the city looks more Amsterdam — a lot of building is going on, and there are a lot of semi-skyscrapers (lower than in Frankfurt, but higher than in your average city). Then, if you go further north from the station, you come — very abruptly — into a part of the city that looks very ghetto-like: graffitis, old houses, strange people running around, stuff like that. I was somewhat happy to get out of that neighborhood.

Another thing that is not mentioned in the pictures is the ride to Oslo and back. Norway is a long country, so, the train from Trondheim needs quite a while (about seven hours) to reach Oslo. The most sensible way to travel is to do it overnight, so you can get some sleep and do not lose time in the transit. The ride back was with a bus — similar time schedule, less comfortable, but also a little cheaper.

Yeah, yeah, you are bored and need more pics. Here they come:

One of the impressions from Holmenkollen was that almost every Norwegian there was really drunk — and that even before they won that 50km race. No, really, nearly everyone had a bottle in his or her hands and when the race was over, somebody cried “Swedes go home!” (because the Swedish racers did not perform good).

So yesterday I have been walking in the suburbs of Trondheim. It was a nice day to go hiking, for it was not that cold and one could shoot really good pictures. I found it quite surprising to see that you can actually go skiing pretty far downhill here. I always imagined that the mountains here are not that high. Apparently, I was wrong:

The view from the place we were headed to was really great. Unfortunately, I did not manage to capture the sunset, but this picture should roughly give you an impression:

 And tonight, I managed to see some northern lights. It was a great sight, but unfortunately, my photography skills were insufficient to capture them nicely (auto-focus screws it up, and you have to set up everything from aperture to shutter speed manually). Still, you can get the idea:

It was -10 according to my laptop outside today. I’m saying this just to emphasize how much I am doing for you, dear readers 😉

This is a gas station. Note the absence of any human beings whatsoever. There are many fully-automatic gas stations around here, mostly because you don’t need humans to process card payment.

Everything taken within a five minutes’ walk from my dorm.