Day 7: Tromsø
Oct. 30th, 2004 12:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenThe further north in Norway you travel, the more and more things you encounter which are the northernmost of their kind. The northernmost town, village, stone church, wooden church, cathedral, chapel, medical school, university, mine, reindeer herder… The list seems endless. In some cases, these are the northernmost in the world; sometimes, Europe; sometimes, just Norway. To be fair, mind, the three categories overlap hugely.
Tromsø either is or has quite a few of these. It's the northernmost city, it has the northernmost cathedral, the northernmost university and the northernmost medical school. By southern standards, it's a small town, really, of around 60,000 people, but it's a busy one. It is split between the mainland and a large island, Tromsøy; the soaring vertigo-inducing bridge between the two parts probably deserves some such accolade. What it is not, in all fairness, is pretty. The medical school is a complex of large modern buildings which can most charitably be called "plain", their main point of interest being trilingual signage: Norwegian, English and Sami.
The Sami actually speak a whole range of dialects, some of them quite mutually unintelligible, but the Norwegian national government takes a pragmatic attitude to this: the Sami can nominate a prevalent dialect and that one is the one that will be used, at least in that area. Up here in the north of Norway, called the Nordlands, the Sami are widespread, though a minority today. This area was once called Finnmark, the realm of the Finns – just one early name for these people. A section of this is now a Norwegian county of the same name. (Incidentally, I am unsure of the ethnic relationship between the modern Finns and the Sami, but they're certainly not the same.) They were once known as Lapps, but today the Sami reject this name as being pejorative – as did the Inuit, the one-time "Eskimo" or "Esquimaux" - although the Norse reaction to this judgement seems to be bemusement. They were once nomadic reindeer-herders, with a distinctive language and culture, from clothing to a rich oral folklore. After years of little to no recognition as a separate group, things have changed significantly now: they have their own governing body and are recognised in law. However, modern Norwegian policy is integration and assimilation: whereas schools teach in the Sami language, they are expected to speak Norwegian and are encouraged to settle down in fixed homes. The few I met, in a small tourist concession, all have Norwegian names such as Nils-Oscar, and our tour guide cheerfully remark that you really can't tell the difference any more: they look and sound the same as anybody else.
And so another unique human culture dies out. I think it's a damn shame, myself.
Tromsø is a busy port and industrial town and the main street, as usual called simple Storgata – big street – contains the usual assortment of chain stores. Walk along it for ten minutes to the south, though, and it peters out into a residential area; the houses, many in the traditional wooden style, are dilapidated and in many cases apparently abandoned, although there are many small blue plaques pointing out places of historical interest.
In residential areas, like other towns here in the Arctic, people don't seem to go in for gardening. (I am as guilty as they in this respect, I should observe.) Many dwellings simply sit in the middle of a patch of scrubby grass, with no marked boundary between neighbouring properties. If there are walls or fences, the land within is untended, and we see more peeling paint than further south. A fellow-traveller, while purchasing a two-day-old English newspaper in a Narvesen newsagent on the main street, asked the assistant how it felt to live on the top of the world. She looked surprised and replied that she'd never been asked that one before, and that she didn't think of it that way: it was just a town, just where she lived, not somewhere remote or special.
And so it is, up here. The landscape is a bit hillier, a bit bleaker than in the south, and yes, it stays light all day in summer and dark all day in winter, but otherwise, this is nowhere special. There are no icebergs, no polar bears, nothing polar about it. The towns just tend to be a bit shabbier and a bit uglier than further south, compared to decorative places such as Trondheim or Bergen or even Ålesund or Molde.
The city centre is littered with monuments and statues to various heroes, from Roald Amundsen on downwards, but it's otherwise unremarkable; our tour bus didn't stop anywhere until it reached Tromsø's most famous landmark, on the far side of the harbour: Ishavskatedralen, the "Iceberg Cathedral". Vaguely reminiscent of the Sydney Opera House, this looks like a giant house of cards, comprising a set of huge nested triangles. From the outside, it’s imposing and majestic; inside, as befitting Norway's Lutheran Protestant state church, it is stark and bare. The far end faces a mountain which is climbed by a cablecar and topped with a restaurant, a small beckoning point of warmth and light on a wet and dreary day. This huge window was once clear, showing the majesty of their deity's handywork, as postcards attest - but I'm told that the priests found problems keeping their congregations' attention – people were wont to watch the world going by outside. So it was replaced, some years later, with an imposing stained glass window in a '70s modernist style, its panes set in concrete rather than lead. This is almost lush by Lutheran standards, as is the pipe organ at the other end.
The Ishavskatedral is not the only bit of impressive modern architecture around. In the Eastern side of the city centre is a striking roof. At the moment that's all it is – the building beneath, once a cinema, has been completely removed and construction of a new one is just beginning. The roof alone remains like some giant rigid tent, a huge square made from four intersecting arches, supported at its corners by pillars – thus allowing the structure it covered to be demolished separately. I hope the new place lives up to its crown.
The one that pleased me the most, though, resembled the cathedral in just one way: the outside was more interesting than the interior. Close by the Hurtigrute quay is Polaria, the Polar Museum. It's mainly devoted to Svalbard – which you might know as Spitzbergen – Norway's archipelago in the polar ocean, some thousand kilometres closer to the pole than the uttermost point of the mainland. Svalbard is truly Arctic, a wilderness of tundra, permafrost, polar bears and countless seabirds. From the outside, the museum is a half-collapsed row of iceblocks, like a row of giant books fallen to one side. Each huge white block lies at a different angle, the gaps bridged by glass, the whole series propped at one end by a glass wedge: the entrace hall.
Inside, it's a little too theme-park like for my tastes. I rather liked a giant globe of the earth, suspended on water so you can freely rotate it to and fro to show the effects on world coastlines of a sea-level rise of a few meters. Well, you can freely rotate it if you're stronger than our small, middle-aged female tour guide, anyway. An animated depiction of the flow – and cooling – of the Gulf Stream as it flows northwards was pretty good, too, for something driven by slides – a £200 PC could do better today, albeit connected to a £3000 LCD projector.
There's a 20-minute film about Svalbard, with a score of music and the sounds of nature – no dialog, no narration, no subtitles apart from occasional placenames. It's presented on a band of five screens, a sort of poor man's IMAX – sometimes these repeat one or several images, sometimes they hold a whole panorama, slightly disjoint as it's filmed from an arc of five separate cameras – you can very occasionally glimpse the shadow of the cameraman on the snow. Svalbard looks like an amazing place and I now yearn to go there. It's inhabited, but only my miners and a few biologists – but I'm told they're very greatful for any company. It is divided into Norwegian and Russian-run halves; the capital is in the Norwegian part. It's called, oddly for a town in Norway – or at least in Norwegian territory – Longyearbyen, "the long-year town". While I don't doubt that a year in Svalbard would be a very long one, this makes no sense in Norwegian, and indeed it's pronounced as if a hybrid of English and norsk – "long-year-bü-en", with the peculiar sound of a Scandinavian "y".
(Try it! Purse your lips in an exaggerated kiss and try to say "eeee". What emerges is a sort of long hooting sound somewhere between "ooh" and a moan; it's a vowel sound that simply doesn't exist in English, although it's very close to the nasal sound of the French word "tu". The Swedish one is closer to "ooh" and the Norwegian to "eeee", but it's neither. It's widely used and you have to get it right to understand the language – it's not the same as "ooh" or "eeee", but it can easily be mistaken for either, in which case you'll hear an entirely different word. After eleven years of practice, I still can't reliably distinguish it and it regularly throws me. Just out of interest, in phonetics, this is called a minimal pair – meaning that the difference is all that distinguishes otherwise-identical words. One is "y" versus "u", but so are "å" and "æ" against "a" and "ø" against "o" – but happily, the latter three all occur in English, so you just have to learn what the letter sounds like. Examples are "paw", which you might write på, "hat" to hæt – by Norwegian rules, you might pronounce "hat" as the English "heart" – or "sir" becoming sø, more or less.)
Anyway, Longyearby was named after an American called Mr Longyear. So there you go.
- - - - -
In the Polaria museum, you leave the theatre into an attempt to realise a polar environment: as you walk through the automatic door into a cold room full of fibreglass ice, a sprayer above the entrance squirts you with snow – actually more like tiny flecks of foam – and a tape plays howling wind noises at you. Displayed for your delectation are a polar expedition's tent, skis and supplies, a stuffed dwarf reindeer and a fake icecave with a stuffed polarbear. A tray holds some shale scree arranged atop a rubber membrane above a waterbath containing padding and springs, which is, apparently, much like walking on part-melted permafrost. It is, I must admit, a disconcerting sensation – it feels treacherous, as if like quicksand it might at any moment suck you under.
Thankfully, this one small room is it for the Svalbard experience. You go downstairs, disconcertingly underneath the transparent base of the permafrost, into a miniature aquarium, which is interesting, if aimed at kids: the tanks bulge in or out of the room in hemispheres, so you can either look through or stick your head in – or up into, in a painful crouch if you happen to be 1.88 metres tall. I think the designer had substantially smaller people in mind. I particularly liked a demonstration of camouflage: three small shallow tanks at waist-height, roofed in Perspex. In two, you play spot-the-beastie on beds of gravel, but one is in quadrants: one bare, one gravel, one sand, one artificial reddish grains, perhaps of brick. Each quarter contains one or more baby lemon soles and you're asked to count them. Against blue plastic, it's easy. Despite his best efforts to turn sky-coloured, he's yellow and so sticks out - and he knows it, eyeing you nervously. In the others, though, his kin shift colour and pattern to blend in perfectly and the game is hard. You can cheat by waving your hand so its shadow passes over them – they're used to it and don't move, but you might catch their eyes tracking you. Nicely done, though the fish might disagree. The prawns didn't seem to care.
A small dome allows you to peer into a larger tank where shadowy shapes swim, perhaps a yard long. They look like baby seals.
Next, you walk through a submerged transparent tunnel, and you might well jump when you realise that these are no babies but nearly full-grown and you're a long way down in the bottom of their swimming pool. They loom suddenly out of the dark, longer than I'm tall and twice my not-inconsiderable weight, veering aside at the last moment but sometimes probing the cylinder with their whiskers – these are Bearded Seals. In their element, they're a lot faster and more agile than I am in my own.
Upstairs, it's time for a show: a girl instructs the three females and a guy the larger males as they perform tricks and obey commands. It's not, the humans insist, to please the crowd, it's to keep the seals active and learning and interacting in an artificial and restrictive environment.
The subsequent displays were a little less impressive. Flasks of phytoplankton and zoöplankton look suspiciously like, well, water. I'm not sure why displays of crabs and anemones are in 5cm deep tanks, although I can guess why they're only a meter off the ground – but it's damned awkward for adults. A touch-tank allows you to fondle starfish and urchins, which don't look happy about it. Another contains rocks, anemones and a single small blenny, peering at me with deep suspicion from under a rock. Naughtily, I dig in my pocket for a few crumbs from a long-ago stashed pastry, and sprinkle them on the water. He eyes me mistrustfully then lunges out to grab one, his tiny jaws closing on it with a startlingly loud snap. But then, others appear – literally dozens of them – and the metre-square tank is transformed into a writhing nest of snakelike little fish fighting for flakes of a Gregg's vegetable pasty, which I venture is not their natural diet – but I think it should be a pretty harmless variation. I am so spellbound I almost miss my bus.
It's not bad and at least half the show is good and informative for adults, but mainly it made me wish I was in Svalbard instead of Tromsø. And maybe a little bit that I was twelve again.
Tromsø either is or has quite a few of these. It's the northernmost city, it has the northernmost cathedral, the northernmost university and the northernmost medical school. By southern standards, it's a small town, really, of around 60,000 people, but it's a busy one. It is split between the mainland and a large island, Tromsøy; the soaring vertigo-inducing bridge between the two parts probably deserves some such accolade. What it is not, in all fairness, is pretty. The medical school is a complex of large modern buildings which can most charitably be called "plain", their main point of interest being trilingual signage: Norwegian, English and Sami.
The Sami actually speak a whole range of dialects, some of them quite mutually unintelligible, but the Norwegian national government takes a pragmatic attitude to this: the Sami can nominate a prevalent dialect and that one is the one that will be used, at least in that area. Up here in the north of Norway, called the Nordlands, the Sami are widespread, though a minority today. This area was once called Finnmark, the realm of the Finns – just one early name for these people. A section of this is now a Norwegian county of the same name. (Incidentally, I am unsure of the ethnic relationship between the modern Finns and the Sami, but they're certainly not the same.) They were once known as Lapps, but today the Sami reject this name as being pejorative – as did the Inuit, the one-time "Eskimo" or "Esquimaux" - although the Norse reaction to this judgement seems to be bemusement. They were once nomadic reindeer-herders, with a distinctive language and culture, from clothing to a rich oral folklore. After years of little to no recognition as a separate group, things have changed significantly now: they have their own governing body and are recognised in law. However, modern Norwegian policy is integration and assimilation: whereas schools teach in the Sami language, they are expected to speak Norwegian and are encouraged to settle down in fixed homes. The few I met, in a small tourist concession, all have Norwegian names such as Nils-Oscar, and our tour guide cheerfully remark that you really can't tell the difference any more: they look and sound the same as anybody else.
And so another unique human culture dies out. I think it's a damn shame, myself.
Tromsø is a busy port and industrial town and the main street, as usual called simple Storgata – big street – contains the usual assortment of chain stores. Walk along it for ten minutes to the south, though, and it peters out into a residential area; the houses, many in the traditional wooden style, are dilapidated and in many cases apparently abandoned, although there are many small blue plaques pointing out places of historical interest.
In residential areas, like other towns here in the Arctic, people don't seem to go in for gardening. (I am as guilty as they in this respect, I should observe.) Many dwellings simply sit in the middle of a patch of scrubby grass, with no marked boundary between neighbouring properties. If there are walls or fences, the land within is untended, and we see more peeling paint than further south. A fellow-traveller, while purchasing a two-day-old English newspaper in a Narvesen newsagent on the main street, asked the assistant how it felt to live on the top of the world. She looked surprised and replied that she'd never been asked that one before, and that she didn't think of it that way: it was just a town, just where she lived, not somewhere remote or special.
And so it is, up here. The landscape is a bit hillier, a bit bleaker than in the south, and yes, it stays light all day in summer and dark all day in winter, but otherwise, this is nowhere special. There are no icebergs, no polar bears, nothing polar about it. The towns just tend to be a bit shabbier and a bit uglier than further south, compared to decorative places such as Trondheim or Bergen or even Ålesund or Molde.
The city centre is littered with monuments and statues to various heroes, from Roald Amundsen on downwards, but it's otherwise unremarkable; our tour bus didn't stop anywhere until it reached Tromsø's most famous landmark, on the far side of the harbour: Ishavskatedralen, the "Iceberg Cathedral". Vaguely reminiscent of the Sydney Opera House, this looks like a giant house of cards, comprising a set of huge nested triangles. From the outside, it’s imposing and majestic; inside, as befitting Norway's Lutheran Protestant state church, it is stark and bare. The far end faces a mountain which is climbed by a cablecar and topped with a restaurant, a small beckoning point of warmth and light on a wet and dreary day. This huge window was once clear, showing the majesty of their deity's handywork, as postcards attest - but I'm told that the priests found problems keeping their congregations' attention – people were wont to watch the world going by outside. So it was replaced, some years later, with an imposing stained glass window in a '70s modernist style, its panes set in concrete rather than lead. This is almost lush by Lutheran standards, as is the pipe organ at the other end.
The Ishavskatedral is not the only bit of impressive modern architecture around. In the Eastern side of the city centre is a striking roof. At the moment that's all it is – the building beneath, once a cinema, has been completely removed and construction of a new one is just beginning. The roof alone remains like some giant rigid tent, a huge square made from four intersecting arches, supported at its corners by pillars – thus allowing the structure it covered to be demolished separately. I hope the new place lives up to its crown.
The one that pleased me the most, though, resembled the cathedral in just one way: the outside was more interesting than the interior. Close by the Hurtigrute quay is Polaria, the Polar Museum. It's mainly devoted to Svalbard – which you might know as Spitzbergen – Norway's archipelago in the polar ocean, some thousand kilometres closer to the pole than the uttermost point of the mainland. Svalbard is truly Arctic, a wilderness of tundra, permafrost, polar bears and countless seabirds. From the outside, the museum is a half-collapsed row of iceblocks, like a row of giant books fallen to one side. Each huge white block lies at a different angle, the gaps bridged by glass, the whole series propped at one end by a glass wedge: the entrace hall.
Inside, it's a little too theme-park like for my tastes. I rather liked a giant globe of the earth, suspended on water so you can freely rotate it to and fro to show the effects on world coastlines of a sea-level rise of a few meters. Well, you can freely rotate it if you're stronger than our small, middle-aged female tour guide, anyway. An animated depiction of the flow – and cooling – of the Gulf Stream as it flows northwards was pretty good, too, for something driven by slides – a £200 PC could do better today, albeit connected to a £3000 LCD projector.
There's a 20-minute film about Svalbard, with a score of music and the sounds of nature – no dialog, no narration, no subtitles apart from occasional placenames. It's presented on a band of five screens, a sort of poor man's IMAX – sometimes these repeat one or several images, sometimes they hold a whole panorama, slightly disjoint as it's filmed from an arc of five separate cameras – you can very occasionally glimpse the shadow of the cameraman on the snow. Svalbard looks like an amazing place and I now yearn to go there. It's inhabited, but only my miners and a few biologists – but I'm told they're very greatful for any company. It is divided into Norwegian and Russian-run halves; the capital is in the Norwegian part. It's called, oddly for a town in Norway – or at least in Norwegian territory – Longyearbyen, "the long-year town". While I don't doubt that a year in Svalbard would be a very long one, this makes no sense in Norwegian, and indeed it's pronounced as if a hybrid of English and norsk – "long-year-bü-en", with the peculiar sound of a Scandinavian "y".
(Try it! Purse your lips in an exaggerated kiss and try to say "eeee". What emerges is a sort of long hooting sound somewhere between "ooh" and a moan; it's a vowel sound that simply doesn't exist in English, although it's very close to the nasal sound of the French word "tu". The Swedish one is closer to "ooh" and the Norwegian to "eeee", but it's neither. It's widely used and you have to get it right to understand the language – it's not the same as "ooh" or "eeee", but it can easily be mistaken for either, in which case you'll hear an entirely different word. After eleven years of practice, I still can't reliably distinguish it and it regularly throws me. Just out of interest, in phonetics, this is called a minimal pair – meaning that the difference is all that distinguishes otherwise-identical words. One is "y" versus "u", but so are "å" and "æ" against "a" and "ø" against "o" – but happily, the latter three all occur in English, so you just have to learn what the letter sounds like. Examples are "paw", which you might write på, "hat" to hæt – by Norwegian rules, you might pronounce "hat" as the English "heart" – or "sir" becoming sø, more or less.)
Anyway, Longyearby was named after an American called Mr Longyear. So there you go.
- - - - -
In the Polaria museum, you leave the theatre into an attempt to realise a polar environment: as you walk through the automatic door into a cold room full of fibreglass ice, a sprayer above the entrance squirts you with snow – actually more like tiny flecks of foam – and a tape plays howling wind noises at you. Displayed for your delectation are a polar expedition's tent, skis and supplies, a stuffed dwarf reindeer and a fake icecave with a stuffed polarbear. A tray holds some shale scree arranged atop a rubber membrane above a waterbath containing padding and springs, which is, apparently, much like walking on part-melted permafrost. It is, I must admit, a disconcerting sensation – it feels treacherous, as if like quicksand it might at any moment suck you under.
Thankfully, this one small room is it for the Svalbard experience. You go downstairs, disconcertingly underneath the transparent base of the permafrost, into a miniature aquarium, which is interesting, if aimed at kids: the tanks bulge in or out of the room in hemispheres, so you can either look through or stick your head in – or up into, in a painful crouch if you happen to be 1.88 metres tall. I think the designer had substantially smaller people in mind. I particularly liked a demonstration of camouflage: three small shallow tanks at waist-height, roofed in Perspex. In two, you play spot-the-beastie on beds of gravel, but one is in quadrants: one bare, one gravel, one sand, one artificial reddish grains, perhaps of brick. Each quarter contains one or more baby lemon soles and you're asked to count them. Against blue plastic, it's easy. Despite his best efforts to turn sky-coloured, he's yellow and so sticks out - and he knows it, eyeing you nervously. In the others, though, his kin shift colour and pattern to blend in perfectly and the game is hard. You can cheat by waving your hand so its shadow passes over them – they're used to it and don't move, but you might catch their eyes tracking you. Nicely done, though the fish might disagree. The prawns didn't seem to care.
A small dome allows you to peer into a larger tank where shadowy shapes swim, perhaps a yard long. They look like baby seals.
Next, you walk through a submerged transparent tunnel, and you might well jump when you realise that these are no babies but nearly full-grown and you're a long way down in the bottom of their swimming pool. They loom suddenly out of the dark, longer than I'm tall and twice my not-inconsiderable weight, veering aside at the last moment but sometimes probing the cylinder with their whiskers – these are Bearded Seals. In their element, they're a lot faster and more agile than I am in my own.
Upstairs, it's time for a show: a girl instructs the three females and a guy the larger males as they perform tricks and obey commands. It's not, the humans insist, to please the crowd, it's to keep the seals active and learning and interacting in an artificial and restrictive environment.
The subsequent displays were a little less impressive. Flasks of phytoplankton and zoöplankton look suspiciously like, well, water. I'm not sure why displays of crabs and anemones are in 5cm deep tanks, although I can guess why they're only a meter off the ground – but it's damned awkward for adults. A touch-tank allows you to fondle starfish and urchins, which don't look happy about it. Another contains rocks, anemones and a single small blenny, peering at me with deep suspicion from under a rock. Naughtily, I dig in my pocket for a few crumbs from a long-ago stashed pastry, and sprinkle them on the water. He eyes me mistrustfully then lunges out to grab one, his tiny jaws closing on it with a startlingly loud snap. But then, others appear – literally dozens of them – and the metre-square tank is transformed into a writhing nest of snakelike little fish fighting for flakes of a Gregg's vegetable pasty, which I venture is not their natural diet – but I think it should be a pretty harmless variation. I am so spellbound I almost miss my bus.
It's not bad and at least half the show is good and informative for adults, but mainly it made me wish I was in Svalbard instead of Tromsø. And maybe a little bit that I was twelve again.
