Above the Arctic Circle

In the morning we took one last look around Bryggen where I was trying to capture its peculiar geometries.  We grabbed a bus to the airport and waited there for our plane to Tromso, above the Arctic Circle.

We got into Tromso in the late afternoon and checked into the hotel. The lady at the reception was very friendly and gave us direction on how to take the bus and go up the Storsteinen mountain. She also recommended a couple of restaurants. We had one of the best meals of our trip at Fiskekompaniet.

On the way to the mountain we missed our stop (again) and had to ask for directions (again). But it got really easy to find once we started following the cables of the cable car.

Up Mt. Ulriken

It was already late afternoon, but we wanted to try to get to the cable cars that climbed Mount Ulriken.  We took a pubic bus and got off at what seemed to be the outskirts of town.  We couldn't figure out the way to the cable car so we walked around asking people.  It turned out to be quite convoluted as we meandered through a tunnel and hospital, up a lot of stairs to the launch pad of the cable car.

This mountain was much higher than the one that the funicular went up, and was much more spectacular.  We saw a paraglider from above.

Rosenkrantz and Guildestern are dead!

After coming down from the funicular and having lunch at some place with poor service, we went to visit the Rosenkrantz Tower.  They were doing some kind of renovation so that outside was surrounded with scaffolding.  Because of that, admission was free!

They had some dark rooms down below, including a dungeon.  Unfortunately my flash blew after taking some pictures in the dungeon and was useless for the rest of the trip.  There were several floors to explore, but as it is a tower, there was only one or two rooms per floor.  One of the floors had information on witches who were burned at a stake.

We also looked at King Harald's Hall, which was very impressive, and later to a newly opened museum about the Bryggen area.  The latter had some runes translated.  One I remember said something like "stand up and fart".