Pre-Wedding Honeymoon {PART 2: Trondheim}

On our first full day in Norway, after a beautiful train ride up from Oslo, we arrived in Trondheim. It was hard to believe that it was 10PM when we arrived, with the sun still shining brightly. Our next couchsurfing host met us at the train station -- this woman, Martina, and her boyfriend Martin are actually Germans, from Dresden, living and working up in Norway.

We were pretty tired and went to bed soon after arriving. I should mention that Trondheim is quite a way up the coast from Oslo (though just barely halfway up the coast of Norway as a whole). Even though we were visiting a whole month after the brightest part of the year, we still got a little taste of what the white nights must feel like: the sun set around 11PM and rose around 4:30 -- but it remained close enough beyond the horizon so that it never got fully dark, all through the night. I woke up at 2AM and it just looked like twilight or dawn. With all this light, we found ourselves needing much less sleep -- and I found that the sleep I did get was very light.

We woke up with our hosts in the morning and ate with them. They have a beautiful little apartment that has a view of the fjord from the front windows and porch. When they left for work we headed out too, to do some exploring. We walked out to get a closer look at the fjord and found a nice little path running along the top. Across the path we found a lookout point and decided to stay there and take in the scenery for a while. We spent a couple hours just looking out at the water, watching porpoise fins and boats coming and going.

We finally decided to make our way down into the city. It was a beautiful walk down the coast, along the fjord, and eventually we made it in to the city center. We wandered around in the bright sun, looking at the buildings. At our host's suggestion, we bought some strawberries (a Norwegian specialty) -- and they certainly were tasty.

One of the main attractions in Trondheim is the cathedral. On one end of it on the outside there are rows and rows of statues of saints. Below, at the end of this row is Jacob with his ladder.

Below is one of the other features of Trondheim: they have these beautiful old wooden houses along the canal that runs through the city. They're all brightly painted and look lovely, rising out of the water

In fact, most of the houses we saw all over in Norway were painted with bright saturated colors. They looked like little bits of sunny color on the landscape. It made me wonder if they used these rich yellows, greens, reds, and blues so that there would be some rest for the eyes during the long, dark, snowy winters...

{next installment: BBQ on the fjord}