19, 20 and 21 July - Trondheim

Around 1am in the night after our Geirangerfjord excursion, Marian got up for a minute, and noticed that there was light coming in the porthole.

Sunset, or sunrise? We are 2° north of Anchorage, AK.

The Polarlys docked in Trondheim at 8:00 on Saturday the 19th. We'd already had breakfast and packed. We'd signed up for a Trondheim excursion, but we were also leaving the ship, so we took our bags with us in the tour coach. At the end of the tour, we were dropped off at our hotel — very nice service from Hurtigruten.

The tour featured only two stops. The first was the Cathedral. You get a wikipedia link because, unlike most other places in Scandinavia, photos were not allowed inside. The front is pretty impressive, though.

Photographed next afternoon, when the light was better.

Among its rows of saints are some odd-looking ones. Besides an excellent likeness of Gandalf the Grey, and a chap who is carrying his own severed head in his arms, there is this guy.

What saint's trait is to carry three severed heads in a basket?

A cathedral docent gave us a 20-minute talk about the history of the cathedral. It was a pilgrim's destination because of the reputation of St. Olaf, which is the reason for building such a large church in the 1100s. In 1537 a Danish king (Denmark then ruled Norway) took it from the Catholics and made it a Lutheran church. He also removed the silver shrine of St. Olaf. The silver went into the king's treasury and Olaf's remains were buried in an unknown location. After seeing so many church fronts destroyed in France last year, we were impressed that the Lutherans did not engage in iconoclasty, but left all the saints' figures in place when they took over.

From there the tour went to the Ringve museum of musical instruments. And once again, "No photos please." What is it with Trondheim and photos? Well, it is probably for the best because here we would have taken tons of photos of the large collection of odd and antique instruments nicely displayed. We had a guided tour by a charming music student from Trondheim U. who demonstrated a clavichord, harpsichord, two different generations of piano, and the hurdy-gurdy.

Sunday afternoon we went back to Ringve using the #4 bus to attend a free Sunday concert. The performer, another student, was actually not stunningly good. But it was free, and musical.

Afterward, one staff member and a volunteer were performing in the courtyard. We had by chance met the staff member beforehand and she said they would be performing "street music". It sounded like Elizabethan songs, or anyway that general era, although we don't know enough to be confident of it.

Sunday we walked around Trondheim a bit. Not too much because the heat has returned, with brilliant sunlight and temperatures approaching 80F. Anyway there are some nice old buildings along a canal.

View from Den Gamle Broen, the old bridge.

Brilliant light, bright colors, reflections.

Monday morning after checking out of our hotel we took another bus, #18. A side-note here on public transit in Scandinavia. It's great! We used it in Copenhagen, Bergen, and here; and in each city the service was frequent and reliable. Not cheap, when buying single tickets from the driver; for example in Trondheim it cost 50nkr for two senior citizen tickets, about $4 each. But the bus schedules are posted in every kiosk and the buses hit their numbers like clockwork. The #18 in front of our hotel was due at 17 and 47 minutes after the hour, every hour weekdays and 6-10pm Sundays, and at 9:47 it rolled up.

Anyway, the #18 carried us a bit out of town to the Trondelag Folk Museum. This is a large site where the museum has been relocating original historic buildings from around Norway.

Their oldest building is a Stave Church from the 1000s. It was a little village church, so nowhere near as large or fancy as the one in Bergen last week.

The most interesting bits were some farmhouses from the 1800s. They had original, hand-crafted furnishings including this lovely sideboard.

One preserved farmstead had both a farmhouse for the family but a separate "party house", a building reserved for weddings and funerals only, when many would be invited to a multi-day potluck and drinking fest. It was fantastically decorated.

From the docent here we learned the real meaning of a common word. At these parties, she claimed, beer was served in a large bowl, like a modern punch bowl. People would dip small cups into the bowl to drink. But if you were at the end of the long table (and had had a bit already), to get a fresh drink you would holler for the bowl to be passed down: "Bowl! Bowl!" in English, but in Norse the word is Skoal. Which is why they, and lots of others, toast with "Skoal!". Also we learned the "a" in that word is pronounced: Sko-all.

That afternoon we took a train out of Trondheim east into Sweden; and then Tuesday another train south to our final city, Stockholm. We'll leave the story of that journey to our first post from "the Venice of the North".