Early Snow

We woke up Oct. 6 to this!

This was on taken on Oct. 9. You can see by looking on top of the cars how much snow we had gotten--and there was more to come!

People were out enjoying the snow--skiing, sledding, grilling polse (should be an "o" with a slash through it, but I can't get the keystroke to work) which are sausages/hot dogs. You can find the little disposible grills everywhere here--basically it's a foil pack with charcoal and a starter--very handy and easy. Looks like the people in the photo below have a small fire going rather than using a little grill.

This year we had our first cover-the-ground snow on Oct. 6. Mike and I had gone out for a walk the evening before, and noticed that some people had changed over to snow tires. The next morning, we knew why. By the time we got up that morning, there were already a couple of inches on the ground. It continued snowing up until Oct. 14, and overall, I'm sure we got at least a foot. Then, the weather warmed up, and the snow started to slowly melt away (though, there is some left now, from where the snow movers piled up the snow). It was a good snow--crunchy underfoot, and beautiful. There were still leaves on the trees when the snow began, so near the end there were leaves scattered on top of the snow.

Saturday, Oct. 3

A view of the Arctic cathedral and "snow mountain" taken on our way down to sentrum.

Just goes to show you how far behind on this thing I still am that I'm still posting October photos. Oh well. On Oct. 3, the art museum had an open house for international students. We walked down to sentrum in the afternoon, and got a cup of coffee and a roll in the lobby of the museum (free food and coffee is always an excellent draw for students!). There were several new exhibits since the last time we were there. We managed to get some slightly better photos of the Vigeland sculpture this time, though it seems to very difficult to get the whole thing (even though it is quite small) and still get a good image. Guess better lighting is needed than our camera flash can provide. They have some really beautiful paintings of northern Norway, and have included a couple of photos of those. On the way home we took a route that goes through a track field that is located in a niche pretty close to the top of the hill where we live. It was a good place to get some photos of "snow mountain" (that's what I call it--it's really called Tromsdalstinden).