More Norway..

Okay, the next day, Saturday, was the best day of the trip. We went through the snowy mountains and across a fjord on a ferry, eventually our bus arrived somewhere between the mountains, where the vegetation was a lot lighter and richer than elsewhere.

There was a path leading to a glacier, it was a few kilometres to walk.




The road went uphill and there was a rocky river close by so I went off track and went on next to the river. Anyway, at some point the vegetation ceases to exist, instead you get this grey dry rocky land, with a single tone greenish lake. That was one hell of a place, it blew my mind away. Here:


That was the view from the glacier,which I decided to climb:


That was truly the highlight of the trip..

That was the view from the rocks, glacier's on the left:


Well, that place was really amazing. It felt so unlike Europe, so unlike the rest of Norway. That's a place I MUST visit again.
A little town who-knows-where:



Another old Norwegian church:

We spent a second night in the same hostel. During the rainy evening there were dozens of us watching Eurovision, which included so many cheesy tunes (Ireland's song was especially horrific). Well, that's the way Eurovision is, but everybody still watches it....(including me).
After a bad night's sleep we headed back off to Oslo. It was mostly rainy there sadly. Visited some museums, had some free time, went back to the hostel, after which I explored the suburbs alone.
Next morning, we started going back, popped through a cave painting museum in Sweden and arrived in the port of Stockholm in the evening. I visited the buffet on the ship, that was the first proper dinner I had had on the trip. After a sleepless night, we were once again in Turku. No time to look around this time, we continued to Helsinki, a two hour ride which felt like 15 minutes. Ship, arrived back in Tallinn. The first thing I had to do after returning was visit the supermarket, because Estonian prices felt really heavenly compared to Scandinavia's ones.
It was a nice trip, better than the Russian trip back in September (though that was fun too).

Norway

Okay, another science class trip which I decided to join. 1 week, with around 50 people. Ship to Helsinki, the first stop was a limestone mine in Finland.

After that, we headed off to Turku which, along with Tallinn, is the European capital of culture 2011. It seemed like a sleepy little town by nature. We spent the night on the Turku-Stockholm ship, ships are always fun.
We were gonna spend a lot of time in the bus during the trip. Main activities: chat, half-sleep, eat cheap food, watch movies on the TV of the bus (such as Fight Club, Into The Wild, The Hangover, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button and Die Hard 4), listen to music and enjoy the scenery. It was around 7 hours to Oslo from Stockholm. We passed Fahlun and its copper mine. Apparently, in the 19. century some guy died somewhere in the mines and his body was found 42 years later, unchanged.
We spent the night in a hostel in the suburbs of Oslo, the whole area was surprisingly pleasant. I think that if I had to move to Scandinavia, I'd move to Oslo.
On Friday we went up North. We visited another mine, this time a silver mine. We had to stuff ourselves into minecarts, which took us into the mountain. We had to wear earplugs, the train was quite noisy. This mine seemed to be built more organized. Fun, like all three, that we visited.
Anyway, we went on with the bus (loads of hours spent there every day, kind of lost track of time there. For example, I fell half-asleep and when I woke up, I felt like two hours had passed, while it was only some fifteen minutes actually. Sometimes my thoughts started acting independantly, I kind of saw some stranger outside and I decided that he was an adventurer and a bird watcher, for no apparent reason. Half-sleeping can be pretty interesting) and soon there were a lot of mountains and waterfalls, as well as several fjords around us. We visited stave churches, nice and mystical, Viking-like, as seen here.
Time passed, the vegetation went darker, and there were now many patches of snow everywhere.
We spent the night in a hostel in a little town (in Norway any settlement with over 200 people is a town) in the mountains. I'll put more photos in another post.