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.