There has been some serious hardcore auroral action. But first, a little about my day.
I had a lesson in the morning so after some breakfast with Mrs Host and Little Host, I dispensed with that and made my way to the cathedral to attend a morning concert given by students at Mr Host’s school. As I’m financially still reeling from the night out in Oslo, I decided to walk there rather than pay 4,50€ for the fifteen-minute bus ride. Google Maps seems to think I walk a lot more slowly than I actually do, and the walk took about 25 minutes through colourful Bakklandet with some time for ooh-ing and aah-ing at the colourful wooden houses on the Nidelva river.
I walked over the seventeenth-century Gamle Bybr Old Town Bridge to the cathedral and arrived pretty much on time, with enough spare to shuffle gingerly over ice-disguised-as-snow and take some photographs. I also got to visit the cathedral without having to pay to get in, which was an added bonus. Much to my chagrin it turns out that the inability of people to know how to behave is not limited to first class on trains, and while the verger’s many attempts at getting grown adults to sit down and not wander around taking photographs were mostly successful, a handful of the indifferent continued to demonstrate the fake shutter noise on their phones.
One of them was sitting right next to me and I must have given her such a filthy look of death as I snarled “stop” that she looked at me in horror like a rabbit in headlights, then complied and put her phone away sheepishly. The other hardcore should-be-sterilised-at-births turned out to be French and my hissed and perhaps un-cathedrally explicit instructions about shutting up and how exactly to do it surprised them so much that they sat pretty much traumatised and motionless until a convenient round of applause allowed them to leave without saying another word.
Nidaros Cathedral dates from just after the reign of King Olav II and takes its name from Niðaróss, the medieval name for Trondheim. Construction started over Olav’s burial site in 1070 and wasn’t completed until over 230 years later, in 1300.
While it doesn’t sit well in my new quest for smallest things, it is the northernmost Gothic medieval cathedral in the world and is stunning. From the outside it’s quite innocuous and appears deceptively small, but once you’re inside everything somehow seems to take on much more majestic proportions and forces you to look up. I’m a sucker for a massive organ and the west end did not disappoint as it contains not only one of two, but also a magnificent rose window.
Sadly my ooh-and-aahing time there was limited as after the concert it was time to leave and we were quickly herded out by the verger who had shown such patience with the phone people, it seemed churlish to beg for more.
After a coffee and a cake I spent the afternoon wandering around Trondheim with my usual lack of determination taking pictures of pretty things. Now enjoying something of a tower trip, I walked up to and had a look at the Kristiansten Festning and enjoyed its views while being invigorated by the breeze. Sufficiently invigorated, I wandered back down to relative warmth and set about taking more pictures of pretty coloured wooden houses until it was time to find somewhere to have coffee.
By this time I’d noticed that a lot of Trondhjemmers were just sitting around anywhere the sun would warm them, savouring every moment. Following their lead, I found a lovely little café on Øvre Bakklandet where I sat outside in the sun and was given a blanket to put over me in a move which, I have discovered, is not an accoutrement of the old but in fact a most luxurious way of enjoying a cup of coffee while mitigating the effects of invigoration.
After even more photographs of pretty, I decided I needed something snacky to eat and contemplated a falafel for comparison with Gothenburg, but discovered even a simple falafel wrap costs about 12€ in Trondheim as opposed to four-euros-something in Gothenburg. As an example, a ‘signature burger’ meal from a regal burger chain is around 17€, which is frankly obscene for fast food. I had a not-meat cheesburger for about 2,50€, enough to sustain me until I made it back where I’m staying for proper food cooked by host.
Whale. I don’t usually eat meat but I’ve not had whale before and I’m unlikely to have a chance to have it again, so I tentatively tried some with crème fraîche and paprika. I secretly yummed and instantly felt guilty.
At about 10pm and after consultation with Host and a quick check of weather forecasts – space and Earth – I decided to try my luck again at the beach, this time all togged up with all available layers. I started in the same place as last night and managed to stay warm for about the first hour until things got challenging, at which point I started doing a little dance to keep me warm. At about eleven — I was quite cold by this point — I received an alert on my phone suggesting that “if the skies are clear,” I “might see some aurora within the hour.” Clearly my little aurora dance was doing more than just keeping me warm.
I continued with it until I decided that walking around might be a more efficient means to the same end and tried venturing down to the shoreline but struggled with the super-slippery snow-cum-ice and through fear of an ungainly fate, chose a space to stand still long enough to notice a tell-tale green smudge emerge above the horizon. After staring at it long enough to confirm it was an aurora and not my glasses steaming up, it started to slowly spread until a faint green ribbon stretched across the sky and impressed some hitherto unheard people further down in the dark enough for them to let out a collective woo.
I’d decided to walk back up to the rock by this point for fear of falling over standing still, and as I stood at the top doing an uncoordinated variation on The Floss, the wooers trudged back up through the snow en masse with their phones lighting the way, got into their cars, and drove off. I stood around a little longer willing the sky to go green. It took a lot of willing.
What had started as a faint ribbon and all but disappeared decided it was going to reward the faithfully non-departed (i.e. me) with an encore. It started as a bright green oval in the north east which got brighter and brighter and spread like a stain until it had not choice but to unfurl across the sky, sending shoots dancing up higher into the sky as it went. As if emboldened by this performance, a few of its friends decided to join in and before long what had been a few faint is-it-isn’t-it smears above the Trondheimsfjorden and the sodium street lights on the other side were most definitely losing their inhibitions and gracefully changing shape and dancing back and forth with each other until they decided I’d had enough, at which point they faded back into the obscurity of the night sky.
The whole spectacle lasted for about twenty minutes, from ten-past midnight to about half-past. I’ve seen it described on the Interwebs as “a celestial ballet”, which is probably about right.
And I was the only person still there to see it.
