On Sunday the 3th of December the polar night started here and I started to write this blog about the polar night.

But as it goes during this time of darkness, time slows down and eventually stops during the Christmas holidays.

So the blog was never finished, but last week daylight came back and energy started to flow again, bringing everything back to life. And now we desperately wait for the sun to show itself.

From the beginning of November the sun was leaving us, pulling away higher and higher into the mountains. But when the polar night started we did not exactly notice a difference from the day before, because it had been clouded a couple of days.

In my car my sunglasses still remind me of the sun warming my face and blinding my view. During snow and rain I automatically use the back window wiper only to see the pitch dark in the rear mirror. More and more I forget to use the mirrors driving in the dark mountains.

That the sun doesn’t rise doesn’t mean it is pitch dark the whole time, as many people think.

There are still some hours of twilight as a remembrance of the day, sunset and sunrise going over in each other colouring the sky in all kinds of delicate pastel colours – from yellow to orange, pink and red. Especially visible on cold, ‘sunny’ days.

There is something very special about this dark time, like everything we learned and know isn’t totally truth anymore.

Like the sun doesn’t come up tomorrow; there is no sun shining behind the clouds etc. This makes one wonder what reality is, ponder over what we are. Spirituality becomes a natural reaction.

Our conditioned behaviour doesn’t work either, with the day rhythm disturbed by the lack of light. The same goes for the summer with its midnight sun, making an arctic year feel like a really long day and night.

The insomnia that is known during the white nights in the summer is actually worse in the winter; the body doesn’t know when to go asleep without the sunlight.

A lot of the nights are decorated by the intriguing, beautiful Northern Lights, making it hard to go to bed anyway!

To survive this though time people celebrate Christmas intensively from the end of November with lots of julebord (Christmas dinners), Christmas decorations (especially a lot of lights around the house) and other preparations.

And even with all the tasks that have to be finished at work, time for Christmas-activities is always found. The Christmas holiday is a welcome and necessary break during this dark and low energy period.

On my hiking trip today the sun itself still wasn’t visible, but at a given moment daylight suddenly appeared, the tops of the mountains on the other site of the fjord were glowing up and the snow under my feet was starting to show shadows again. My body felt the warmth of the sun even without its loving touch.

Slowly the tension is building; who will send the first sun picture to the local newspapers? Sun celebrations are being planned everywhere and soon the kids in kindergarten will celebrate standing outside in the sun eating ‘boller’ and smiling like never before.

The post Mørketiden: The Polar Night appeared first on 51³Ô¹ÏÍø.

Everyone that comes to Norway is in total awe with the astonishing landscape and the people seemingly living in total harmony with it.

The cultural landscape looks like a troll just took all the houses and threw them onto the hills, mountains and around the lakes and fjords.

The towns, well that is another story. A few good examples on the side, towns are not really the places we’d like to visit here. They are only places where people go to buy stuff, go to work or go to school. And occasionally for some cultural activities and socializing.

Our town is no exception unfortunately. As a place where boats could land easily and farming was relatively good it became a trading place in the centre of the islands. A little harbour and a farm grew out to be an important trading settlement and even got city status after the law change in 1997.

After several bridges where build to connect the islands, dynamics changed, but the borders of the municipalities stayed as if the harbours where still the centres.

This brings some challenges for our maintenance and surveying colleagues who have to travel a lot to cover the whole area of the municipality.

A growing town in Northern Norway

Lately our town became an official region centre, with approximately 5.000 residents in the town and a little over 10.000 in the whole municipality.

Though the original farm still exists, providing a rare green breathing space in the centre of the town, other farms are located further away, threatened by the expanding town. However some nearby farms survive and thrive by aiming at authentic small-scale activities, producing delicious local organic products.

While working for the municipality with maps and with some experience in spatial planning I was so lucky to become intensively involved in the process around the new town plan some years ago. Although the project took several years of really hard labour and a lot of press from politicians and management, it was a great experience for the whole team.

As part of the compulsory stakeholder participation process our project team visited all schools to map how the children use their environment. We also had good cooperation with the local media, organised several public meetings and had some exhibitions in the shopping malls. During this process residents became very involved and even started to discuss their wishes and futuristic ideas on social media.

A changing perception

The whole way the town was perceived changed; for most people it was not enough anymore to have some shops with enough parking places. Green areas/corridors, meeting places and infrastructure for bicycles and pedestrians became new focus points.

The resulting plan got a lot of appreciation, not only in town, but also in the whole spatial planning field.

And thus I witnessed the birth of a new town, or better the conception of this wannabe town, because it still is work in progress.

The post What Makes a Town? appeared first on 51³Ô¹ÏÍø.

They told us that there are only two seasons in the Arctic, a white winter and a green winter. The green winter is short and abundant, immediately going over in the white winter after the first snow in the beginning of October. Green leaves freezing of the trees, snow covering the green grass.

And the white winter is long and harsh, with as its climax the polar night, lightened by the northern lights. Every year a mixture of gladness and anxiety over the coming winter creeps up on us while the days get colder.

Winter is actually a much needed break between the busy winter preparations after the summer holidays and the intensive start of the growing season in May/June. Summer is short and there is little time to do everything that has to be done in the summer, even shortened by the long summer holiday in July.

We love July, the nearby school is closed, few go to work and all our neighbours leave the area to live in their cottages somewhere in the mountains. Or travelling to the South.

Our first winter was beautiful – so much to enjoy and experience, but afterwards we started to understand the meaning of the winter song we learned the first year:

Nordaførr Vårvisa

It still brings tears to my eyes after all this years, because it totally describes the long winter feeling and the longing for the sun. For those that want to know .

Try to feel the North-Norwegian text; it is really poetic and deep. But for those that don’t understand I found an .

This year we are enjoying a really long autumn, with beautiful colours, making up for all the autumns we didn’t have the past 7 years.

This year everyone and everything seems calmer, more relaxed. Mountains are still inviting us over and Thor is seemingly still on his summer holiday, leaving the weather sunny and windless.

So chores can be spread over several weeks and peace is all over – instead of the normal autumn stress.

Or maybe it is just us getting more and more adapted.

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