Today Sarah took all of us around Trondheim to see the sights while Sigmund had to work with his string orchestra, rehearsing for a show. Our first stop was the world championship sky jump course that was used in the 1997 world championships. The Norwegians are of course very good at winter sports! The jump is huge and they fly through the air for about 120 meters! They were doing some repair work on it but it's scale was impressive.
Next we visited the open air museum and it was really interesting. They had constructed a little town and various era's of Norwegian were represented within the grounds. Of course the first place we needed to visit was the candy shop old traditional sticky candies were made and sold. The kids were immediately into that! Sarah was pretty canny.
Then it was strait across the road to the dentistry display! After scaring the wits out of the kids with that we went over to the older village. The museum had transported many houses and huts down from the country to display the lifestyle and buildings.
A unique character to these was their grass roofs. The roofs were lined with bark from birch trees and turf was placed on top of this and grass and flowers grew from there. It looked very distinctive and in the summer right now everything is flowering so you would have a flowering roof. Apparently it gives great insulation to the houses. This traditional style of roofing is still seen on houses all around Trondheim.
The huts were small. A typical farm set up would consist of a group of small huts designed for different purposes and functions. Some for the farm animals, some for industries of various sorts and there was even a food storage one that was on stilts and the stairs that didn't connect to the building. This was to stop mice infestations of the food.
We went into one hut and there was a lady making flat bread on a fire and we were all able to try it. Many of the huts were restored inside and by the displays of items you got an impression of traditional life from many years ago. It looked cramped and cold but with the fires going I imagine it was rather cosy actually. Favourite colours for decorations seemed to be greens and blues. We came upon an old church built in the 1170. Which reminds of another aspect about the architecture here. Mostly the buildings of any type are constructed out of wood. All the old buildings of course were but still all through the city is wood houses painted either orange, red or cream. I never expected that, thought it would be stone. However there certainly doesn't seemed to be a great shortage of wooded lands around here. Also doesn't seem to be a white ant threat either as many of the wooden structures have lasted for a thousand years!
We went into one hut and there was a lady making flat bread on a fire and we were all able to try it. Many of the huts were restored inside and by the displays of items you got an impression of traditional life from many years ago. It looked cramped and cold but with the fires going I imagine it was rather cosy actually. Favourite colours for decorations seemed to be greens and blues. We came upon an old church built in the 1170. Which reminds of another aspect about the architecture here. Mostly the buildings of any type are constructed out of wood. All the old buildings of course were but still all through the city is wood houses painted either orange, red or cream. I never expected that, thought it would be stone. However there certainly doesn't seemed to be a great shortage of wooded lands around here. Also doesn't seem to be a white ant threat either as many of the wooden structures have lasted for a thousand years!
After , we took a trip across to Monk Island which had been a monastery for many years. In the harbour there was some really old Norwegian fishing boats. In fact, they were exact restorations of some of the old boats we had seen in the museum. On the island the kids had a swim in the icy cold water. Genevieve was very brave staying in for so long. It was much colder then Lake Melu in Corisca apparently!
Fred
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