Sep 15 2008
Oslo is how far north?
I can hardly believe a week has gone by since my last post. I apologize. Time just seems to fly here.
The winters here in Oslo, though they may be slightly less intense than in Canada, are longer. You see Oslo is 16 degrees of latitude north of Toronto, that’s about 1770 kilometres. It’s far. If you need a map, my obsessive personality has created one for you (see map). Anyway the point is that winters here are rather long due to the northern position of Oslo, this also means long nights in the winter. From experience when I was here during Christmas last year (and this handy chart) I can tell you on the shortest days here the sun rises at about 9:00 and sets at 15:00, that’s not even six hours of sun. Compare that to Canada’s 7:48 and 16:44 times, giving you nearly nine hours of sun. Anyway so the winters here are long but perhaps not as cold due to the warm ocean currents that come from the south. To deal with this rather unappealing darkness the Norwegian populace has taken on an extreme love of candles. You see them everywhere you go, inside and outside. The outdoor cafes also have space heaters everywhere. I will have photos once people start using them. Also, and this I really love, every private bathroom has heating cables in the floors. The bathroom floors here are nice and warm which is great on those cold winter mornings. It’s also nice when you step out of the shower. Instead of stepping out onto a cold floor there are nice warm tiles to enjoy. It’s great.
How about a few photos then (photo gallery)? Today I only have a few. On the 30th of August I went, with the Solheim family again, to a town called Horten where lies one of Scandinavia’s greatest collection of burial mounds at the Borre Burial Mound Park. The place has been turned into a park and so these burial mounds are protected. The cemetery did not contain ordinary folk though, it was the resting place of kings. I say was because the remains have been since removed and much scientific work has been on them but I won’t bore you with the details. The mounds themselves are about five or six metres high and thirty or forty metres in diametre. The park has seven large mounds and number of smaller ones.
Vikings buried their dead in the ground or sometimes cremated them. Regardless of which method was used, and they changed over time and with the coming of Christianity, the dead were always placed in a ship or a boat of some sort. The poorer families of course couldn’t afford to use a real boat so they used “imaginary” boats made of rocks (see the photo – not taken by me). Of course the boat was to ferry the deceased to the “other side.”