Oslo Airport

There is something eerily beautiful about airports under snow. This is how Oslo Airport looked earlier this evening when I passed through on the way from Paris to Stavanger. Oslo Airport appears strikingly modern, a cathedral of glass and steel, surrounded by a splendid white expanse of snow.

The light you can see in the dark distance of this photograph are a squadron of massive snow clearing vehicles which were parading around the runway just as I took the photograph at around 11 pm. I counted about fifteen of these vehicles, all chasing one after the other, travelling quite fast with big plumes of snow rising around them. I presume these vehicles are the source of a great pile of snow some 6 or 7 metres high and hundreds of metres long that I spotted from the aircraft as we taxied to our dock on arrival.

On taking off again, the aircraft was sprayed with hot water to remove ice from the wings, engulfing us in a thick plume of steam.

The oil wealth of Norway is well represented by Oslo Airport. It is certainly one of the most ostentatious buildings I have seen since living here in Norway. By comparison, Copenhagen airport (which I passed through on the way to Paris) appears sombre and dreary, its fixtures and fittings outdated, its refreshment stalls like tired railway buffets.

The Long Cold Snap

It was exactly 2 months ago that we parked our car at the airport and went back to the UK for Christmas. That night, it snowed heavily and when we came back to Norway three weeks later, we found the car encased in a thick layer of icy snow that took about an hour to clear before we could drive away.

The chart above from the Norwegian weather site www.yr.no shows that the temperature has been around 2 degrees cooler than normal throughout the last 2 months, hovering mainly somewhere below freezing. Lakes have frozen and the snow that fell on 17th December has been with us now for 2 months, occasionally augmented by further light falls. Mainly it has been very dry and cold, which is unusual for an area that is close to the sea and which has been often wet and cloudy in recent years. Back on the 1st Feb the Stavanger Aftenblad was already announcing a record winter with the longest spell of snow since 1952.

At the weekend, we went up into the hills to go skiing. It was very dramatic. The waterfalls on either side of the valley up which we travelled to Sirdal are frozen solid, white cataracts, mysteriously petrified. The rocks on either side of the valley are rather black against the snow and sometimes there are curtains of long icicles glittering by the roadside. In places the valleys we drive through are incredibly steep-sided U-shaped valleys formed by glaciers. They rise up so high that you feel as if the mountains are trying to curl their craggy fingers over the top of you.

Ice

Lying on the ground now for nearly a month, the snow starts to recrystallise through cold, clear nights. In the morning, giant sparkling facets have formed that glitter in the sunlight. Water and ice congeal and are smooth like new skin.

Skating on the lake, every inch of the surface is criss-crossed by the skaters boots like a giant web. The deep black ice shows its shining fractures and sometimes cracks into life with an unearthly echoing boom.

My daughter spins on her skates. "Look" she says, "I've made an eye."

The eye looks up into the cloudless blue sky that is the colour of glacier ice or meltwater. There are hundreds or even thousands of people on the lake. Their hard steel blades flash past. And the eye cannot blink.

On the edge of the frozen expanse, the people light fires and boil kettles for coffee. Steam and warm breath drift together against the frosted trees.

I take my daughter's hand, palpably somewhere between steam and ice.

Rainsack

A lot of children in Stavanger can be seen walking to school in the morning with fluorescent waterproof covers on their book satchels. This keeps their books dry and helps to stop the children getting run over in the dark.

My daughter is seen here striding purposefully towards the school door, trying to keep out of the rain. The cars have their lights on, not because it isn't fully daylight, but because in Norway everyone drives with their headlights on all the time. Even in the middle of a summer's day, oncoming drivers will flash you as a warning if you aren't using them.

Heavy Snow

Snow, on Monday night, was heavy. It fell as tiny flakes, but continuously, all night. And in the morning everything was white, the young trees bowed, unable to shrug off the thick heavy piles of frozen whiteness that had descended onto them. Tiny twigs barely thick as knitting needles supported great tranches of snow, rounded on top like freshly-baked loaves. The conifer outside our kitchen window stood there like a sad teenager with the weight of the world on its shoulders.

Then, through the day, settling. The snow compacted, its weight no longer perfectly evenly distributed, developing a certain brittleness. One by one, leaves, twigs, stems, began, by constant exertion, to shrug off their loads. Out of the corner of an eye: a flurry of falling wet snow and a branch still quivering almost imperceptibly after springing back into its accustomed position. A green sign or a spiky bare finger. An almost audible sigh of relief.

Sledging to School

When it snows in Norway, children are sometimes taken sledging by their teachers. Here sledges are left lined up outside a school while the children go to class.

Tiddeli Bom

I've just been for a late night jog and found when I went outside that it had been snowing. As I jogged around the block, I refound my footprints in the snow, not quite fresh as they began to be buried in the still falling snow.

These fresh footprints, my own, made only minutes before, slowly fading are like a slow-motion reality. They put me in touch with the passing moment in a way no other repetition can. And the more times I run around the block, the denser the footprints become, until it seems a small army has passed.

It is a concept made famous by a bear who is known as Ole Brumm in Norwegian, and Winnie-the-Pooh in English. 'Pooh' is the noise that Winnie makes when he blows bees or snow off his nose, and 'Brumm', according to my Norwegian teacher, is the noise Norwegian bears make. Ole is a popular Norwegian name.

I know this because we were studying an Ole Brumm song today in Norwegian class. It goes like this:

Det snør, det snør, tiddeli bom.
Det er det det gjør, tiddeli bom.
Nå snor det mye mer enn før,
Tiddeli bom og huttemegtul!

Så kaldt det er, tiddeli bom.
Jeg kjenner det her, tiddeli bom.
Jeg kjenner det på mine knær,
Tiddeli bom og huttemegtul!

I'll translate:

It's snowing, it's snowing, tiddeli bom.
That's what it does, tiddeli boom.
Now it's snowing a lot more than before,
Tiddeli bom and it's so cold!

So cold it is, tiddeli bom.
I know it here, tiddeli bom.
I know it through my knees,
Tiddeli bom and it's so cold!

Pursuing the winter theme, we also learnt about the seasons today in language class. Here is what the books says about winter in Norway:

"Noen sier: Vi har bare to årstider i Norge - en hvit vinter og en grønn vinter!"

Which translated means:

"Some say: We have only two seasons in Norway - a white winter and a green winter!"

Sledging

The patch of cold weather during the last couple of weeks appears to be behind us. This evening is very mild here in Stavanger. However the photograph of our neighbourhood kids racing down the long hill where we live shows how superbly snowy it was two weeks ago. We rushed out and bought a sledge, a really super-duper one for two people that has skis on the bottom, brakes and a steering wheel (really!)

Unfortunately it took me an evening to bolt it together and so we missed one day of sledging. When I tested it with my younger daughter the next day, I discovered too late that I had not bolted the steering wheel on correctly. It came off in my hands rather like something out of a slapstick movie. Fortunately, I was able to direct the fast moving, uncontrolled vehicle into a hedge and nobody was hurt.

After the snow came the ice, the blackest I have ever seen. Fortunately we had already switched the car to winter tyres at the end of October and so were prepared for it. It is highly recommended to drive gingerly at this time of year, especially since pedestrians have an unhappy tendancy to wear dark clothes. The other evening, in the pitch black of 6pm, my headlights picked out a pair of white shoes waltzing across a zebra crossing with no visible body attached. The person was almost completely dressed in black. Lucky for both of us they had those shoes on.

A Cold Wind

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Snow on the far hills,
ice on the step.

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