Northern Europe | Norway: Tromso in the Polar Night (Part 6)

We set off in the morning during blue hour. That blue of a sky that never quite gets light is actually pretty addictive once you’ve spent a while looking at it.

But on the way to the station, it started raining again. We got soaked, but rain-slicked Oslo in the blue hour was still quite beautiful.

We took the train to Oslo Airport and ended up spotting a vintage race car right in the middle of the airport. I looked it up and found out it was an iconic race car from a Norwegian animated film.

After going through security, we boarded our plane. It seemed to be on the small side—we could even see straight into the cockpit as we boarded.

Two hours later, we landed in Tromso. It was around one in the afternoon, and already pretty much dark.

Strictly speaking, though, it hadn’t “gotten dark”—it had never gotten light at all that day. The weather app even said outright: sunrise in more than 7 days. In other words, we were already in polar night territory.

There didn’t seem to be any jet bridges here. We stepped straight outside after getting off the plane and got our first glimpse of Tromso: a sea of white.

We took a bus to our rental. Looking out the window along the way, we really got a sense of just how deep the snow was here: you could barely see the road surface at all. Everything was covered in snow. Even so, the snowplows were still making pass after pass.

At last, we arrived at the rental we’d booked. It had a pretty nice feel overall. It’s the house pictured below; we stayed in a little room on the second floor.

After getting our things sorted out, we had a simple meal of instant noodles. And that was our first meal inside the Arctic Circle taken care of. With full stomachs, we got ready to head out and see Tromso in the polar night.