Your virtual tour of Alta Norway!

Alright, so I now in the middle of writing exams, instead of studying i shall tour you around the city i have been for the past 3 months. Located 69° latitude north, home of more reindeer than humans. I live right in the city center. A 3 minute walk from school, and a 2 minutes walk to shopping mall. I live in a student housing building. We have 1 kitchen for 8 people. There is a Unesco world heritage site, the Alta museum, many rock carvings, i think i already put some pictures up from when i visited there. Okay some boring history for you: in 1944 the whole town and area were burned down by German Nazis. All except one church, i have attended this church a few times. Everything is in Norwegain, but it is still very neat to experience. Anyways so besides this church, all the buildings are relatively new. Earlier i spoke about hiking to the Halldetoppen, there were 2 buildings on top of that mountains, Germans also destroyed them! All that is left from the original building is the stone foundations.
I'll put here some pictures of my room, i left it messy to give it a more student look. Cause you all know that if i'm not studying i am cleaning my room.

Juhls Gallery

For our last trip with the international student group we went to a town called Kautokeino. It was actually quite close to the Norwegian Finland border. We went to this silver gallery called juhls galleri. This couple moved here in the 50’s and built what started out as a small cabin, but they kept building on. It is now a huge gallery. The rooms were all very neat and different, in one room the roof was all caved in. I guess one winter the snow actually sunk down the roof. So the guy just left it. They were involved in this movement to help Afghanistan refuges; so one area of the gallery is dedicated to this Afghani culture. The couple are silver smiths, so they make a lot of Sami and Norsk jewelery. We got to go right into their workshop as they were working. There was a lot of exhibited displaying Sami culture and such. Don’t expect any presents from there, it was all quite expensive…

On the way home we stopped at this Sami culture College, a reindeer slaughtering plant (my vegetarian friend had the time of her life!) and this old church that was in a Sami movie we saw on an earlier trip.

Rah Rah Rilla in Russia!

So as part of our Cross Border Entrepreneurship course we were able to attend an Entrepreneurship meets Culture business week in Murmansk, Russia. This was the school we went too; Murmansk Humanities InstituteWe flew from Alta to a small Norsk town called Kirkenes, it was very near the Russian border. Though it takes 30 to fly straight from Alta to Kirkenes, our flight was not a direct one, we stopped at this small town call Vadsø, then for a 7 minute flight to Kirkenes! Though it did turn out to be around 10 minutes cause the pilot missed his landing, he came over the intercom saying he wanted us all to get our money's worth! So we met up with another class in Kirkenes and went by bus to Murmansk, the trip was made much longer because of the customs. I guess where we were entering was a very dense military region. Lots of guns, many passport checks, in and out of the bus. What a welcome to the ussr! We stayed in a very low class hotel, which just added to the adventure of it all. We had many classes; morning, afternoon and evening sessions. Some I just was not able to attend, due to shopping and site seeing distractions. The first evening my friend and i thought it would be nice to get a hair cut because it is so expensive in Norge. It is very hard to communicate what you want while speaking different languages. After a test piece of my hair turned green, I decided to go with just a cut.
One evening lecture took place on the atomic icebreaker 'lenin'. After the lecture we got a tour of the ship, it is docked in the Murmansk harbor. At the harbor there was this long fence, and on it where about a ton of locks. Lovers engraved a lock and put it on the fence, so for as long as the lock remained there their love would last! So romantical!
We went to so many markets, mostly selling fur coats and hats and vodka..
2 friends and i found the cutest cafe that we visited everyday. We pretty much tasted very cake in that place. Well i told my friend to order me a glass of hot chocolate (cause she speaks russian) and they gave a glass of melted chocolate! ha it was awesome! Exactly what everyone needs first thing in the morning, that and a creme puff.
At one souvenir shop I found the greatest matryoshka doll set. It had the last 5 american presidents inside each other!
On the return trip, we made 5 stops! It was crazy took us 4 hours total with no flight duration lasting over 15 minutes! I never had so many stops from Saskatoon to Alta.(Murmansk at night, it looked very beautiful with snow!)