Tag: Norway
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IS ARCTIC SNOW REALLY BLUE?
For years, I have been seeing photographs of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. And in nearly every photograph, the snow is blue. The Svalbard Archipelago is halfway between the Arctic Circle and the North Pole, so I often wondered if perhaps up there the snow truly is blue. I finally got an opportunity to travel
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A SEED’S JOURNEY TO THE FAR FAR NORTH
It’s a long long way between Zimbabwe and the Svalbard Archipelago in the Barents Sea inside the Arctic Circle. It’s 10,500 km precisely. That’s a long way for a seed to travel. But a bunch of vacuum packed seeds of rice, sorghum, millets and groundnuts made that journey this week. I saw those seeds at
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BACK TO OSLO
We left Ålesund early, the road tracing islands and bridges south through a familiar rhythm of ferries and tunnels. By late afternoon we rolled into Bergen, parked the car, and traded steering wheel for cable car, riding the Fløibanen up to Mount Fløyen. From the lookout, the city spread out in orderly colour—Bryggen’s timber fronts,
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418 STEPS OVER ÅLESUND
We reached Ålesund in the late afternoon after driving south from Kristiansund. The route followed the outer coast, linking islands by bridges and ferries, including sections of the Atlantic Ocean Road (Atlanterhavsveien), a stretch of infrastructure built to keep communities connected across open water. The journey itself was a reminder of how dependent this region
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GRANDPA GAUSTAD
For as long as I remember, my mother has flaunted her ‘Norwegian-ness’. Her mother, Gertrude Gaustad, was of full Norwegian stock. So mom has an appetite for lefse but when I would ask her about our Norwegian ancestors she would draw a blank. She didn’t know much except that her grandfather was named Ole, he
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OLAV OF BYNESET
I hit a brick wall once. A genealogical brick wall, that is. For five years I had been trying to find out where my great grandfather, Ole Erickson Gaustad, came from. I was getting nowhere and figured I’d never find out. But one night in 2007, I was Googling ‘Gaustad’ and the village where I
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CELEBRATING THE HUMAN LIFE CYCLE AT VIGELAND PARK
Visiting Oslo in July with family, I spent a hot but enjoyable morning walking through Vigeland Park, a monumental outdoor work charting the human life cycle. The park contains more than 200 sculptures in granite, bronze, and cast iron, all designed by Gustav Vigeland between 1924 and 1943. Vigeland conceived the layout as a single,
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