Wednesday, Sept 18

We took our time getting going this morning.  I wanted to finish the fingerless mits that I was knitting so that I could wear them today.  The temp is in the mid-30s. Before we set out, I had a lefsesnack (see pic). I bought it the other day at the supermarket.  It is a pre-packaged piece of lefse folded into a rectangle with butter, sugar, and cinnamon inside. (For those blog readers who are not in my family or from Minnesota, lefse is a sort of flat pancake made on a griddle from a dough of potatoes and flour.  It is generally served at Christmas time in families of Norwegian heritage in the US). For being a pre-packaged snack, it was actually really good! I will definitely buy more of these on this trip.

Our destination for the day was downtown Tromsø.  We had read that it could be difficult to park, so had scoped out what was called “tunnel” parking online.  We thought this was just a bad translation for an underground parking garage. Well, after some difficulty finding the entrance, we did, indeed, end up parking in an underground tunnel.  It felt like some sort of bunker. There were “halls” leading off to the right of the entrance tunnel, each had a sign to show how many parking spaces were available and a huge door that could seal off the individual hall.  The doorway through which we had to drive to get in to park was very narrow, definitely less than a foot of clearance on each side of the car.

We mostly just looked in shops downtown for the day.  We stopped for lunch at Kaffebønna Stortorget. I had an egg salad sandwich that was oozing creamy, yummy egg salad.  Rob had his first Norwegian kanel snurr (cinnamon bun). He seems to like the Norwegian version better than the Swedish version.  The Norwegian version is closer to an American cinnamon roll. It is a brother or sister to the American, while the Swedish version is  more of a cousin. As we shopped, I was on the hunt for a hat with a brim. I neglected to bring my usual gray travel hat, and have been regretting it since day one.  Because we are so far north, the sun never really gets above us. It’s always low in the sky, so always in my eyes, unless we are facing directly away from it. I suspect I am not the only one to have this problem.  There were lots of baseball caps for sale in the stores. I’m not really a baseball cap kinda girl. We found a summer staw hat on clearance at a shop – it was the last one and was kinda beat up, but I bought it and felt so much better as soon as we stepped out of the store.  Well, wouldn’t you know it, the next shop we went into had a really cute black felt winter hat with a cute little brim and back flap to keep the ears and neck warm. So, of course, I had to get that one, too. Now I’ve got 2 brim hats. I guess 2 is better than none. And if it’s warm I can wear the straw hat and if it’s cold the felt hat.  : )

We had wandered around shopping for so long that it was snack time, so we stopped at another cafe, Koslig Cafe, for kanel snurr and skoleboller.  Skoleboller is a vanilla coconut bun. Mostly a doughnut with vanilla custard in the middle (there’s no hole) and coconut coated around the outside.  It was okay, but I probably will try something else next time.