Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Fjord water is cold...Flam-ing cold!

OK, so Flam is pronounced Flom, and the neighbouring town we went to, Aurlundsvangen, is really Orlundsvengen in English phonetic terms.
Again it’s idyllic, it’s nestled between mountains and waterfalls, and the wooden buildings are just stunning. Check out this micro-brewery, these are the chairs trolls would have, if indeed trolls have chairs.
I’m in grave danger of actually buying a troll. It’s like you keep seeing them everywhere, and eventually it wears you down and you start to fall for them. Look. Ah….
Anyway, we took a bus to Aurlundsvangen, eventually, which was a gorgeous bus-ride, 10 minutes in duration and 25 krone each (that’s $5...on a bus, yes really) where I discovered my dream fjord-view house. Cool huh?
We discovered there was a man-made basin in the town where bathers could bathe in crystal clear fjord water. I guess because it was shallower (although the basin was deep for a public swimming area) the water was supposed to be warmer.
IT WAS FREEZING! I swam three strokes in, and three out, and my English goose was cooked...er, frozen. Then I ran back in to get this picture (that IS me on the right) thus proving I did swim in the fjords, and scurried right back out again. There were some beautiful blonde Norwegian children playing in the water for ages, I guess you just get used to it, or maybe you’re biologically programmed to have a higher tolerance to cold if you’re Norwegian. I’m sure it did wonders for my metabolism, my whole body stung when I got out.
We stretched a while and talked in the sun. We chatted to a local lady whose child was a young future dancer and whose mum just got back together with her first ever boyfriend. Her mum’s 77 now, he’s 83 and she was first with him when she was 18 and he was 24...there's SO a short story right there! He runs the only grocery store in the town. As I’ve said before these are romantic people, the Norwegians.
We headed back to Flam, where Eric left me to go hike up the mountain to visit a big waterfall. My achilles is playing up (typical dancer injury) so I regretfully left him to it, but as I know someone who loves waterfalls, I made him take pictures for me to post. He said it was awesome in it's power up close.

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