Timepieces Essential!
By Gabi. Filed in Norway, Sweden |
Midnight Sun, a romantic term, a natural phenomena, that I always wanted to see. It is beautiful! But the days seem to go on and on and on. Anywhere above the Arctic Circle, you have at least one full day of daylight in the summer, so all of the Scandinavian countries enjoy this wonderful gift of nature. In Narvik, we were well above the Arctic Circle latitude, so the sun here does not fully set between the beginning of June until the beginning of July. Since Lothar had broken his watch, he was living in a type of twilight zone, never knowing what time it was. Every few hours, he’d venture the question about time and at each incident, he was surprised to hear the answer. His body clock and the sun clock just didn’t jive. We spoke to some locals, especially an engineering student, who was living in our B&B, and he told us that the Scandinavian people had this same problem, no matter how long they had been living here. I would have thought that people adjust more readily.
This whole beautiful summertime feeling, naturally has a downside, the depressions of winter. Whatever amount of time, that is gained in the summer, is proportionally lost in the winter, when a whole month of almost total darkness is the rule. True, you might have a showing of a bit of twilight from the radiating sun from the south, but total darkness for so long must be depressing. The months adjacent to the “darkness” month aren’t that much better, you then get between 1-4 hours of light. A wonderful phenomena in the winter though, is the Aurora Borealis, when the magnetic storms from the sun, light up the skies in beautiful colors; but these are usually brief and infrequent. Nevertheless, someday I would love to see that!
We learned that to battle the winter depressions, the Swedish people can go for a holiday down to southern Europe into the sun region, at the expense of the health insurance companies. Not a bad deal! You got to love
a socialized system of government.
Friday, June 17th 2005 at 10:48 am |
Once we saw beautiful Northern Lights ( aurora borealis) during a nighttime flight over the North Atlantic near Iceland. Maybe the author was sleeping at the time !