Landed in Bodø!

May 28, 2010
We have finally arrived! After what seems like hours of traveling including sitting on the runway for an extra hour and half while our flight was rerouted to avoid the lightning storm and running through the Oslo airport to go through customs, pick up our luggage and drop it off at our connecting airline, all within 45 minutes! We were greeted at the Bodø airport by three Rotarians including Per Vasshaug, the international contact and Richard Lindal, the incoming president. Since the Bodø airport is literally in the heart of town, we drove around the corner to our downtown hotel. The Grand Hotel/Clarion will be our home for the first two nights as we get adjusted to the time difference, get over our jet lag and learn how to sleep through the Midnight Sun. The hotel itself is special as it is one of only three buildings that partially survived the German bombing of Bodø in 1940 during World War II. The entire town was destroyed in that bombing, but as we can see today, they have picked themselves up and started over. In our hotel lobby, you can see an old wall mirror with a crack through the glass. The mirror was actually hanging in the Grand Hotel when a grenade was thrown into the building and is now kept in its original condition as a memory.

Our first day in Bodø was mostly a recovery day. We were treated to lunch by our host Rotarians after which we took an hour stroll through town. Bodø is a small city of about 40,000 residents but an important city since it is the northern endpoint of the train. It has thus become a communication city and remains tied to the rest of Norway via air, train and of course, boat. Originally founded as a fishing city, today most of the residents work at the hospital, within transportation communications or for the local and county governments. Bodø is the capital of the county; there are 19 counties throughout Norway.

Walking by the docks, Bodø, as with most cities in Norway, is situated right on the coast and between several mountains. At any given moment, you can see many personal and commercial boats including cruise ships headed toward Bergen, Estonia and Russia. In fact, during our stay here in Norway, we will be joining one leg of the Hurtigruten boat line which has 10 ships out on an 11-day roundtrip voyage between Bodø, Bergen and Finland. The docks are also home to five boats selling fresh fish for local residents. Customers visit the boats all day to buy shrimp by the pound.

The rest of our tour took us through the town including a visit to the local Cathedral (Protestant, which is the state religion of Norway) and City Hall. We walked by several residential neighborhoods as well. All of Bodø is walkable, within 10 minutes from any given area (including the airport) to downtown. Another interesting creation is Glass Heust or the Glass House. Essentially, architects designed a glass ceiling to connect two sides of a street to create an indoor mall for residents to shop, walk through and visit during the winter months. On both sides of the Glass Heust are stores or restaurants and on one end is the town square which is an open piazza with restaurants, a performance stage and more shops.

Our first day ended pretty early as we all needed to catch up on missed sleep. The Midnight Sun did not really affect us in the hotel since our curtains were pretty heavy and we were pretty exhausted but we shall see how the rest of the trip goes!