Norway (27 Dec 24 - 10 Jan 2025) - Day 7 & 8

 2nd of January, we headed out to the town of Hell, just 30min drive from Trondheim. Hell is a small town, consisting of a small shopping center, petrol station, retirement home and train station. The name derives from the Old Norse world Hellir, meaning an overhang of cliff cave.

We started by parking at the Hell Kjøpesenter mall and took some photos before heading to the train station.

I guess I should insert some jokes about Hell freezing over, snowflakes chance in Hell and all that, but I'm pretty sure they've all been done before by people much funnier than me...

Hell Station:

The sign means Goods Handling, but it sounds like a Diablo game level

The telephone booth was a book-swap

This was the name of a childcare/school just near Hell

Of course to get to Hell you need to go down the Hell Tunnel

The next day (3rd Jan) we headed into Trondheim. The trip didn't start very well when we couldn't find a park and ended up stuck on what appeared to be a shared car/pedestrian mall, blocked by bollards and unable to turn around due to how narrow the road was.

This picture from Googlemaps shows the road in better conditions. When we were on it, the snow was piled up about a meter high on and slightly over each of the curbs, and there were so many pedestrians. Since the footpaths were covered, and it was a shared roadway, every time Kristine tried to reverse in the snow and ice, someone would walk behind down the middle of the road. To make matters worse, the car had a 'smart' function to slam on the brakes if it detected that you were about to collide with something, which included the soft snow, so randomly the car would slam on the brakes, which not only jolted us all around and made us panic we had hit something, it also messed up the traction on the ice and made it hard to get going again.

Eventually we found a small alley we could back into and got the car turned around. We ended up finding a park right next to Nidaros Cathedral, which was our first stop.

The cathedral was built in 1070-1300 over the burial site of King Olaf II (995-1030) and is the consecration site for the Kings of Norway. It underwent a a major reconstruction in 1869.

We couldn't enter the cathedral as it was closed for a funeral, but we could walk around and take some photos.

The most famous side of the cathedral is the west side, which houses many sculptures and the largest church bell in Norway, weighing 2,400kg.

Wikipedia has a good breakdown of the statues: here. Essentially the top row is Kings and Prophets of the Old Testament, the middle row left side is Norwegian Saints, then Theological Virtues (Hope, Love, Charity), then Annunciation (when Mary found out she was to be the mother of Jesus), then the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, the four cardinal virtues (truth, compassion, peace and justice), followed by two Norwegian Saints.

The bottom row is Evangelistic Kings, Saints and the Apostles.

The crucifixion is depicted in the center.

This was Kristine's favourites - leftmost is Olaf Tryggvason (Olaf I of Norway - 968-1000) who founded the city of the of Nidaros.  At his feet is the head of the slave, Tormod Kark, who killed his pagan master, Haakon Jarl.

To the right of him is Bishop Sigurd, who came to Norway from England to convert Norway to Christianity. His three nephews were beheaded by pagans in Sweden and their heads were placed in a bowl and thrown into a river. He recovered the bowl and the heads explained to him what had happened.

Our next stop was Gamle Bybro (Old Town Bridge). crossing over the Nidelva River to the area where we had gotten stuck earlier

The bridge was built in 1681 when Trondheim was rebuilt after the great fire of 1681.

We then headed into the main part of town to do our next load of washing at the laundromat and witnessed a major Norwegian disaster - a bus had broken down on the main road and was blocking every single bus coming into town.  The traffic workers were frantically trying to plow a path around them, while a tow-truck was hitched up: