On the Arctic’s suburban fringe, weekends center on skiing, shopping at the mall, and swimming. In a time of global volatility, it is all reassuringly mundane.
“How is life in Norway?” my friend in Oslo asked me over WhatsApp the other day. “It’s very peaceful,” I texted back. “Yeah, nothing ever happens here,” he wrote. And that was from the capital.
I decided to find out for myself what happens on the weekend in Tromsø. Things got off to a late start when I had the misfortune of leaving the office long after 3pm on Friday, when it seems that most people head home. I was stuck at the office on Zoom calls with the U.S., several time zones behind. During one of my pixellated meetings, news was shared that the visas of some international students at the University of Washington, which had been initially revoked, had been reinstated by the federal government. This was meant to be reassuring, but it only served to confirm my view that the U.S. has quickly slid into authoritarianism.
Around 7pm, when the sun was still beaming – it is already the season of the midnight sun here, despite it only being late April – I finally strapped on my skis and headed home. I nipped past the KSAT ground station, which anywhere else would be a high security site. Here, you can just slide right up to the antennas and sing your Space Age heart out.
I fell asleep early and woke up on Saturday morning to a text from my colleague asking if I wanted to join her for ski touring. It had snowed overnight, but now the sun was shining, making it a good day for hitting some powder. Ski touring is where you put skins on the bottom of your skis so you can move uphill, and then take them off so you can shred downhill. In other words, it’s called “earning your turns.”
I got ready and headed out the door, only to fall hard on the ice on my steep driveway while carrying my skis and answering the phone at the same time. “Uh, hello?” my colleague at the other end fretted to sounds of me struggling. This is the second time that I’ve slid hard on black ice hidden under snow on my driveway in two weeks. Clearly, I haven’t learned to walk in wintry conditions like a Norwegian yet.
After a short drive, we reached the trailhead, turned on our avalanche beacons, and started skiing up. It took us 90 minutes to reach what appeared to be some sort of radio station. My colleague knew I’d want to stop there, seeing as it was Arctic infrastructure of some sort. We took some obligatory photos over the azure fjords and then started skiing down. When we got back to the parking lot, it seemed everyone and their mother was there. If hiking is the main weekend activity of North Norwegians in summer, ski touring is its wintertime equivalent.
On the way home, we stopped at the grocery store, which was also packed. Saturday is the big day for shopping across Norway, since stores are largely closed on Sundays. After we grabbed some juice and Sørlands potato chips, I asked my colleague if she wouldn’t mind stopping quickly at a camera store at the mall, which we would pass on our way back to the center of town, so that I could pick up a spare camera battery. Amazon is not a thing in Norway, so I would actually have to go to a brick and mortar store to run this errand. She politely declined, warning me that doing so would take far longer than I thought, since “everyone” would be at the mall on Saturday. “No worries,” I responded. “I’ll go there in the afternoon.”
So, after a quick lunch of shrimp salad dolloped atop Wasa crackers at home, I walked 45 minutes to the mall in freshly fallen snow. I passed by two little girls who couldn’t have been older than five or six out for a walk by themselves dragging their sleds behind them while giggling. They struck up a little conversation with two bemused middle-aged women in the park. A few people were out cross-country skiing while others were out walking their dogs. Over on the sled hill, two boys were knocking their socks off. It was all very charming.
I reached what I thought was the mall, but what I would later discover was actually a strip mall around the actual mall. In some respects, Norwegian suburban planning exceeds the wildest dreams of American planners. I watched two teenagers saunter into what might possibly be the world’s northernmost Burger King, holding hands and decked out in black hoodies and baggy jeans like it was 1999. Those who dispute Francis Fukuyama’s claim that history ended in the 1990s would do well to visit the outskirts of Tromsø.
As I tried in vain to find the entrance to the mall, I got sidetracked by a giant grocery store. Lost in the supermarket, I gawked at the dozens of packages of whale meat in the frozen aisle while once again failing in my quest to procure kale. This staple of millennial diets does not seem to have made its way to northern Norway. Next door at the Peppe’s Pizza chain, however, you can still get a slice of pizza for only 49 NOK (about $4.70). That’s far less than you pay these days in major U.S. cities, where you would have to be lucky to even find a Sbarro still in business at a mall (the only locations I can think of, oddly enough, are at Keflavik Airport in Iceland and in downtown Reykjavik).
Finally, I figured out how to get into the actual mall, which is called Jekta Storsenter. Whether I would be able to find the camera store was another question. This mall was built like a casino, with no clocks and no clear exits. I went around and around, passing various stores selling milkshakes on my hunt for the camera store until, defeated, I gave in to temptation and bought a frozen yogurt. The shop didn’t have the tart flavor popular in southern California, which is unsurprising given the sweet tooth of Norwegians, so I ended up getting coconut and pistachio. I ended up with far more than I wanted since the self-serve machine was slow to cease squishing out its frozen concoction. A good upselling trick, that one. I heaped bits of caramelized hazelnut, almond, and pistachio “krokant” on top, which is one of the preferred ice cream toppings of Norwegians.
The frozen yogurt store was absolutely packed, as was almost every other establishment at the mall. Anyone who has penned the dozens of newspaper articles and even academic studies on the death of the mall clearly hasn’t been to Norway because the architectural design birthed by Austrian-American architect Victor Gruen is alive and kicking on the edge of Europe. Idling in Jekta Storsenter’s brightly lit corridors on a sugar high with brain freeze, I inadvertently found myself reliving my teenage years, when my mother would chastise me every winter break for becoming a mallrat. I mean, what else was there to do? And what else is there to do in Tromsø, besides ski?
Walking from the paved paradise of the mall to the bus stop with a sublime view of the mountains in the distance.
It is a good question, and one that I overheard a local ski guide try to answer in conversation with his two British clients at Vervet Bakeri, one of the few cafes open in town on Sunday morning. I headed there in the middle of a snowstorm in the hopes of doing some copyediting only to get sidetracked by eavesdropping.
The Norwegian guide started off by telling the Englishmen that this bakery was a mere yard a few years prior. He added that relatively recently, “Tromsø Airport might have been closed on a Sunday afternoon just because there were no flights.” Now, though, it’s a different story.
“I think that Tromsø has grown into something different that it was not meant to be.” He complained, “I read a few months ago that easyJet opened 10 new routes to Tromsø. I said to myself, ‘Oh, why is that?'”
He went on to describe that the proliferation of direct, low-cost flights is due to the city becoming something, in his words, of an ‘Arctic capital.’ “Tromsø is kind of like living on an island, but there are 140 nations here. I think they are attracted by this Arctic thing,” he surmised. However, he seemed puzzled by what exactly all these tourists coming from around Europe expect to do when they touch down in north Norway.
Rhetorically, he asked the two Englishmen, “When there is a full easyJet flight landing from Bristol, it’s like, what do they expect, apart from complaining about the high beer prices?” The two men chuckled. After offering them a local tip of where they could order an entire pint of beer for 45 NOK (less than £4), the Norwegian rambled on. “They don’t know what to do because they are not skiers. So they book some expensive tour on a bus to see the northern lights with an Indian driver and a Sami guide. And then they book another expensive tour to see some reindeer. But then they come back to Tromsø and realize you can see reindeer in the streets here.”
The steep, snowy streets of Tromsø, with not a reindeer in sight.
I’ve never see in reindeer walking around, and I have been coming to this city for twelve years. What I can tell you is that there is one more thing to do in Tromsø on a snowy weekend in spring: go to the pool. This activity seems to be increasingly on the radar of tourists given the complaints on Google Maps of Tromsøbadet (the public pool), where one resentful local called for introducing special tourist prices given the apparent overuse of the taxpayer-financed facility by visitors.
I skied over to the pool on Sunday afternoon and did notice a handful of interlopers. The French gave themselves away with their bathing caps, the Finnish with their elven incantations, and the Chinese with their shoes, which they tried to wear into the shower area only to be quickly corrected by a polite locker room attendant. For the most part, though, the pool was filled with local families and teenagers.
Under a huge digital screen advertising various programs at the pool, from swimming for elderly people to morning “Zen” courses in the sauna, I completed 20 laps of the Olympic-length pool. Then, I swam through the incredible recreational pool area, which opens into an outdoor pool area that has a view over Kvaløya, the fjord, and the surrounding mountains. Boisterous teenagers cannonballed into the water while others slid screaming down multi-side waterslides. One corner of the pool turned sharply into an eerie, high-ceilinged room with dark green tiles and no light from the outside. I rested in there for about a minute until a dad came in with his water-winged toddler, who started whimpering at the strange ambience.
Back in the main pool area, near the tables next to the floor-to-ceiling glass walls, kids scarfed down pizza and ice cream while exhausted parents downed cups of coffee in blue plastic mugs. All of this seemed somewhat unsanitary by Nordic bathing standards. None of this would have passed muster in Iceland, whose bathhouses are relentlessly clean. I have barely seen even a stray hair in that country’s pools. Norway offers a different interpretation of bathing culture, one that is perhaps a bit less cleansing and a bit more like going to a swimmable mall.
In many ways, Norway manages to preserve or even combine public spaces popularized from the 20th century: malls and swimming pools. The latter are especially important for socializing because mobile phones are prohibited from use. This makes pools one of the last reprieves where people can chitchat without being distracted by notifications or the urge to scroll. Instead, the main interruptions are shrieking toddlers and cackling teenagers. The cacophony was a welcome reminder of what it means to be human in an era where we so often interact through screens – especially in the US, where you don’t even have to get off your couch to go shopping anymore.
Not that I talked to anyone while at the pool, of course. This still being Norway and me being a stranger in a strange land, that would have been weird. At the turnstile, a robotic machine out of the future commanded me to insert my microchipped wristband, which had provided access to the pool and a locker, before exiting.
I walked out into the snow, steam coming off the top of my head, and found my skis right where I had left them, unsecured at the bike rack. I hadn’t worried about them being stolen because this was Norway, and it still felt like the 1990s, anyway. I skied home, turned on national television channel NRK1, and warmed up a waffle with brunost (brown cheese) and raspberry jam. I felt like I had spent the weekend as locals would have: skiing, shopping, and swimming.
In the end, nothing really did happen, as my friend down in Oslo described of life Norway. “I guess boredom is the drawback on playing Life on Earth on very easy mode,” a Redditor once quipped regarding the country. During the course of my snowy stroll to the mall, I had listened to Ezra Klein’s horrifying podcast on deportations from the US to Ecuador and the loss of due process, which is called, “The Emergency Is Here.” The emergency is most definitely not in Norway. If boredom is the price to pay, it is a worthy one.
