Røros | The Mining Town

To kick off the week of wanderlust traveling, the class took a train four hours north to a town by the name of Røros. It was a small, cold town. In fact it was shockingly cold for the time of year it was. I did not expect to get off the train into 3C weather. Left in the cold the group had one task for the night: find the hostel which we had no clue where it was or what is was called, with out the help of the teacher who was on the next train north.

Thankfully people do exist during the night in Røros and with the help of our Norwegian student Kjersti we eventually wondered around enough to find it. Once there, we cozied up for the night and got prepared for the big day out on town.

The next day's activities consisted of a guided tour around town (it's small enough that that takes a morning) and then a tour of the mine that makes the town what it is today. It was quite fun and interesting to walk around the chilly city and see what a traditional Norwegian mining town looks like.



It was also somewhat frustrating to me for a reason I could not pin-point. I think it may have been the fact that it is on the UN heritage list and because of that the town now relies solely on tourism and preserving the history. It felt like a town that had died and been injected with enough preservatives to make it profitable. There was building restrictions on everything for the main part of town. Houses had to look a certain way and could only be painted with certain colours which back in the day use to be the crap paint you could make in your house. There was also a giant pile of slag, or smelting rubbish, that was a declared monument and couldn't be touched. I guess its just the way it must be sometimes because although I hate things being sold as tourism, it does happen. It's also important to preserve the history and the town doesn't have a lot of other income since the mine shut down in the 1980's. Alas, sigh, I am a camera touting tourist out to rule the world one click at a time.



This is not to say that all in town was gloomy and depressing for me, because I did in fact have a good time learning about how the mining effected Røros and Norway. It was also fun to go to a town with a much different and older feel than Hamar. It felt much more European almost.



I would say one of the best parts of the town was going down into the copper mine that started the city. The mine starts off by walking through the original mine started in the 1600's and then down another 10 meters to the more recent mine. It was impressive to see what people in the 1600's had the ability to do. It was also fun to see a copper mine and be able to compare it's similarities to the iron-ore mine that I went down into in Minnesota. Our tour guide for that portion was quite entertaining too with his random awkward pauses where he would just put on a crazy smile and ask "Any Questions?"



After the mine we hopped on a bus to take a four hour ride through the mountains to Trondheim. The ride wasn't bad. I slept for the first part and then watched all the picturesque mountains pass on by for the latter part.