Land of the Midnight Sun

It truly is the land of the midnight sun and does stay light all night.  It was a bit disorienting to wake up at 2 AM and it's daylight.  As I went for a walk at 11PM, Kirkenes was closed down as you'd expect (see the picture below) , but it's certainly daylight and town looks abandoned.  Strange.  This is also the only place in the world where three borders meet-- just south of town at Treikstroysa (Three Borders) and there are also three time zones. Right now it's 8:00 in Norway, 9:00 in Finland and 6:00 in Russia although they are only feet apart.  For the millineum, the borders of the three countries were opened and a big party commenced to celebrate New Year's 2000 three times in a 4 hour period.  Usually the borders are closed and Russia has an electrified fence running along it's border!

A couple streets away is Andersgrotta.  During WWII Kirkenes was bombed over three hundred times because of it's strategic position next door to Russia.  There are iron ore mines were never bombed because the Germans were running them to send iron back to Germany.  The mines closed briefly in 1969, but have since reopened and are visible on the hills outside of town.  Andersgrotta is a massive bomb shelter in the solid rock that forms this area.  It has 4 entrance at different places and saved many of the people of Kirkenes during the unrelenting bombings. An interesting film shows Kirkenes flattened after the bombing without any buildings standing.

The flight path last night was over Northern Finland.  It is called the land of 10,000 lakes (so much for Minnesotan originalty!)  There is water everywhere in a pattern that makes the land look like it's flooded or suddenly sunk. Driving into town lakes, inlets, and rivers and the massive rock outcropping cover most of the land with small scrub trees-- very green sprinkled with well manicured small towns that look too perfect.