Arctic Circle (5 of 5): The ARKTIKUM Museum

Our last day in Rovaniemi we visit The Arktikum Museum a museum dedicated to teaching about arctic peoples, traditions, history, wild life and environment. The exhibits were great but we couldn't take pictures of most of that (we snuck a few). I was really struck by the building itself, though. Most of it is underground, practical in that cold climate and also mimicking the way nature shelters itself from the harsh winter in the north. You enter through the crecent shaped building at the back of this picture, then decend under the highway and into the grand hallway that is flanked on each side by exhibit space.
Looking down the whole length of the building, from the river to the entrance.
Chairs made from birth trees and reindeer hides. Much of the building uses these and other indigenous building materials.
We meet a polar bear,
... explore the inside of an ice chamber ...
... see a very old sled...
... hug a brown bear ...
... see some arctic fish ...
... and Kalee and Charles make an important proclamation.

There must be a traditional story about these geese and the little charter who is leading them, but we didn't hear it.



Kalee dances to some contemporary Sami folk music. We ended the day at a great restaurant at a mall next to our hotel and Kalee had perhaps her favorite moment of the whole trip - a free bouncer in the mall.

Arctic Circle (3 of 5): Rovaniemi

The city of Rovaniemi sits at the confluence of two rivers ( the Kemijoki River and its tributary, the Ounasjoki). Rivers are always important strategic points in war and Rovaniemi found itself in this situation in WWII. At the end of the war when German soldiers were retreating, they destroyed the entire city. Literally. The bombed out the bridge and leveled nearly every building.
90% of the city was leveled. Have you ever been in a city built entirely in the 1950s? Not really very inspiring architecturally. Starting with a blank slate Alvar Alto (of course) designed a new street layout that looks like reindeer antlers ... ... and new municipal buildings. We never ventured out far enough in the cold to see those buildings. Maybe they were more interesting than the main street.

One morning, though, we did walk down the pedestrian mall to the river. We saw this ...
... an Alvar Alto sculpture of the Northern Lights.

After the war they re-build the railroad bridge and then, more recently, added this bridge a bit further down river.
Short bench?
No, just lots of hard-packed snow.
In Lapland you can make a snowman that stays all winter long.
Kalee takes a bow.
Now, a few state, according to wikipedia:

• average temperature: +0.2 °C (+32°F)
• annual rainfall: 535 mm/annum (21 inches)
• snow stays on the grounds 183 days a year on average
• lowest temperature ever recorded: −47.5 °C (−54°F), recorded on January 28, 1999
• highest temperature ever recorded: +30.6 °C (+87°F)
• the midnight sun can be seen from June 6 to July 7