Over this last week I got to go on a couple trips planned by the groups for exchange students here at NTNU. The first trip was to the Rockheim Museum in Trondheim. This museum shows off rock music in Norway from the 1950s on. It was especially interesting walking around the museum after taking a rock history course last semester at the University of Minnesota.

The whole museum was set up to be really interactive. One area had laser pointers that you could point at targets on a wall to activate video and sound clips for all of the instruments on the wall. They had instruments from famous bands, old recording gear, and a display of different ways to store music from 8-tracks to iPods. Another area had an old mixing board that was about 8′ wide where each slider controlled a video on a big screen. Another room where you could use laser pointers to navigate a room with screens on all of the walls. When you pointed a laser pointer at a video it would start playing.

It was divided up so there was a room for each decade as well as a separate room specifically for Norwegian black metal. Apparently among contemporary Norwegian bands, black metal bands like Dimmu Borgir are the highest grossing internationally. I also found out one of my favorite bands, Pagan’s Mind, is from Norway. The most popular Norwegian band ever by a long shot is A-ha!

The last part of the tour was a big interactive exhibit where they had drums, guitar, keyboard, bass, and a microphone that you could try out and play along with famous Norwegian songs. They also had the guitar from a famous Norwegian 80s hair metal band called TNT (think Van Halen, Judas Priest, etc) teach you guitar riffs. He just made fun of you for not being as good as him so I gave up.

Røros

On Saturday we took a bus to Røros. Røros is an old mining town about 2.5 hours south of Trondheim. In 1644 it was discovered that there was copper in the hills surrounding the town so a very successful copper mine was started there. The town itself is along a river to get power with the actual mines farther away in the hills. It is known as one of the coldest places in Norway with a record low temperature of about -58 degrees fahrenheit. Luckily it was right around 32 degrees fahrenheit while we were there!

Our first stop was a tour of one of the mines. We actually toured two different connected mines. The first part was started not long after copper was found in the late 1600s while the second was started around 1930 when it was discovered that the first mine didn’t exhaust all of the copper, the vein just moved more than they expected. The mines were closed in the 1970s though when the Røros Mining Company went bankrupt. It was interesting seeing the differences between the two sections. The old part was mined by lighting fires to heat up the walls so they could be easily broken. The new section used more modern equipment like drills and dynamite and had minecart tracks throughout the mine. There were also huge caverns that had been cleared out. We got to walk through a pretty big section of the mine, but when we saw a map, the mine stretched far beyond what we could see.

The next part of our trip was visiting the town of Røros itself. Every year Røros has a big festival celebrating the mines and the indigenous Sami people. The big market for the festival was a little more touristy than I would have liked with lots of expensive somewhat pointless trinkets, but once we left that area of town it was a really interesting city. Many of the buildings in the town are really old and Røros has one of the biggest cathedrals in Norway despite it being such a small town. It was built by the Røros Mining Company basically because for a period they had so much money that they decided it would be a good investment to build this cathedral to help keep the miners in town happy and to attract people to the area.

After exploring town we had reindeer at one of the local hotels. Røros is also known for reindeer farming, even before the mines were started. The hotel the dinner was at had the Olympic biathlon race on and all of the Norwegians were crowded around the TV and would cheer or yell at each shot! It was pretty fun watching the Olympics along with them. One of my friends from Germany was afraid to talk after a German pulled ahead in the race though.

Next weekend I’m off to Sweden to go downhill skiing in Åre!