1st of November 2009 First day at school and work

 Finn and Luca with Matthis waiting for the door to open on their first day at Borktun skole.
This is Phil on the way to work at NOFIMA.
The photo was taken at about 8.00 am with a beautiful sunrise over the mainland in the background.
Before Phil went to his work we all took Finn and Luca to Borktun skole for their first day of school.
Luca and Finn had a great first day and Phil was made very welcome at his new work.

Our new home in Tromsdalen

This is the view from our house. What you see is the city centre on the island of Tromso. We live on the mainland and either get into town via a tunnel under the sea or over the big beautiful bridge you see in the distance. It takes a very short bus ride into town or an easy 25 to 30 min. walk over the bridge. The view from the bridge is beautiful and you can see towards the fijords in the distance in both directions. There are also some big fishing boats and one can look straight into the boat  from above the bridge. Matthis loves to look into the boats and his imagination produces some wonderful stories.
Please notice the daylight on the photos.When we first arrived we still had proper day time and night time. I will show you some photos of the twilight, we are experiencing now, later on.

First week in Tromso - continued

The next few days were consumed by organisational matters such as going to the police to register our arrival and applying for our national numbers which is the most important thing when living in norway. " All applications will be processed in the next couple of month", we were told and considered ourselves lucky. If we would have applied for permits from outside the country the processing time would have been 6 months!

We realised that things were not going to be happening fast but Phil at least got his temporary work permit which enabled him to start working the next week.

New beginnings are always hard and all in all we managed to get a few balls rolling during that first week and  felt relatively good about it. The week passed very fast and on Sunday we moved to our final destination at  number 15, Norselveien in Tromsdalen. We took a Taxi to our new home and I think the whole neighbourhood saw us arriving. Soon there were a number of children mingeling in front of our house, hoping to get a glimpse of us and those new children from New Zealand.

We met Knut and Hilde, our neighbours and they came over for a cup of coffee the same afternoon. Finn, Luca and Matthis went outside and met the children from the neighbourhood. We were amazed how well they all spoke english, even the relatively young children. The kids played football all afternoon and we received some first hand information about living in Tromso from our neighbours.