The book I read to research this post was The Berlitz Pocket Guide To Norway which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. This book is around 140 so is a fair length. I was surprised how many tourist attractions in that country are above the Arctic Circle. Many of them aren’t too commercialized either. Oslo with about 600,000 is the capital and by far the largest is this country of 4.6 million. It is one of the biggest countries in Europe with a 1/3 of the country being in the Arctic. Interestingly there are 5 million in the USA of Norwegian descent. There is little arable land and fish tends to be a main component of the diet. Stavanger which is a port and key city in the crude oil industry much of it offshore in the North Sea. There is a museum well worth visiting on this industry with things like a mock up of an oil rig. There are the large cities of Bergen and Trondheim with even rather quirky leprosy museum which at one time was quite prevalent in Bergen. Legally in Norway any settlement with more than 5,000 can call itself a city. In the Norvik is the cities of Narvik and Tromso which are both fairly small. There is also the island of Spitzbergen where there is a mining community at Longbyean and many Arctic expeditions have set off from here. Norway has the most Northerly town in the world and a little further up is the most Northerly point in Europe. There are quite a few glaciers or icefields which are mostly national parks and many take a cruise exploring the fjords. These are a kind of geological oddity where the coast is broken up more than usual and contain many islands. I did very much enjoy this book and do recommend it.
