What it looked like just days before

Sunday I was in the city, and while waiting for the bus outside our bus station, snapped a few pictures. You are looking at one of the main roads in and out of town. The big structure is a parking garage (cheapest in town) and if you look behind it, you can just make out the top of our city's tallest mountain, Ulriken, covered in snow. It's the white pointy thing with the TV mast on top, to the left of the blue structure (which is an elevator shaft) on the parking garage. As you can see, with the exception of Ulriken, we didn't have chaotic snow. We were actually experimenting with spring.

The national differences in road design and marking fascinate me. There are so many different ways to do signs and dividing lines. Signs that tell you which lane to be in for a certain destination are green with white lettering where I come from (California) and gold with black lettering in Norway. Here, a solid line to show no passing is allowed is actually a dashed line with a very small space between the dashes, versus the version that does allow passing which has a much wider space between dashes. I assume this bit of possible confusion for a foreign motorist is just a way to save on paint. I don't actually know why it is the way it is. The Norwegians are simply fond of dashes, it seems. To show where the road ends and the shoulder begins, they paint a white dashed line. I do remember there being some logic to that along the lines (!) of the dashing showing that one was allowed to cross that line to pull over or something. Like the "solid" line showing "no passing" would actually prevent your wheels from crossing it. (Since it doesn't, we've had a few bad accidents lately, a prohibition on overtaking and passing traffic in tunnels has been suggested.)

If you follow the lane marked "Sotra", you will eventually get to a sign marked "Fyllingsdalen", which is where I live. You get to go through a tunnel, over a bridge, and through another tunnel. If you're lucky, you get to see a gorgeous sunset over the city fjord.

This day happened to be the 11th day so far this year of fairly clear skies. (No wonder I've been feeling blah.) And I saw a bit of beautiful sky while waiting for the bus, which why I took these pictures in the first place.