European Winter Escapade 2019 - Part Eight - That Darkness Is Not Just The Arctic Winter...It Is Our Souls

#2 and I were reflecting last night as we drank tea and ate potato chips in the hotel lobby instead of chasing after the Northern Lights, that if you travel you are going to have disappointments. (I guess if you do anything, there is the chance of disappointment.)  Of course, if you don't travel often and you have a disappointment that proportionally is a much bigger deal. As the #2's and we travel a butt-ton, the number of disappointments is actually pretty small. But count our first 30 hours in Tromso as a MAJOR disappointment.

We can start with the weather. We had geared up shopping like crazy for the 'Arctic' experience. It does not look like it will go below freezing the whole time we are in Tromso. It rained all morning which meant even going out and taking pictures was pretty much squashed. There is no snow on the ground. It is dark all the time so I will grant you that.

Let's go on to the hotel.  Our initial room had a bed so small that I refused the room and asked to change to two single beds. It is a major US brand but is always understaffed even though it is a big hotel with a ton of traffic. The understaffing seems to be something of a standard operating procedure here. Its main draw bar on the upper floor with a view is closed all day on Sunday. The restaurant is not open for lunch on Sunday.

Moving on to restaurants, the food has been uniformly poor, service poor and terribly expensive. I had been warned that Norway was expensive. But honestly, the two meals we ate out so far were just about as much money as I have spent per person on a meal in a decade...especially since they were not good. It is not just a point of the flavors, representing local cuisine tendencies, are not to our liking (they are not) but the execution is just not there.

On Saturday when we arrived, 2B had lined us up for what was purported to be one of the better restaurants. We chose the four-course menu. The food lacked any of the basic flavor bases that really highlight any dish - salt, acidity, umami. They were uniformly bland and flat. The service was terrible (#3/3A you would feel right at home) with only 2 servers managing a whole dining room.  It was easily 30 to 40 minutes between courses while the chairs were hard wood which made sitting and waiting really uncomfortable. We had to get up and walk around just to ease the pain on our arthritic hips. Then the management had pulled a bit of a bait and switch on a wine. We ordered a bit of a splurge wine, a wine that I new specifically, that was from a very good vintage. The price was up there but not more than I would pay in the U.S. for the same. But the bottle that came out was from a different vintage than that advertised. When the wine was poured for tasting, we noticed right away that it was a shadow of what such a wine should be. 2B checked out the vintage on his phone and sure enough, the vintage was a particularly poor vintage for that region. He also had a view of the wine storage area from his seat and noted there were 6 more bottles of this 'replacement' vintage. So they were listing a premium wine on their menu and swapping out one that was selling retail at half the value. I was pissed. This whole fiasco set us back $500.

I will not say much about our second meal out (which took us almost an hour and a half to find) because so many places were closed on Sunday or only offering a fixed menu with either salt cod or smoked reindeer as the dishes), but if the sound of boiled, salted lamb ribs does not sound appealing to you, then you are with the four of us who equally did not find it very appealing. This meal - four entrees, three soups, two soft drinks, two coffees and two beers - only set us back $250.

And to top our day off, as we were getting all our gear on for our all-night trip to see the Northern Lights - our only reason for coming - 2B got an email from the guide saying that all the routes he takes were looking like they would be cloudy so he was calling off the trip and refunding our money. This didn't surprise me as I had looked at the regional weather which did not look good. Honestly, all of us but 2B were pleased that the guide was honest and didn't take our money to schlepp for hours and hours to see nothing. But it was a bummer nonetheless.

We will have one more chance tonight.