Arriving Rovaniemi in the Dark, Before the Splurge

The train pulled into Rovaniemi a little after twenty past seven in the morning, into a darkness that had no real intention of lifting anytime soon. This far into the Arctic in December, sunrise is less an event than a rumor, a few hours of pale blue twilight sometime around late morning standing in for what most of the world calls daytime.

Hostel Cafe Koti took me in early, tolerant of a guest who had clearly spent the night failing to sleep properly on a train, and I did the only sensible thing available to me: slept properly instead, in an actual stationary bed, for most of what counted as the morning.

Kaamos, the locals call it, the polar twilight that stands in for daylight this far north in December, and by early afternoon I had a small, blue tinted window of it to work with.

I used what light there was to walk the town at something close to ground level, low buildings and quiet streets doing nothing to compete with a sky that stayed the same soft dim blue for the few hours it bothered showing up at all. It was the first day on this entire trip with nothing booked, nothing planned, nowhere I was expected to be, and after three and a half weeks of trains timed to the minute that emptiness felt less like wasted time and more like something I had actually earned.

Nothing about the day asked to be remembered in detail. It asked, mostly, to be recovered from, one more overnight train's worth of tiredness set down before the actual reason I had come this far north started the next evening.