Norwegians celebrate Constitution Day on the 17th of May and they take it very seriously. It's basically a scene from one of those sci-fi movies where the good guys end up in a parallel universe that looks almost exactly like the one they came from except ... the boys all wear business suits and the girls look like they just stepped out of an illustrated Scandinavian fairy tale. Also there are a lot of little Norwegian flags everywhere.

In Trondheim the day's festivities include a couple of little carnivals around town, many people trying to sell you a hotdog and a soda for $10, and three parades: school children, clubs/organizations, and the Russ kids.

We hate the Russ kids so we skipped that one.

The weather was 74 degrees and sunny.

Becca had a lot of fun marching in the morning parade with her school. The afternoon parade was quite entertaining and included colorful costumes, very athletic little Norwegians (i.e. gymnastics clubs doing flips for over an hour straight), and some fun props (i.e. sailboats on wheels). After the parades we went over and grilled some meat with Anders and performed some maintanance on one of his mountain bikes to get it ready to ride over the long weekend.

Becca's school during the children's parade. If you look closely you can see Becca!

Some men were better dressed than others

Even Harrison Ford participated in the parade

Little Norwegians are show-offs

Fancy shoes and tiny flags

It was like the carnival rides had replaced the height requirement with a dress code

Fnutt supervised the grill from the kitchen window and only tried to escape once

The whipped cream on Becca's cake was no match for the sunny weather