Day 12 - A City Tour, A Funicular, And A Relaxing Afternoon In Bergen

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Today is our second day in Bergen, and because we are staying in town, our only tour for the day was a city tour with a local guide at 9:30AM. This allowed us a well needed late sleep and we set the alarm for 7:30 for plenty of time to relax and have a good breakfast before our 9:30 tour. Unfortunately, we left the hotel room windows opens and someone dumped a bunch of glass bottles into the dumpster at 7:00 and woke us both up. Oh well, it was a good plan at least to sleep late.

Breakfast was great and we puttered around the room until the tour started. We met up with out local tour guide, Liv who was born and raised in Bergen and has lived here all her life. She was great and obviously knew everything there was to know about Bergen. Bergen is the second largest city in Norway with about 285,000 residents. It was founded in the 11^th century, and was always primarily a trading port because of the city fjord and harbor. About the middle of the 14^th century, the Germans set up a trading organization called the Hanseatic League and Bergen became one of the centers of the Hanseatic traders. Mostly it exported dried salted cod, and Liv let us know there was a traditional local dish called Bacalao which is a stew made with dried salted cod, tomatoes, potatoes, garlic, olive oil, and onions. It is evidently either absolutely delicious or the most vile food ever prepared depending on your taste. She recommended that we not try it to find out.

Since early Bergen consisted of mostly wooden houses, it has a long history of fires destroying large portions of the city. After the great fire of 1702 which burned almost all of the city to the ground, the series of medieval wooden houses called the Bryggen were built. Most visitors to Bergen will remember this famous row of houses and Bergen’s famous cityscape. Liv took us to visit the Bryggen houses, initially built as trading shops on the first floor and living spaces above, they are still in use today for restaurants and souvenir shops and are constantly being renovated and restored.

We also visited the harbor, where traditional steamboats are still in use, though now they are just for tourist groups. Liv also went into the Bergen explosion of 1944, when a Dutch vessel loaded with ammunition and explosives for World War II caught fire and exploded in the harbor. It killed about 150 people with another 4,000 or so injured. Many people had facial injuries or lost eyesight as they were looking out their windows at the ship fire in the harbor when the explosion shattered almost every window in the area.

After showing us around the older part of the city, we boarded the bus for a quick tour of the surrounding suburbs which were modern as are most Scandinavian cities. There was a push in the 1950s and 1960s to pull down all the old buildings and replace everything with modern architecture. Fortunately, more historically minded heads prevailed, and while the areas outside of old town are modern, the historical parts of the city were preserved. There was a primary school that was now dominated by Ukrainian refugee children, a former leper hospital that was now a museum that she recommended that we not visit, as she still cannot get some of the pictures out of her head from her visit as a child. There was a large elderly retirement home that for some reason has a view from all the windows on a cemetery. And while there are also an inordinate amount of 7-11 stores on every street corner, there is also a Mini-Mart 7-23 store since Norway, like all of Europe uses a 24 hour clock, so 11:00PM would be 23:00. There are also electric cars and busses everywhere. Norway is a leader in converting to electric cars and all vehicles that are electric have license plates that begin with "E" so they are easy to identify.

By 11:30, Liv was finished with the city tour, and we were left on our own for a free afternoon. The weather was nice, but the sky was beginning to cloud up, and since Bergen is noted for being a rainy city, we decided that we would waste no time in heading for the funicular to ride to the top of the mountain overlooking the city. Especially since the funicular is only a two minute walk from the hotel. Also it was getting close to noon, and Liv let us know that there were two cruise ships in the harbor, but that cruise ship passengers tended to return to the ship for lunch, so the funicular might not be too busy.

Sure enough, Liv was right, and we were able to walk right up, buy our tickets and ride the funicular to the top minutes later. A funicular is essentially a cable car, or rather a pair of counterbalanced cable cars with a cable attached between them pulling them up and down a steep slope. There is a large pully at the top which uses a motor to wind or unwind the cable. The cable cars run on a single track, with a provision for two tracks in the center, so that while one car is going up, the other car is coming down and in the center, they pass side by side. Most of the work is done by gravity on the car going down pulling the other car to the top with some assist from the motor on the pulley. It’s a clever design and has been used in many parts of the world since the early 19^th century.

The ride to the top took only a few minutes, and soon we were able to take pictures from far above the city. At the top there was a play area for the children, some goats for petting were wandering around, and there was a souvenir shop, and a couple of cafes. There is also a lake available where you can either paddleboard or canoe for free, but neither Jody nor I were much interested in anything to do with the water since the air temperature was only 60 degrees, and the water temperature was much colder.

We decided our best bet was a coffee and a cinnamon roll from the café and they were delicious! By now were reinvigorated and ready to head out for some souvenir shopping. So we headed back down the mountain on the funicular, and back to drop some stuff off at the hotel before heading out. Fortunately, our city tour with Liv was a real help in figuring out where to go. Our first stop was the shops of Bryggen, and there was a lot to choose from. A lot of the souvenirs were the same things available in any shop, but there were a few where there were things made by local artisans, and these are the kind of places we like best.

There were some beautiful sweaters, coats, and gloves, and all sorts of winter apparel available. If we still lived in a cold climate, we would certainly picked up on some of these wonderful garments. But we live in Florida, where shorts and t-shirts are the uniform of the day. So we stuck to t-shirts and magnets with an occasional piece of jewelry thrown in. After finishing the exploration of the Bryggen shops, we headed back to the hotel to drop off our purchases and decide where to go next.

There were a couple of museums in the area, but they didn’t look very interesting. There was a local art museum in town, but it was too far to walk. So we just decided to head out toward the harbor, and we encountered a few more shops along the way. We were also checking out restaurants as we were on our own for dinner tonight and were trying to pick out a good place. When we first started travelling in Europe, we were apprehensive about figuring out restaurants. But as we get more experience, we also figured out to ask for recommendations from the tour director who has eaten in a lot of these places, or just wing it and hope for the best! In Scandinavia, everyone has been friendly and helpful, and all of the food has been great.

Liv had also recommended that we check out the fish market and it did not disappoint! The fish market is basically a series of tents set up in the square near the harbor, where you can either buy the fish outright, or there is a small restaurant where they will cook it for you. In addition to the normal cod and salmon, there were lots fish I had never seen before. There was also caviar and huge live king crabs. You could also get moose burgers and reindeer meat, but the strangest of all was whale meat. It’s evidently not illegal to kill and eat whale around here, but we had no interest at all in trying it. It is a very dark meat and did not look any too appetizing to us.

There are certainly a lot of restaurants in Norway, and most have a large assortment of seafood. There was also the classiest McDonalds we had ever seen, located on the first floor of an 18^th century house. They also served a burger called the “Homestyle Truffle and Onion” certainly a lot different than our typical Big Mac. There also seems to be a pizzeria on every street corner throughout Norway. Evidently, Norwegians are obsessed with pizza. But we looked at some of their offerings and the toppings were not very appealing. They were usually small and covered with all kinds of meats and vegetables and nothing we were at all interested in trying.

There is also a local favorite fish soup, but it’s expensive and really intended to be a main course, so we ended up deciding on a place that Maja recommended called Egon’s and the food was delicious. We had the very safe Norwegian Cod, baked with boiled potatoes and vegetables and we were both impressed. After dinner, we both decided that we had walked enough today to warrant a dessert, so I had something called Egon’s Garden that actually looked like a dirt garden with rocks and plants, but it was actually vanilla ice cream with chocolate crumbles on top and a couple of rocks made of something we couldn’t figure out and a sprig on mint on top. Jody has some sort of chocolate lava cake with raspberry and vanilla ice cream. The perfect ending to a perfect day!

Now that our batteries have recharged, we are ready to pack it up in the morning for our final destination In Oslo. I’m not sure what we’re doing yet, but I’m sure it will be great!

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