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Published: July 24th 2007
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Finally Getting Some Rest In Bergen
Our final stop in Norway was the decent sized city of Bergen on the west coast. To continue our travel from Balestrand we caught a ferry from just outside our hotel. While the ferry was a really fast one, it still took us four hours to get to Bergen. The trip takes you through a fjord and out close to the Atlantic before heading back west to Bergen. For the most part I slept and read a bit while Kel devoured a book she had picked up at a used bookstore the day before.
We had been really lucky in Norway, we had very little to no rain since our arrival. The only rain we received our whole time here was when we stepped off the ferry in Bergen. As often is the case, we had no idea where our hotel was or how to get there. While I waited with our bags under some cover, Kel found a map at the nearby ferry terminal. Bergen isn’t very large so we decided to hoof it through the light rain to our hotel. Even short distances aren’t fun with our packs
on but we braved it and arrived at our vintage 1968 Radisson hotel.
After checking in we decided to scope out town to see what we would do tomorrow with our only full day in Bergen. When Kel had booked the extended Norway in a Nutshell travel route through the tour guides, part of the package was a three hour bus tour of Bergen. I have a hatred of bus tours, there’s nothing less personal than showing up at a historic sight with sixty of your closest tourist friends. Thus, I wanted to see the town and see if a tour was worth it, or if we could just manage on our own.
Bergen is a nice little seaside town. Its big period in history was around the 13th century when it was part of the Hanseatic League. This group of European cities was centered around an early form of Germanic trade union. All the cities in the Hanseatic League thrived due to the constant movement of goods through their ports. Bergen, perfectly located right by the Atlantic but removed enough to be safe from the horrible north Atlantic weather, was well situated to be part of any
major water-based shipping/trade union. One section of town was known as the German sector up until WWII because of Bergen’s Hanseatic link. Since the Nazi took over and were later expelled from Norway, nothing in Bergen refers to Germany any more.
The main section of town to see is the area around the harbor. This scenic area has two of the major sights in all of Bergen, Bryggen (a recreation of Bergen’s old town) and the fish market. Kel and I briefly walked through the smelly but bustling fish market on our way around the harbor to Bryggen. We had read in our guidebook that Bryggen was filled with stores that sold Norwegian sweaters. I was interested in seeing if I could find a nice wool sweater to take home as a souvenir.
Bryggen is one of the 800 Unesco World Heritage sites around the world. This seeming indiscriminate list of protected world sights, both natural and historic, contains many of the sights we’ve seen on this trip. The list does afford some protection for these sights due to a list of restrictions that must be followed to keep your sight on the list, e.g. no changes to
architecture, no new building around natural sights, etc. Sometimes it feels that Unesco is everywhere and that every place in the world has at least one Unesco site. The prestige of the designation seems a little less distinct when every place in the world seems to be on the list.
We spent about an hour walking around Bryggens wooden buildings. These multicolored wooden structures comprise a section of the town, right on the riverside, that is about three or four blocks in size. Throughout the area are shops and boutiques, most of them centered around souvenirs and sweaters. We walked in and out of the shops and explored the back alleys of the area in search of a sweater that I liked. As usual we left empty handed; Kel and I have such a difficult time buying anything at this point. It’s very tough to justify buying anything when you can’t carry anything, on top of that I never found a sweater that I really liked.
That night we did our usual search for a decent restaurant and were lucky enough to stumble on a organic café in a back street away from the harbor. The food here
was really good despite the fact that they had run out of more than half of the items on the menu. Eventually they had to start turning people away because they had next to nothing to cook.
It has been rare for us to find good food in Norway. We were completely unprepared for the negligible food because the food in the rest of Scandinavia has been pretty decent and in some cases has been really good. We expected Norway to be no different than Sweden, Finland, etc. It turns out we were wrong. Norway has a series of restaurants that emulate chain restaurants in the United States. Similar to your neighborhood Applebee’s or Chili’s, Norway’s average restaurant puts out really expensive, really homogeneous and tasteless food. It’s actually surprising that a restaurant that isn’t part of a conglomerate/chain can manage to create food that tastes like it was made with pre-packed/frozen ingredients. I would say that this is quite an accomplishment but it’s something no restaurant should strive for in my estimation. If you come to this part pf the world, be prepared, the food is nothing to write home about.
A Full Day of R&R Given what Bergen had to offer, we chose to forego the tour and to catch up on our sleep. Since we had gotten up prior to 7am every day for the last few, it was time to catch up on sleep. We woke up around 10am which was blissful but that also meant that we had skipped the free breakfast in the hotel. So, when we finally got out on the town we had to immediately seek out food.
We found one of the ever present cruddy chain-ish restaurants and proceeded to have lunch. We left much happier because our bellies were full but had not really enjoyed our meal that much. Who knew that you could screw up potato skins?
After lunch Kel decided that she wanted to return to the hotel to work on the blog and call her Mom. I decided I would go off and work on pictures. When Kel’s not with me I can really take my time and try new techniques with the camera. So, for the next three hours I walked around town while Kel worked on the computer and had a LONG conversation with her Mom over Skype.
Bergen is a great place to walk around and just enjoy the day. While the weather was a bit overcast, the temperature was great which allowed me to really enjoy taking pictures and just wandering.
Later that afternoon we met back up for dinner. We used the guide book this time and got our selves a really good meal at a local seafood restaurant, another exception to the Norwegian rule. After dinner we watched some TV and started packing for our flight. On Wednesday we were catching an afternoon flight to Iceland.
Hope you are all well at home, we miss you!
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Dawn MacKerron
non-member comment
Norway Seems Expensive
How can anyone af-fjord to live there?