September 25, 2009
Next thing I knew it was 8 AM and we’d been asleep for 10 or 11 hours. Holy crap! Good thing we were staying at the hotel. We got our stuff together, barely got our luggage checked in time, and got on our flight to Bergen. The flight was pretty crowded, I wonder if Bergen is a vacation town for Europeans.
We got to Bergen with no major issues, claimed our luggage, and headed off for the city. The city looks really pretty - lots of mountains with little houses built into the side. Due to the late start, we hadn’t had any breakfast, and Shannon wasn’t feeling well. Hopefully this won’t be a long bus ride to the city. It wasn’t, we got there in a half hour or so and the bus dropped us off about a block from the hotel. Unfortunately, that was too far and Shannon got sick on the street outside our hotel. Not a good start for Bergen. Oh, and it was raining (again).
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| Rainy Bergen |
We got into the hotel and got to our room. The room was tiny; there was a bed, a chair, and a bathroom. Good thing we’re not staying here for long. We got Shannon feeling better, got our rain gear on, and headed out into town. First thing we needed was some food. Shannon found a restaurant in Frommers and we decided to check it out. The restaurant was nothing more than a cafeteria in a hotel, but it was surprisingly good. Shannon ordered meatballs, and I had the cheese schnitzel. Both were delicious. After filling our bellies, we headed off into town.
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| Mmmm....meatballs |
We walked along the harbor, past the fish market, near a few churches, and into the castle. It was very cool. The rain wasn’t too bothersome, the castle was cool, and the town was really beautiful.
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| Our rainy castle |
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| This picture was totally Shannon's idea |
The town was full of winding, hilly roads, scenic views, and was really easy to navigate. The town is a lot smaller than Stockholm. Roads just dead ended into paths up into the mountains and people lived surprisingly far up the mountain. I have no idea how they got home every day from work. Maybe they don’t work. Who knows? Good for them if they don’t. Work is lame.
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| Hilly, rainy Bergen |
There were some huge ships in the harbor, I wonder what they all did. Fishing boats, cargo boats, tour boats, maybe some oil and gas exploration in the North Sea. I just know they were large, and that I'm kind of a nerd.
After sightseeing, we stopped at a cool little beer garden on Bulls Plade and had a beer.
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| Said beer |
After that, we headed back to the hotel to put some dry clothes on before dinner. We wanted to go to a local restaurant for dinner, but quickly got scared off by menus that were all in Norwegian. As we discovered, therein lays the rub with foreign travel. You want to go to cool local places, not tourist places, but as tourists, we do not speak the native language, so it’s much easier to go to tourist places. So, we did that, grabbed a couple beers and split some nachos. Now that we had a little liquid courage, we decided to head back to Pingvinen, the local place we discussed before. We grabbed some seats at the bar and orders two beers. Luckily the bartender spoke English, which was helpful when I gave him the wrong amount of money. That wasn’t the first time that happened on this trip, nor the last. The coins all look alike and are actually useful. The lowest bill demonization was 50 Kroner (about $10), so the coins were still useful. Generally the 20 was bigger than the 10, the 5 bigger than the 1, and the 5 and 1 had holes in the middle. That made sense once I got used to it.
We enjoyed a few Carlsburgs and struck up a conversation with a local guy sitting next to us. Ok, he probably struck up the conversation with us. We were scared to talk to anyone. He was pretty drunk and at the bar alone. He appeared to be drinking coffee with a shot of vodka. Staying awake and getting drunk - this man was not f'n around. He seemed like a pretty nice guy, but pretty unhappy. He moved to Bergen from Trondheim and worked on a tour boat. He enjoyed the mountains and drinking from the streams up there. He asked if we did that in America, I said, not so much, and explained that my job is actually to clean up rivers. That is not a big industry in Norway. I was not surprised.
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| I just needed to break up the text. We don't have any pictures from the bar. |
We also learned that all Scandinavians hate Sweden, Norwegians have learned English in school since WWII, and the King has more power than we would d have thought. Like most Europeans, he seemed to know a lot more about American than we know about Europe. He talked about the current and past president and finally asked us “not to steal all their oil.” Oh, so that’s how they feel. Guess I can’t blame them.
We excused ourselves and headed back to the hotel. That was a fun second night in Europe.
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