Beautiful Bergen
The forecast is for cloudy with periods of rain today. We have a few things on our list but not a
full day so we can take our time and dodge showers if we must.
It’s 9:30 before we saunter down to breakfast. It is a nice spread of eggs, sausages and all
the great Norwegian breakfast items—dark bread, smoked salmon, herring, geitost
cheese, fruits, vegetables, ham, muesli and yogurt. Mary goes right for the herring, salmon, dark
bread and fruit. John goes for the whole
buffet. A fella’ needs his energy. Lots of coffee and juice complete the
picture. The breakfast hours are until
10:00 but they are still replacing and refilling items at 9:55—that’s a pretty
high level of service.
Our two “musts” today are the old town (Bryggen), a Unesco
World Heritage site, and Floyen, the tip-top perch above the city for
spectacular city and water views. It isn’t raining when we leave so we head
right for the funicular up to Floyen.
The line is over a block long out the building with tons of tour groups
and people holding up paddles. Being no
fools we decide to wander around Bryggen first.
This old port city was ruled by Hanseatic League merchants
for a few hundred years between the 15th and 18th
centuries. These international traders populated the port cities of Europe
dominating trade and actually forming their own navies and armies to protect
their wares. There is still a lot of
Hansa-this and Hansa that throughout Northern Europe that are directly
descended from the league.
The structures are wooden and pretty well preserved. The old trading houses of the merchants and
guilds are now populated by trading houses of tourism businesses. There are cute little shops, markets, restaurants
and other services which makes for a fun morning of just nosing around. At one
point Mary decided to find a rest room which required a 10-krone coin. We were both reading coins in our pockets
when a bystander, obviously frustrated with our ignorance walked over and dropped
a tenner into our hands (that’s $1.20).
Tusen takk sir! Of course the
coin didn’t work when Mary dropped it into the slot so she just waited for
someone to come out and then grabbed the door to go in.
It is a little after noon when we go back to the funicular
to find almost no one in line.
Apparently the tours get going in the morning and again
mid-afternoon. There are two cars
running back and forth on a single track with a bypass in the middle. The views on Floyen are as spectacular as
advertised. Bergen is surrounded by 7
mountains with the city in a valley reaching down to the North Sea. Our aerie is at a couple thousand feet
offering vantage points for every direction.
This is understandably the number one tourist attraction in Bergen.
Bergen is the second largest city in Norway and the
comfortable center we have become familiar with we now see stretching a few
miles inland. Around a corner from the
center and beyond our hotel on the far side is another large port where a
massive cruise ship is docked. There are
also a couple smaller cruise ships docked at wharves farther out—probably for
fjord trips. Now we know where all the tour
groups came from on a rainy Monday.
There is a sign on a tree that says, “Don’t insult the
witch.” A group of French men and women
are trying to figure out what it says and they ask Mary. She goes into her witch routine and they
immediately understand what a witch is—imagine that. We browse a bit in the restaurant/bar and it
looks like this is a lunch stop for some of the tours.
It begins to rain lightly as we are wrapping up on top so
our timing is perfect. The afternoon
tour groups are also starting to appear which is our cue to get back in line
for the ride back down.
The rest of the afternoon is just spent appreciating more of
central Bergen. We visit stores, parks,
monuments, stroll through the university.
We blow off lunch since one of us ate most of the breakfast buffet and
the other doesn’t eat much and opt for an early dinner after a bit of a rest in
our room.
We were so enamored with Pingvinen last night that we
dangerously decide to go back. We again
find seats at the bar and the same bartender recognized us bringing our English
menus right away. John orders the lamb
and spinach sausages with mashed potatoes and cauliflower, and Mary has the
open faced smoked salmon and scrambled egg sandwich. Like last night we trade plates halfway through
dinner. While we both finished each
other’s dinners last night, the sausage was too much lamb and not enough spinach
for Mary so we traded back and everybody was happy. The beers are good and the encore was as good
as the original performance.
We stroll around town for the rest of the evening and finish
it siting on a bench on the water in Bryggen watching the boats and the rest of
the world drift by. We finally wandered
back up the hill to our hotel for a brownie and tea before bed.
What did we learn today? There is a cart in Bergen where you can get a
reindeer hot dog or a chili dog. That
means you could get a reindeer chili dog—the ultimate in fusion cuisine.
No comments:
Post a Comment