Moving from Oslo to Bergen meant moving from the inner city to the coast. So many new things floating through the air: sea salt, gas fumes from boats, sea gulls, sea gull poop and the smell of fish. Lots and lots of fish.
We woke up with recharged batteries, ready to do things that didn’t involve sitting around all day. That would not prove to be overly difficult. Bergen is a lot smaller than Oslo and most of what happens is right around the harbor area, so we spent a lot of time walking up and down Bryggen, the street where our hotel was.
But we weren’t the only ones roaming around that area—the place is a tourist town. It was been around for many, many years, but most of the stores within two blocks of our hotel sold Norway souvenirs. There were tour buses and tour groups all over the place, so sometimes we had to compete for space on the sidewalk with a dozen people clustered together, staring at their maps.
As we started out, there was one very noticeable difference between Bergen and… just about anyplace else we’d seen. The buildings along the road were crooked. Some leaned forward, some off to the side, some were twisted just a little bit. They weren’t going to fall down by any means, but you could stand on the sidewalk and see the lack of straight lines among them.
Why, you might ask? Blame the 1700’s. Yeah, I know, they’re not around to defend themselves in the face of such an accusation, but it’s true. There was a huge fire in 1702 that torched everything. They could have properly renamed Bergen “Ash City” after that happened, but they eventually rebuilt. However, they rebuilt using the old buildings’ foundations, which were not all completely flat and stable. Owners are allowed to adjust their floors to make them even to the ground, but the buildings themselves get to wiggle around as much as they want. Now if they could only develop hips to wiggle around, Bergen would totally become a party town.
The first place we visited along the harbor was the Fish Market, which was surrounded by booths selling souvenirs and tents selling food inside. If that doesn’t convince you about the city’s draw for tourists, consider: one tent in the market has a sign stating (in a number of languages) that they could speak English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. And they probably knew Norwegian, too. Hunger might be a universal language, but these people knew a whole bunch of specific ones.
We passed by a few other places on the other side of the street as well. We took a picture of Dyvekegangen, but walking down that alley wasn’t really an option, given that it’s only 99 cm wide. We found a glasses store and got the nose pads on my glasses replaced (one of them was broken and had started falling out—getting new pads seemed like a much better option than using duct tape, even though duct tape fixes everything).
Then there was a building that blended in almost completely with its surroundings. Its camouflage was spectacular. If you didn’t look closely, you’d think it was just another structure built on a faulty foundation and never know just how out-of-place it really was. If you did look closely, however, you might notice the curved yellow M in the top of each window, the glowing white letters on the face of the white building and, instead of regular hinged doors, it had an automatic glass sliding door in front. Yes, it was… a 7-11.
No, wait, this was a McDonald’s. The 7-11 was across the street. And there was another 7-11 around the corner and down the block. That little cluster of stores made Bergen feel like home, which was not necessarily a good thing.
Turning away from the water and up a few blocks, there was a funicular, which is kind of a cable car that goes up the side of Mt. Floyen, the highest mountain in Bergen. As you would expect, there was a line to get on the funicular. What you wouldn’t expect is that there was a line because it wasn’t working. There was a mechanical area somewhere up at the top of the mountain that could take five minutes to fix or it could take half an hour, they had no idea.
We opted to stay in line and waited for 15-20 minutes before everything started to move again. Then the line started to move. Then it stopped. Enough people stuck around that Mom and I ended up on the second car to head up the slope of the mountain. It was a little snug in there, but at least we could see a wide variety of plush green trees and plants as well as the tiny buildings slowly getting tinier in the distance.
It was gray and drizzling just a little bit when we got to the top, so there wasn’t a whole lot to see. We looked around at the town from above, Mom got a few pictures of flowers, then we got ready to head back down again. We could have snuck into a car just before it was leaving, but Mom needed to sit down in a seat and it looked like there weren’t any available, so they sent the car down and we waited for one to come back up.
Because we waited, we were the first in line to get our seats, so we found two right in front that would let us look out the window and see everything as we got closer to the bottom. As the funicular started to head down, three little girls came to stand up in front next to us so they could see everything. Sometimes I feel like I’m a horrible influence on children because there were roads that crossed over the top of the car’s cable—whenever we got close to a bridge, I told the kids, “Wave!” and we’d all wave to the people on the bridges.
I thought the girls had fun when people waved back at us—I know I did—and after we got to the bottom, a woman was amused about how I could still be a child at heart. At least I think she was amused about it. Maybe she was laughing on the inside at my expense. Regardless, I considered the trip down a moral victory.
