Bergen

In England, wandering around the sixteen thousand historical sites we visited, we learned (inter alia) about the invading hordes from the North that preceded the invasion of the Normans. Obviously, our next stop was destined to be the home of said hordes, that is, Norway.

The flight in was interesting, as it’s a strange-looking coastline. It’s like someone crumpled up a piece of paper and then dunked it in a tank of water – it’s all abrupt mountains and deep rivers and harbours, plus thousands and thousands of islands off the coast. Some of the bigger ones were all joined up by bridges, and we could trace the roads winding out across them from the mainland.

We had one night in Bergen last night before heading out this afternoon for a couple of days of touring the fjords and countryside (I’m writing this on the train). Bergen is a beautiful-looking town, set in a deep valley on the coast surrounded by forested mountains, with rows of fairy-tale houses winding up them. We were staying in the Bryggen, which is fronted by rows of tall, narrow timber houses along one side of the harbour, painted in reds and yellows. Everything is very clean, including the air and, judging from what I could see, the homeless. It’s not too cold, either, in fact it’s quite warm in the sun, but the temperature dropped pretty quickly last night once the sun set (and also this afternoon with the advent of clouds).

After arriving we went for a walk around; it’s a pretty small town, really, though it sprawls a bit. We walked around the fish markets and saw some awesome-looking anglerfish (awesome because terrifying, obviously). We also saw some chunks of black-looking meat in a few places before working out that it was whale meat – all the places that sold cooked fish in the market seemed to have it on the menu (we haven’t eaten any).

We had a few hours today before we needed to get to the train station, so we took in a couple of the museums maintained by the University. The natural history museum was a proper old-school museum, with rooms and rooms of classified skeletons and preserved animals. There were some nods to contemporaneity, such as plastic models etc, but not many. There was a whale room which was pretty amazing, all the massive skeletons were hanging from the ceiling and overlapping, including a humpback and a blue whale (everyone relax, they were from the 19th century). We also had fun laughing at some of the facial expressions and poses on the mammal and bird specimens – someone had obviously had fun with them. One of the big eagles had even caught a lamb and taken it back to its nest. I don’t know whether that’s accurate or not, but what it may have lacked in accuracy it more than made up for in gore.

At the cultural history museum, by far the most impressive exhibit was of religious art dating from the 12th century up to the 19th. We had seen some Norwegian folk art elsewhere in the museum, and it was funny to see how the religious art obviously adopted the traditional style – all the saints were sort of stylised, and (my favourite detail) had pale skin with rosy Scandinavian cheeks painted on. That’s not to make light of exhibition – almost all the pieces were incredible, including massive carved wooden doors and other panels completely unlike anything we’d seen in English churches. You could see the gradual tendency towards more Southern European church styles, until after a few hundred years the images wouldn’t have looked out of place on the cover of a Penguin edition of Chaucer or Boccacio.

Anyway, our next stop is Voss, which doesn’t mean anything to me except for being the title of a Patrick White novel that I haven’t read (and don’t intend to). Hopefully someone there will serve me reindeer meat.

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