Off the Beaten Path

Bergen has been my favorite Norwegian city, with Stavanger at a close second. The people, the buildings, the cleanliness of the city itself, the nightlife, the food, the daily activities, the shopping, and most of all the scenery have been fabulous this entire vacation. Bergen was the perfect place to bring all those things together for a final four days in my new favorite city in the world.

It is 10:30 a.m. and our train has just departed from the Bergen train station. It is supposed to be one of the top 20 train rides in the world because of its scenic route across the center of the country back to Oslo. (Too bad I am slightly hung-over and will probably be sleeping or in a daze for the majority of the way.) We are headed back to Oslo and are expected to arrive in 6.5 hours, at which time we’ll check into our hotel and probably wander around the city for a while before sitting down to our last dinner in Norway. We’ve already decided that we’re going to eat at the same restaurant where we ate during our first 2 days in Oslo. It’s got the most delicious Norwegian fish soup, which is like a really exquisite version of American New England Clam Chowder. It’s so yummy and I can’t wait to have it again. This is a popular soup in Norway, and only last night did we eat the “real thing”—Bergen Fiskeballer (fish ball soup.) My dad has told us of Fiskeballer many times and we’ve been so eager to try the real thing in its place of origin, but until last night we’d been eating some other rendition of it—a similar cream-based soup with scallops, mussels, shrimp and even salmon—but the real Bergen Fish Soup contains ball-shaped pieces of Cod. Last night, in a tiny quaint restaurant in the row of old, wooden buildings on the brygge in Bergen, my dad ordered a cup of fish soup, and was pleasantly surprised to discover that it was, in fact, authentic Bergen Fiskeballer. We all ate a “ball” and it was delicious! We also ate about 8 pieces of bread each, dipping and wiping up the very last drops of it!

The shopping in Bergen was fun, too. Cheryl and I had been shopping in Stavanger, which was a bit more convenient because the shops were close to our hotel. In Bergen, the shops were quite a distance from both our hotel and the restaurant where we had to meet our family for dinner at 6:30 last night. At 6:00 we were headed over to the little shopping strip in hopes of finding something to wear to Metro, one of the young nightclubs in town. We picked up a few things, and I left a pair of pants there that I wanted, but Cheryl advised me that it was a financially irresponsible decision. I partly agree with her, and partly hate myself for not getting them when I had the chance! Most likely, they’ll have the same store in Oslo and I can track them down there. Otherwise, I’m going to order them online as soon as I get back to the States. They’re these satiny Princess Jasmine-looking pants with the cuffs at the ankles and everything. A lot of people here wear that style pant, and at first I didn’t like the look of it at all, but now I can’t help to think that maybe it would look cute! So I tried them on in the fitting room last night and they do look cute…with flip flops and a tank top, it’ll be an adorable look. I must have them!

After our dinner last night, Cheryl and I went back to the hotel room and packed our bags for our travels this morning, and then headed out to SjØboden (“Sea Place”) for a little pre-game nightclub experience. It was a little neighborhood-y place with locals dancing and live music. This building was probably 500 or 600 years old: its rafters were not very high above the heads of the musicians on the tiny wooden stage! ( Bergen is over 1000 years old, with some buildings we saw on the trip dating back to the 1100’s and earlier.) Picture a 3-man Irish band, singing and dancing and laughing and drinking beer up on stage in a tiny Irish Pub. Now swap the red hair for blonde hair, change the funny Irish accent into a funnier Norwegian accent, and switch the Guinness in the singer’s hand for a Hansa and that’s what this little band was like. Everyone in the bar was swinging their hips or tapping their feet, singing along to the 90’s American and folksy Norwegian music, and it was, to coin the term, a jolly good time. These men here seem to have no fear of rejection when it comes to dancing (or offering sex to me, for that matter—but that’s another story.) Arm outstretched, they’ll point to you and then curl their finger towards them in a gesture for you to join them where they are standing on the dance floor. As a shy American girl with two left feet in a foreign place, I originally was reluctant to join each man on the tiny dance floor for all to see, but I couldn’t very well turn someone down like that when it really did look like fun, so I got up there. Cheryl and I both had the experience of dancing with quite a wild animal of a man! He was heavy set and a jolly, chubby-faced man who could really work the dance floor! We were swung left and right, dipped down, and taken for quite a rollercoaster ride! After a few dances and beers, we decided to take these shakin’ booties elsewhere. That’s when we headed over to Metro. The music went from Norwegian folk music and old-school American singalongs to Flo Rida and Mary J. Blige. That’s when we got our grind on with the younger locals. We also met a girl, Lene, who sat and talked with us for close to an hour, probably, right there in the club on one of the little orange leather sofas, about Norway and America and the similarities and differences between the two such as the people’s attitudes, exchange rate, weather, and college life; we talked about Hilary versus Obama, boys, fashion, everything. She was adorable! We told her how much we love Norway, and she could hardly understand why. America seems glamorous to her, and Norway seems to be such a natural beauty to us. She visits California often, and we Facebook’d her after we’d gotten back to the hotel to make sure we stay in touch—“maybe our paths will cross again” is what Cheryl wrote to her.

During the day yesterday we rented bikes from a local bike shop and went on a ride around Bergen, to what seemed like the furthest stretches of the city. We rode by the university where Erika stopped to talk to some of the students and Dad went in to talk to some people about his leadership seminar in CEMS. We rode up and down hilly streets where I was about “this close” to flipping out because my crotch hurt form the bike seat and I was sweaty and very tired (also slightly hung-over again), and I kept getting separated from the group because they’re such speed racers and kept changing direction! It was actually quite fun, though. I love bike-riding and sightseeing and this combined the two and allowed us to cover more ground than just walking. We saw beautiful views of Bergen from different angles, and rode up little alleyways and through a beautiful park.

The day before, we took the funicular tram car to the top of the mountain in Bergen where there is a fabulous view of the city and surrounding towns, peninsulas, islands and fjords as far as the eye could see. That day we did more souvenir shopping and window shopping because things are SO expensive here. I found a beautiful black wool coat that I could just die for, but it was like $600 USD and that’s just ridiculous. But I felt like a movie star—no, a princess—in this coat. I bought a few small things for people at home, but not much for myself because just having been here and experiencing this beautiful country is souvenir enough—no trinket or tee shirt or coat could ever represent to me this wonderful vacation. I bought a Bergen magnet for myself, justifying my purchase because this was my favorite city and I just adored the little scenic town. My real souvenir will be the scrapbook that I make out of all the pictures, brochures, stickers and ticket stubs I’ve collected along the way.

The most fabulous part of staying in Bergen was the cruise to the fjords. The fjords are quite a distance from the city of Bergen itself, but it was from there that we departed for the cruise. I have seen the countryside, cities, coast and islands of Italy, the Grand Canyon, the East and West coasts of the United States; I’ve seen the mountains of Canada, the cities and countryside of England, France, the canals of Amsterdam, the Australian Outback, the Great Barrier Reef, and now much of the coast and largest cities in Norway, and I have yet to see something more spectacular than the Norwegian fjords. I have nothing to which to compare the fjords to describe their beauty, and I have pictures that won’t ever do them justice, but I have seen them with my own eyes and can say that I have truly seen a Wonder of the world. I want to come back some day, but next time add a visit to the Arctic Circle on June 21, my birthday and the Summer Solstice, the longest day of sunlight in the Northern Hemisphere, and sit and watch midnight come and go with the sun still up in the sky. I think that would be spectacular. Then I want to come back and see the Northern Lights in the winter.

Stavanger is the last city I need to write about in this post, because I think I wrote about Kristiansand last, and that came just before Stavanger. Kristiansand was not that great. I probably think so because of the events in the days before and after our visit there that it seems so disappointing. We wished after staying in Kristiansand that we’d stayed in Grimstad instead. Stavanger was my second favorite place we visited on this vacation. It was smaller than Bergen, but very similar. In fact, we made references to restauarants we wanted to back to or stores we wanted to revisit in Bergen that were actually back in Stavanger. We’ve been to so many places in these last 12 days that it’s hard to keep track of where we were and when! Stavanger is where the shops were near our hotel and they were awesome! The little wharf is similar to that in Bergen, but about 2/3 the size. I was sick the first day in Stavanger and missed the first day of sightseeing, which was the Geneology Museum (yawn.) I didn’t miss anything, anyway. We didn’t find anything about our relatives there. That afternoon we visited the old part of Stavanger with the tiny little houses and the narrow cobblestone streets. That’s where the picture of Cheryl and I in front of the yellow bush of flowers is from. “Are you f---ing kidding me?” was my response when I realized that basically all there was to see in that part of town were a couple of cute white houses! I was still feeling ill that day with the cold that has been passed around all 6 of us on this trip, and trekking around outside in the heat was the last thing I wanted to be doing. The watchtower was neat, though. The top was closed by the time we got there—that’s OK, we wanted to shop anyway—but we got to see some of the city. That’s when Cheryl and I went to H&M and Vera Moda for some retail therapy…