A dose of reality

After a week of visiting villages and small towns where we might not see anybody on the streets, and then steadily increasing our human contact with the outside world as we got further south, we had more or less conditioned ourselves to the fact that we might have a peaceful and tranquil stay after we got off the boat in Bergen.
Well, welcome to reality, Jim!!
We got the car off the ship and headed to the center of town to find our hotel. Our first clue was when we came to a corner and like a dummy, I stopped to let someone cross the street in front of me. That was like a signal to half of humanity and a flood of people seemed to come from nowhere, and it is not an exaggeration to say that we sat there for more than a minute waiting for a break in pedestrians to where I could continue. Suddenly, we were in the middle of the tourist season in one of the major tourist cities of Scandinavia.
Its major impetus is that it is a city small enough with a population of about 250,000, but large enough to have everything a tourist might want. It is a MAJOR jumping off point for the fjords. One can go in almost any direction, except for west, of course, and see some of the most spectacular scenery available to the human eye. It is a young person’s town in that it has a major university with the, appropriately named, University of Bergen attracting students from all over the world, and top the whole enchilada off with the fact that it is the quintessential picture postcard city of Norway.
Since most Norwegians are off for the month of July, the only “Real” people left here are those in the service industry. Then you add back the number of tourists present and you have a city crammed with people in the downtown area instead of being spread out amongst the city at large. It is an absolute zoo in the center of town. The pedestrians are 3-4 abreast in the streets. To get information on what to see and do, you go into the tourist center, take a number, and then wait 45 minutes before you get called to get your tour or activity booked. I guess we just weren’t mentally prepared for this. Our last vacations have been the trip to Africa, walking the camino in Spain, the trip to Tibet, and others where we were in places not inundated by the hordes of tourists that can descend on a given point in the world.
This morning the situation was compounded by the fact that two mega-cruise ships were in port, disgorging an additional 4,000 people into the streets for some major shopping into a concentrated amount of time. The ships made our little Hurtigruten look like a cabin cruise.
Therefore, Carol and I did what can only be described as an act of desperation. We got out of the main area and just started walking. Using our logic that most of the tourists would stay in the major tourist area around the harbor, we took to the hills, literally. Bergen is nestled at the base of a lush, green hillside with the houses stacked one above each other in levels which seemingly don’t have any separation. However, as we discovered, much to our delight, it is an area full of little alleys, winding streets, and tons of hidden treasures all waiting to be discovered. In one case we followed a narrow passageway and found that four houses had joined the area behind their house into some kind of a common area with benches and gardens, an absolute delight to behold.
I think that Bergen would be a wonderful place to visit in the off season when one could enjoy it without being jostled while trying to do so. We took the floibahn up the mountain and got an overview of the city as a whole. With all the water ways coming in from different directions, it is really a pearl in the midst of the ocean.
But we needed to get out of dodge and so we fled after two days and headed inland. My client in Stockton who is from Bergen suggested we do what is called “Norway in a Nutshell.” It turned out to be really good advice and we totally enjoyed our day. Since we had a car we were able to start and end our trip a couple of hours inland and not have to return to Bergen. The tour consists of a combination of bus, rail, and ferries which give the passenger the quintessential view of the best the area has to offer.
The ferry ride on the Fjord was particularly nice, still lots of tourists on the ferry, but tolerable. That afternoon we got back to our car and headed towards the Geiranger Fjord, reputed to be one of the loveliest in Norway. We decided to stay in a little town named Vik, and it was absolutely delightful. It was exactly what we needed. With 2,000 inhabitants or so, it was quiet and picturesque. The most dramatic moment came when three girls were walking their dog in one direction and a boy walking his dog came from the other. The two dogs sniffed each other, accepted each other, the crisis passed, and the town went back to its sleepy ambience. Before leaving this morning, we went to see one of the oldest remaining stave churches in Norway. This one was built in 1130. You can see it at:
http://www.fortidsminneforeningen.no/eiendommer/16/16

The grab-bag of superlatives: Carol and I have decided that the best way to describe Norway is to take a plain, brown, paper bag, fill it with a whole bunch of adjectives like: majestic, peaceful, inspiring, bucolic, dramatic, serene, and a couple dozen more of your choosing and then when you want to explain what it feels like, just grab one from the bag, and it will surely fit the moment.
Words like beautiful just don’t do the job. It is one of the most spectacular countries I’ve even been in. I remembered it this way from my youthful eyes when I was here in 1962, but I wondered if that was just me being young and things looking better the further away from them you get.
Well, that couldn’t be more wrong. It really is that good. Ever since we got on the Hurtigruten I’ve had the Morning song from Grieg’s Peer Gynt running through my head. I’d sit out on the prow of the ship watching the landscape and the music just poured out of my brain and blended with the vision with which my eyes were filled. I figured somebody else must have felt the same way I did, and thanks to my favorite: youtube.com I was right. In fact it was done by Norway in a Nutshell. So I’ve listed a site below to give you a sense of what my eyes and ears were seeing and hearing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGCIf_WUJow&feature=related

This one below is not Peer Gynt, but it’s Grieg and you’ll get the picture, literally.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf6mXhYXudg
It was this sort of scene that inspired Norway’s greatest composer, and you get the sense of it as well.

Now if you really want to see a good you tube, you’ve got to check out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=astISOttCQ0&feature=fvst
This is my grandsons’ favorite. I mean, after all, it has had 19,500,000 (and still counting) hits compared to the Grieg’s 24,000. Do my grandsons have good musical taste, or what

Carol’s Norwegian vocabulary lessons
Since Carol is a linguistic person at heart, she has really taken to the Norwegian language, and has already learned many valuable words to make her trip more meaningful. Whereas I’m stuck on hello, goodbye, thanks and you’re welcome, Carol is far more diverse.
She’s learned Salg - sale, fabrikk utsalg – factory outlet, garn senter- a yarn shop, Tricotagefabrik – a knitting museum, and is working on a whole bunch more to expand her vocabulary.

This is not a German Autobahn
One of the books stated that Norwegian drivers tend to go the speed limit and that limit is already slow. Most of the roads here have a 40-45 mile an hour speed limit, and, in fact, they do adhere to it. When somebody goes roaring by, it invariably has a German or Swedish plate. I remembered Ulf, My Stockholm Servas host, telling me that once he was going down a highway at about 90 mph and a cop pulled up alongside him on a motorcycle and banged on the roof of his car to get him to slow down. He did so, and avoided a ticket. How come that wouldn’t work for me with the CHP.
But the real question for me is why anybody would want to burn up the roads when there is so much to see at any given moment. I don’t want to miss everything by having to give my total and undivided attention to whizzing down the highway seeing how many cars I can pass. It is that glorious. It requires some patience and a peaceful mind. We only made 200 kilometers today, about 120 miles, because we took it slow and made dozens of stops to enjoy the view.
There is a fantastic network of ferries plying the waterways, because without them you literally couldn’t get there from here. The Sogne Fjord comes inland over 100 miles. Try driving around that one on your Sunday drive to see Grandma. Nothing is cheap in Norway, but the ferries are as reasonable as anything you’ll find. This morning after leaving Vic we took the ferry to the other side, and drove along the water at water level. Then climbed over the top of the mountain with over a dozen switch backs, rode the ridge of the mountains with its numerous lakes, dropped down again to the next fjord and then repeated the whole process. We must have stopped over 20 times for the photo op that wouldn’t go away.
Often that moment had to do with waterfalls. Carol has described them as looking like somebody /9some fiber lady undoubtedly) threw some yarn down over the back of the couch and let it fall as it would. They are sometimes little ribbons working their way down to the fjords, and sometimes they’re torrents 50-80 feet wide, thundering as they fall pell-mell downward. And I mean they’re everywhere. On our two hour ferry ride yesterday on the Nutshell deal, I tried to see if we were ever out of sight of one. The answer was no.
When planning the trip, as much planning as we do anyway, we thought we would spend about a week in the fjord area. We knew it would be beautiful just from all the descriptions of the “Must do’s” given in our readings. I must say that nothing has disappointed us here in this labyrinth of ocean and land. It is……………. Where’s my grab bag.
Stay safe,
Carol and jim