5/5 Bergen

Beaut wooden buildings and cute alleyways

Tuesday 5^th Bergen

The sun “rose” at 4.18, although it had been light all night and will “set” at 11.28 tonight – hardly worth bothering! We are 60 degrees North and it is 8c.

We set off into Bergen in cloudy weather that turned wet in a short while, but didn’t last long. We wandered the streets and shops. We found the library, where we scored free wifi , got the blog up and set up a pose in front of the pool camera for 2pm today when some of the children will look at the webcam - hopefully. Fridge magnets were too expensive to buy, as were most things. J had urgent call for the sandbox but discovered that they wanted a 10 Krone coin (about $2) just to unlock the door – luckily somebody came and opened the door and she scrambled in with 3 Chinese tourists.

We had been very pleasantly surprised just how reasonable prices were in France, Italy and even Germany but we knew Scandinavia would be different. Just for example, in Perth we are lucky to get smoked salmon for much less than $40 per full kilo and in Europe we have been buying 200g packages for about $3 or $4. Here it was about $25 for that size. And where does it come from???? Norway!!! How can the Germans get it so much cheaper than the Norwegians themselves? They also had whale meat (black and unappealing) for about $120/kg.

Strange angler fish from the deep cold ocean.  Look at those teeth

Leaning buildings of Bergen

We had a look round the fort and up a few of their wood-paved back streets and got back to the boat for lunch. We were supposed to sail at 2 but were delayed for about 45 minutes by “heavy traffic”.

We won the afternoon quiz and scored 2 Tshirts this time.  The tip-offs were flying all round but they obviously didn’t tell anyone the final answer, which we got. Then it was one of their classic pleb games – hoopla. J turned out to be the star with her end-over-end throws and scored the bottle of champagne. Straight on to “Name the singer or group” and J won a bag to put all the Tshirts in. All harmless fun and they were giving everybody merchandise prizes so they were all happy. Sebastian seems to be having issues with some of the entertainer group – he maybe isn’t a team player?

Dinner as usual and J went to watch the cultural music show (opera). We were both asleep by 10 in broad daylight.

 

We are in the land of trolls and vikings