Bergen part 1

We loved walking around the quiet streets of Bergen on our first afternoon there, the sunny day!  The tall white houses and cobblestone streets were full of charm.  Our hotel, the Bristol, was in a great location, right on the main shopping plaza.  We were able to walk right from the dock where we got off the Kong Harald after our Atlantic fjord cruise.  It is a very easily walkable town; we only took a bus once in Bergen and that was just because it was raining and we didn't have anything else to do. The Hanseatic quarter was fun to explore.  This is the original Bergen, settled by German sailors.  It is full of tippy wooden buildings from the 1700's.  This part of town has burned down 10 times, until all fires in houses were banned, there was a central outdoor kitchen that cooking was done at.  Between our hotel and the Hanseatic wharf was the fish market, where they were selling coyote furs...And in the harbor were these three children, babies really, rowing around by THEMSELVES! Police would have called to such a scene in California.

Sverresborg, Trondheim

At Sverresborg there was a ski museum.  For my mother:  Is he real or fake?

Sverresborg was started in the early nineteen hundreds when a fisherman who had been using this 16th century church as a storehouse asked the city of Trondheim if they would like it...they said yes, moved it on to some property at the edge of town and the museum was established.  The site is where King Sverres built a fortress is the way back days, I think around 1000.  The walls at the top of the hill overlooking the current city and harbor are still there...there were some masons clink clink clinking on the walls while we were there.  Since the first church arrived, many other farm houses, barns, outbuilding, cabins, and a whole city square with stores and businesses have been placed on the park grounds.  Some of them are open and furnished and you can go inside.  They even have a "family" (actors) who are going about the daily life activities of a farm family.  When we were there, there were two women in the kitchen making lunch on the wood stove: sausage patties, mashed beets, bread; a man out in yard making logs for a log building, and two children who came running when the lunch bell rang. In another little cabin, a young woman was making flatbread over the fire.  She invited us to try some.  It is made of rye and barley flour and water.  It was tasteless, but as she pointed out, they usually eat it with soup or with butter or jam.  She said they made it only twice a year, at Christmas and in the summer, and stored enough to last them for six months.

The little door in the wall under the fortress is, I am SURE, a troll house door. 

Scott has his hand here on the stave, the upright corner post of the oldest stave church in Norway.  It was built in 1017 as a Catholic church and was converted to a protestant church after the Reformation...in the late 1500's.  Most of the wood is original, they impregnated it with pine pitch to preserve the wood, and it has lasted for 10 centuries!  It is a small dark church, no windows or pews, not very inviting, but SO old...

We ended our fun day with a coffee in the museum coffee shop, just as a tour bus full of noisy, chattering Americans arrived.  We had had the place to ourselves so we felt lucky and were reminded of why we like to travel on our own instead of with a tour group.  

Oslo Operahuset

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When it finally stopped raining for awhile, after we parked ourselves in a bagel shop and took shelter from the downpour for an hour or so, we walked to the Opera House.  It is all marble and it is designed to be walked all over, the ramps and roofs and plazas and patios are all accessible.  Since it had been raining you would think that the marble would be slippery, but there are textures and grooves so it is quite pleasant to stroll around and climb on.

The Opera House sits right on the water and there is this cool sculpture in the harbor...a glacier? a ship?























From the top you have marvelous views of Oslo in every direction, the islands in the fjord, the modern city skyscape which is referred to as the Bar Code I guess because of the upright rectangular lines of the buildings, the green hills behind Oslo, and the old buildings and boats of the Bryggen.

 There was a convention of surgeons in town when we were there and we saw them everywhere.  Here they are having a meal in the Opera House restaurant.

Trains

We rode lots of trains.  I mean we rode LOTS of trains.  We like to ride the public transportation in the new places we visit, as opposed to a tour because that way we are surrounded by the local people instead of other tourists.  The down side of that is always being a little unsure if we are in the right place, does the the train stop where we need to go?  Are we going in the right direction?  Do we have the right tickets? And, we are often dragging suitcases up and down stairs and across streets.  In Europe, train stations function as more than a place to catch a train.  They are city centers, often a mini city in themselves.  With shopping malls, restaurants, post office and banks, and 30+ tracks.  So when you buy your ticket in the Munich station and have 10 minutes to catch your train, you find yourself running full speed with your wheelie suitcase dragging behind to find the right track and board before the train takes off.  We made it every time.  Thanks to Scott, we never missed a train.Our first experience of Chicago was the El...the elevated train.  This picture was right downtown where we got off the blue line from the airport.  We still needed to find our way to the hotel, so with the help of so many friendly Chicagoans, we found the bus that took us straight to our hotel at McCormick Place, the convention center south of the city.We had to take a picture of this cute little Thomas train at Navy Pier.Oslo's train station with the Tiger.Leaving Bergen for the first leg of the Norway in a Nutshell tour.Cute little girl looking out the train window in Norway.The narrow gauge train we took from the fjord village of Flam to Myrdal, high in the mountains, took us through beautiful country.Through the window of the cog wheel train we took up to Zugspitze.I'll be happy to get from place to place in my own car for a while...but I am glad we travel the way we do.

Cruising the fjords

We cruised on two ships.  First we took the Hurtigruten ferry, the Kong Harald, down the western coast of Norway.  We didn't know what to expect so I was very excited when I first saw the ferry.  It looked like a miniature cruise ship.  We had a nice little cabin with a big window, a bath with a shower, and two comfortable beds for our one night onboard.  There were lots of places to sit, inside and out, luxurious lounges and libraries and decks.  We met a retired businessman from Florida, of course a conservative Republican, and had fun talking politics!  Really, we did!  It was the kind of civil discussion that I always wish I could have...He was a big fan of McCain, but also liked Clinton.  Liked Bush for the first term, but was disappointed by his second term.  There was no name calling or Limbaughesque emotional outbursts.  He invited us to join his tour group, and introduced us to Matt, his Swedish group leader with whom we discussed capital punishment and serial killers. Also an interesting talk.  The weather was drizzly the first day, but then we got up the second day and the sky was blue and the ocean sparkling.  A couple of days later we took a ferry that traveled deep into the Sognefjord, the second largest fjord in the world and the largest in Norway.  This was just a typical ferry, with bench seats.  It was raining pretty good that day, so we mostly stayed inside during the couple of hours long trip.  Slowly cruising past waterfalls, green green hills, picture perfect farms, lighthouses and villages.

World Cup Soccer (Fusball)

Today, in honor of the World Cup Soccer championship game, I bring you soccer pictures.  First, we ran into the Netherlands vs Japan game while we were at the Akershus in Oslo.  It was rainy that day, and we were wandering around the Bryggen area by the harbor.There is an old, old castle, the Akershus,  on the hill overlooking the harbor and Scott was excited by the stone and dirt walls.  So we climbed up to the windy top and lo and behold, down below us was the soccer game on a big screen.  There wasn't much of a crowd watching, probably because of the weather.  And the fans seemed evenly divided between NED and JPN.  Needless to say, the Dutch prevailed!  I had to root for them because of their orange uniforms...!!!  A French woman took our picture, telling us that the French team was no good this year....Then when we got to Munich, Jay and Donnette hadn't arrived yet, so we walked over to the Englischer Gardens and found the Chinese Tower beer garden.  Which is basically thousands of green picnic tables around a kiosk selling beer and food.  Many families were there, having birthday parties and other gatherings. We found a spot at a table where we could see the screen and Scott went and got us beer and pretzels.  Pretzels big enough to slide on his arm so he could carry two beers!  He had the 1 liter size Hofbrauhus and I went for the smaller Weiss (wheat) beer. The NED vs Slovakia game was on the big screen and although Slovakia lost, the Slovakian fans were happy that they scored a goal in the last seconds and the entire crowd was very good natured.  I don't know if this video will play...but it is the sound of Garmisch celebrating with much honking and whistling after Germany beat England.  We were back in our hotel room by then, I took this video looking out the window.  What a pretty view of the Alps we had!  Even though I am not a sports fan, being in Europe during the World Cup games was a lot of fun because it is a way to be a part of the local culture and not just a tourist.  The enthusiasm was infectious...I think I even hooted back at a motorcylist who sped by honking, waving and holding a huge German flag aloft.  We also watched the end of the Netherlands vs Brazil game from the very crowded beer garden, so crowded that the only place we could find to sit was behind a tree.  I could see some of the screen by looking around a branch and Scott could see around the tree trunk. I had just as much fun people watching as I did soccer watching.  There was a birthday party happening at the table next to us for a 3 or 4 year old girl.  Can you imagine Emma saying she wants her birthday party at the beer garden to watch soccer?  So today, we have Spain and Netherlands playing for the Cup...not a big deal here, but huge in the rest of the world.  I am still rooting for Orange!

Zugspitze

Today I bring you pictures from the top of the world.  Well, not the top of the world, but the Top of Germany.  Zugspitze is Germany's tallest mountain peak in the Alps and is just under 10,000 feet high.  And we went there!  And we stood on the top!  And we looked down!!!  First we took a train from our hotel in Garmisch, which was just leaving the station when we were buying our tickets, so the ticket seller ran us out to the track and held the train so we could get on.  (The same thing happened to us in Norway!)  The train tootles through the charming Bavarian countryside where cows wear bells, men wear leather lederhosen and green felt hats with feathers in them, balconies are abloom with flowers and firewood is stacked with a precision that Scott admired very much.  Then we switched to another train, a cog wheel train to get us up the steep ascent.  We know exactly how steep it was because Scott pulled out the iTouch and used the level app to tell us that the grade was around 14%.  Very steep!  

This is not quite at the top yet.  We still need to get on a cable car to take us to the very top.

This is at the top.

The gold cross is at the summit.  The lake is Eibsee, and that is where we then had to take the cable down to.  The cable car was not scary.  The platform at the top of the mountain, however, gave me butterflies in my stomach.You can see that I am holding onto the railing for dear life.  So I don't fall off, or jump off, or even get PUSHED off.