Beyond Bergen, Norway

August 27, 2006-Getting Acquainted
(photos:Cozy castle,
Oygarden)

David has been following our hotel ratings in Fodor’s and we’re doing quite nicely. They’ve all been well rated. The most recent one, simply called First, is a jewel.

Our city guide, Kay, had no discernable Norwegian accent. That was because she was from Detroit. Her parents were from Norway and she moved here with them as a teen. Her husband is a firefighter. He has lots of job security. Bergen has had a major fire each generation. There are seven fire departments in this small city.

This was more of a drive-by tour than we’ve had in other places. Bergen is small and scenic but many historic buildings are just not there. What fire didn’t destroy the German ship that exploded did. We saw the cutest little castle from the outside. It’s still used when the king visits. If you can call a castle cozy this one would be. Most houses are smaller than a castle and smaller than we’re used to. A three bedroom one-bath house would sell for about $350,000, which seems a bargain compared to Oslo. They also have larger families here, from three to four children. It’s a peaceful place averaging one murder a year.

Kay maintained that people here are different than other Norwegians. She said that going to a funeral in Bergen was more fun than a wedding in Oslo. People from Bergen are more gregarious and fun loving. She attributes the differences to their heritage. Most are leftovers from Dutch and German traders who settled here in 1250. This has always been a trading town and the Hanseatic League was established to protect trading interests of those early settlers who came from Holland and Germany. In 1750 the League closed and members became Norwegian citizens. It was the first time I’ve heard Germans called fun loving. One of those citizens was Hansen, the man who found the cure for leprosy. There’s a Leprosy Museum that sounded kind of interesting but I doubt we’ll get there.

As we returned to our hotel and pulled back into the city center the bus driver had to pay a toll. It’s a vestige of tolls early farmers paid when they came to town to sell their goods.

Getting Out Of Town

We all just grabbed lunch at 7-11 or McDonald’s in order to make the afternoon tour. Yves started out speaking like a representative of the bureau of tourism talking up the benefits of summering here. He became even more enthusiastic as we approached an island off the coast of Bergen. He said we could buy a small cottage there for $30,000.

The coastal area on the island was very rugged. Lilac colored heather grew out of the granite and trees were sparse. One person said that every time he looked at granite he saw countertops. Those lovely red, green, white, and yellow houses were in abundance and we learned that the government controls what colors you can use. They have to be muted tones. The sea was at our side and the next landfall was America. This is where the Vikings set sail.

Studies are being done using tides for electric power instead of waves. Tides are predictable: waves are capricious. The original settlers burned wood until the trees were gone. Then they cut peat for fuel leaving holes in the earth that are now small lakes. The people of this harsh area are always looking for better fuel sources.

This optional tour was about Norway past and present. Today the area has fish farms, supplies ships for the off shore oil industry, and houses a gas refinery. Oil companies gave money for a museum to preserve the past culture of the west coast of Norway and as a vehicle of propaganda for their industry. The museum in Oygarden (meaning row of islands) was our destination. The introductory film showed how hard it was in the past. Fishermen and families had to contend with weather and row their catches to market in Bergen. Today 300 new millionaires exist in the area. They are fish farmers who export 3.5 million dollars worth of salmon a year to the U.S. alone.

We took a break to eat pancakes then walked through the very small and basic museum giving a pocket size overview of the area from Stone Age to industrial and oil age. The earliest settlers followed reindeer north as the glaciers receded after the Ice Age. The main feature was a “feel good” movie made by the oil company in residence, Statoil, the state oil company.

The oil field at sea is the Troll Field. You email readers are lucky in that it was too dark to take notes. It was a sophisticated film boasting that Norway had oil reserves for fifty years. That didn’t sound long to me. It showed the construction of a gas pipeline and platform. I was impressed by the feat of engineering, as was the man from Texas sitting behind me.

We boarded the bus again to look from a distance at the Kollsness Refinery where the gas ends up after it’s extracted. The Star Wars style buildings are sunken below ground so as not to be visible from sea or land. It’s a huge complex including buildings to entertain the many male “guest workers” in an effort to keep them away from the local girls. If there were a major accident and explosion it would be five times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

On the way back to the hotel Yves let us in on extraneous information that we’ll probably never need. He said that if we landed at the airport in Trondheim the announcement would be, “Ladies and gentlemen welcome to Hell.” Hell is the name of the airport or town near Trondheim and means “luck” in Norwegian. He then put a CD on by a Norwegian group called Secret Garden and tried to lull us to sleep. It didn’t work. Besides, it sounded like Irish music.

Now that we know a few words of Norwegian we leave for Stockholm tomorrow. “Ost” is cheese, “killing” is chicken, “skinke” is ham and “fart” is motion. Along the roads there are lots of farts. On a highway sign it means exit.

Toby