Trip to Norway: Part 1
Oslo to Voss to Bergen
Arriving in Oslo we were picked up by a car and driver and delivered to our hotel where we were met by our tour guide, Chase Alexander Jordal. We had been introduced by e-mail and a personal phone call before we traveled, so we were able to recognize each other right away and make our face-face introductions. Chase was the perfect tour leader for our group, having lived for a time in the U.S. and having an American mother and Norwegian father. He is also an officer in the Norwegian Army Reserve and fit right in with the many military veterans in our group. He had been married just over a year and we were his first tour group, having signed on with the company in November. He is working on his Master’s degree and desires to teach and eventually get into school administration, but we think he also has a future in Norwegian politics. We were given an opportunity to get into our hotel room and have a little rest. After a nap, we joined the rest of the group in walking to a local restaurant and having dinner with our tour leader. After dinner we were on our own, so walked around the waterfront and had an ice cream before heading back to our hotel and turning in for the night.
After a hearty breakfast in the hotel we met in a conference area and had a welcome briefing and “getting to know you session” with our tour leader and the other members of the group. The 23 group members were all seasoned travelers with Grand Circle/OAT and turned out to be a good group to be with. Our next event was a bus tour of Oslo with a local guide who did a good job of pointing out the sites and letting us out for some guided stops. We were impressed with the modern opera house that sits in the harbor like a giant iceberg and other city buildings with a very modern look to them, to include one that looks like a barcode like you see on a package and also the world’s narrowest apartment building, only 7.8 meters wide. We then bussed to the Vigeland sculpture park. The park is a very large green space, but has hundreds of bronze sculptures as well as a central set of stone sculptures all created by a man named Vigeland running from the 1920’s to the 1940’s. The theme is human life at all stages of life and their relationships with each other. The central pillar of stone is one piece and very impressive. Even more impressive was the fact that the city commissioned the artist and provided him with all the funds he needed for supplies, equipment, associates and a personal income. The park was undamaged during the Nazi occupation years and some of the final pieces were done during this period. After the park we got taken to the “Fram” museum which houses the polar exploration ship named “Fram” and was designed to survive being iced in at the polar cap for several years without breaking up. The polar expedition era in Norway produced a number of national heroes, most notably Fridjof Hansen and Roald Amundsen. These people and their contemporaries were like the Mercury astronauts in terms of going where no one had gone before and achieving fame in their time, some like Amundsen losing their lives in the process. I cannot imagine being in a ship stuck in the ice for several years, but these hearty souls managed to do it and not go stir crazy. We then were taken to a Viking boat museum with 3 long boats unearthed over the last 100 years dating back to the 8th and 9th century and well preserved along with many implements and items that were buried with the ships as part of a Viking King or Queens funeral. The burial and preservation techniques used are why these artifacts did not simply rot way over the centuries. After lunch in the outdoor café by the museum, we were on our own for more explorations and overstayed our opportunity to get back to the hotel and walk to the parliament building to meet a friend of Chase’s who is a staffer in the Parliament. He had offered to show a bit of the building to those of our group interested in seeing the inside of the Parliament building and having a discussion about taxation policies. As it turned out, Chase had a friend or acquaintance in almost every town or city we visited in Norway and they all were willing to share some expertise with us to go deeper into Norwegian life and culture. We made it a point not to miss any other of these encounters for the rest of the trip. We did use the time we had in the late afternoon to visit the Norwegian Historical Museum which had several interesting temporary exhibits to include the only complete Viking helmet from that era as well as other artifacts and treasures. We only had about an hour to look around before closing time, so we did not see it all by any means. After returning to our hotel and cleaning up for dinner, we walked as a group to the waterfront and had a fixed menu fish dinner at a nice restaurant. We were on our own after that and did some exploring around the waterfront before returning and turning in for the night.
Our second full day in Oslo started after breakfast with a walk to the July 22, 2011 memorial. This incident was an act of domestic terrorism by an alt-right Norwegian trying to eliminate future leaders of the Labor Party at a youth summer camp on an island in a lake out in the rural area. His plot included building and detonating a car bomb outside of some government buildings that caused a lot of damage, injuries and several deaths. He dressed in the uniform of a policeman and moved freely from the van containing the bomb to a car he had parked outside the blast area. Counting on the confusion of the bombing, he drove directly to the lake, took a ferry over using his police cover as a ruse, and got the operators to think he was going to provide security based on the bombing threat. Once on the island, he broke out a semiautomatic rifle and a handgun and began shooting at the operators of the camp and the youth, eventually killing and wounding a large number of people. The final death toll between the bombing and the shooting spree was some 62 people, including several who died jumping off cliffs to tray and swim off the island. This incident stunned the nation as it was home grown. The shooter was captured, tried and convicted and sentenced to the maximum prison term of 22 years, but as there is a legal provision of keeping someone confined who poses a future threat, he will never get out of jail (Norway repealed their death penalty a number of years ago). The memorial is sober and still only a temporary one, but has photographs of all those who died (with the exception of a few whose families did not give permission and are represented by a blank picture frame) and their ages, some as young as 14. There is a documentary film that plays continuously which has interviews with survivors describing the day and the fear they all had. Apparently all the political parties (and there are quite a few) in Norway get young people involved in summer camp activities, which for the most part are like any normal summer camp, but there are opportunities for rising leaders to be identified. In the politics of Norway, voters vote for a party rather than a person to represent them in parliament and the parties that get a certain threshold of votes get seats in parliament with the people who fill those seats picked by party leaders. The island where this massacre occurred hosts several of different political party’s youth over the course of a summer and it has only recently resumed hosting the camps.
After this somber visit, we walked as group to a major arterial street and boarded a tram to the West end of Oslo. Tram lines are very prevalent and active in all the major cities we visited. In the not so distant past, Oslo was split into a West and East end with the money on the East end and the manufacturing on the West end. The housing in the West end reflected the blue collar nature of the neighborhoods, smaller, cheaper and more favored by students and immigrants. With the coming of the 21st century, the West end has begun to gentrify. Breweries and surviving industries have located out of the city and the former textile mills, dye plants and warehouses have been turned into apartments, shops and green spaces. The river that runs through the heart of the area has been cleaned up and provides a very pleasant walk of several miles along either side of it. Our local guide who grew up in the area in the 60’s took us on quite a hike while telling of how it was to grow up in a one room apartment with little modern conveniences. We saw things like a huge complex of grain silos turned into an 11 story student housing complex. We passed several parks and noted lots of Dad’s with small children and learned that the generous amount of maternity/paternity leave granted to the parents of new children are split into 3 parts, one for the mother, another for the father and a third portion that the parents can decide who stays and who goes to work. We ended our hike in an area with lots of counterculture trappings and street art murals. We had lunch on our own in a street market that was an enclosed building with lots of vendors as well as small places to eat. After lunch we took a city bus back to our hotel. Suzy and I then went on a hunt for postage stamps and found a post office where we were shocked to have to pay the equivalent of over $3 for an international post card stamp.
After that walk, we went to the palace to visit the home of the Norwegian King and Queen. Norway is a constitutional monarchy having opted for that rather than a Republic when it obtained its independence from Sweden in 1905. Suzy had obtained tickets online before we left the states for an English speaking tour and we were able to do that on our own beginning at 4 p.m. It was very interesting and well done and we got to see quite a bit of the palace, but unfortunately, no photographs are allowed so we had to settle for some postcards. The Royal Family is well regarded by the people, but do not exercise the power of the government. The sitting Prime Minister and cabinet come to the Palace on Fridays and as a group meet with the King and the next in line for the throne to obtain Royal assents to decisions made by the Parliament. Assent is almost always given and in the very rare cases where it is withheld the Prime Minister will work with Parliament to rework a matter and deal with it at a later meeting. We made our way back to the hotel in time to have a coffee, clean up and meet with the group in our conference area with a local journalist who writes for and publishes a conservative magazine in Norway. This was another acquaintance of our tour guide and was a special event not on the formal program, but we got a lot out of the presentation and follow on discussion regarding the issues of immigration in Norway. The issues are all familiar, in dealing with people who don’t know the language, can’t find work in their former fields, and lack of assimilation. Norway as a country of only 4.5 million and a relatively homogenous local population can only absorb so many immigrants in schools and urban neighborhoods. Although Norway is not a member of the EU, it does have free passage for EU members without passport controls, and as a result suffers a bit from what we would call “economic immigration” from some of the poorer Eastern European EU member nations. We noted a lack of homeless and beggars on the streets, but were told that there had been a recent uptick in panhandling by Romanians which is felt to be an organized crime thing that the country is trying to get a handle on. Suzy and I did have to rebuff two young Roma women on separate occasions who were trying to engage us for “donations” while we were in a park having ice cream, but nothing like the Roma experiences we had in Paris!
Dinner was on our own and we found a nice place a bit of a walk away, but worth it to eat in a courtyard. The long light days even in Oslo made it seem like it was earlier than it was, so we were a bit late getting back to our hotel and packing up to leave the next morning.
Our travels commenced by bus after breakfast. We quickly got into the mountains and had some very spectacular scenery. We also passed by the lake that had the island which was the scene of the July 22, 2011 massacre. A rest stop along the way gave us a chance to stretch our legs and do a small bit of shopping in an enclosed mall featuring stores owned by a hotel magnate. Despite an out of the way location, any business owned by this wealthy Norwegian had to have a shop in this mini-mall. We continued on our way even further up into the mountains and stopped in a small resort town for a group lunch. We went through many tunnels, one of which was 25 kilometers long (about 15 miles). We passed many waterfalls and cascades, reminiscent of the Scottish Highlands. Once again we made an unscheduled stop to visit an acquaintance of our tour leader on a farm outside the small mountain town of Flam. Conrad was the young man’s name and he was getting ready to go study in Germany for a year. The family raises sheep on their farm. His mother is Romanian and knits goods for sale in a small cooperative shop in town for the tourists that come up a deep fjord on cruise ships right up to this small town. The cruise ships are a mixed blessing as there are tourists to spend money on local crafts and goods during the stop and also to ride the scenic Flam railway further up into the mountains and back on short excursions. The downside is there is no infrastructure for the ships, so they run their engines to keep the power on and the sheer numbers of people passing through overwhelm the locals. Our small group was welcomed by the family. Conrad’s father told us about the farm and also his other occupation as a tour guide in Europe (which is how he met his wife). His wife was very nice and served us tea, coffee and a cookie in a covered shed. We encouraged her to show off her knitting work and as a result we arranged to visit the co-op the next morning before we took the railway excursion. I gave her one of my children’s books as a gift for hosting us on the spur of the moment (The Legend of the Christmas Dachshund). We then continued on our bus journey with the next stop being a “Stave” Church built over 800 years before, all out of wood with dragon’s head carvings on the top corners. These churches were built by craftsmen in the middle Ages going from place to place, felling large trees and raising the logs on end atop a stone foundation, then interlocking them with cross timbers. The style blended some Viking mythology with Christianity, which was a common element of the early church in evangelizing pagan cultures. The interior was very dark, but some of the carvings and alter paintings were still in good shape. It was well preserved on the outside because it was covered in tar, so was dark brown to black. A local youth was our guide to the church and she did a very good job giving us the history. After the Protestant reformation, the churches were transitioned from Roman Catholic to Lutheran and the ornate decors were taken out. There are very few of the original Stave churches left in Norway, although there are some reproductions here and there. This church had been used up until about 40 years ago when a modern church was built nearby. It is still used for weddings and there is a church cemetery that is still used for burials. The museum and guides are all local rural youth who work during the summer while school is out. It is a win-win for them and the local area. We continued our travels on through the mountain valleys to the town of Voss, where we stayed overnight. It was a warm day and the hotel had no AC, but was otherwise a good room. We had dinner in the hotel buffet style and as Suzy was not feeling well we retired at a reasonable hour as we had to be up fairly early the next day to leave again.
The next morning we had an early breakfast and bussed to Flam and into the town to meet Conrad’s mother who had opened the co-op shop early for us. We had about 20 minutes to look at the handmade crafts, mainly jewelry and knitting, but some other things as well. We bade her goodbye and headed to the Flam railway excursion with Conrad coming along. This tourist railway climbs steep grades and switchbacks with spectacular views of the valleys and mountains. About halfway up we stopped and had a chance to get off at a very large waterfall and take pictures. We had been told previously about a legend of something like the Greek sirens that sang beautifully and lured sailors to their death on the rocks in the sea, but this version (called a Nokk) takes the form of a beautiful young woman who lures young men to their death in the falls with her enchanting singing. As we were stopped and taking pictures, all of a sudden music came over the sound of the waterfall and we glimpsed a figure of a woman dancing to the music on top of one of the embankments near the top of the falls. She came into view briefly several times then disappeared over the embankment. After this bit of entertainment (I can report no young men went over the falls) and we got back on the train for the remainder of the trip. For a brief snippet of her appearance, click on this link.Water Sprite (Nokk) The return trip brought us back to the Flam station where we went to a different set of tracks and boarded a regular passenger train for Bergen. The trip was several hours and was a comfortable ride. We arrived at the main train station and Chase struck up a conversation with a Norwegian couple who had been on the train coming back from backpack camping in the mountains. They agreed to visit with us for a few minutes and explained that people backpack camp a lot in the mountains during the summer. The water in the streams is safe to drink and they can cook simple meals from dehydrated provisions they bring with them. It was a very nice encounter. We loaded our gear up on a bus and went directly to lunch at an interesting restaurant Chase was familiar with called “Dr. Wiesner’s”. Up until the early 1900’s it was a public bath house for local residents who had no bathrooms and used outhouses for toilets. They could come once a week and clean up for a modest sum. The place went through several iterations of things, finally becoming a restaurant. The current owner spoke to us before lunch was served and explained it is a neighborhood social center (a family was doing a birthday celebration in another part of the facility while we were there). The other interesting thing about the place was that it brings on inexperienced young people and trains them in how to be good servers so they can move on to jobs in higher end establishments. Bergen is Chase’s hometown and he liked to come to this place for a beer and conversation on a regular basis. It had kind of a “Cheers” atmosphere to it, and the food was simple, but good.
After lunch we went to our hotel and settled in mid-afternoon, but went out almost immediately to walk to a vernicular known locally as the “Floibahn” to go from sea level to the top of one of the seven mountains surrounding Bergen. Suzy decided to stay in our room and rest, but most of us took the “Floibahn” straight up the side of the mountain, getting out at the top and having a large area to wander about for viewing and taking pictures. There also were two restaurants, a tourist shop and a child’s play area. Chase challenged us to walk with him back to down a very well maintained and wide path that snaked back and forth and eventually deposited you back in town. Most of us did so and within a short distance we came upon a kindergarten/preschool for kids. Their parents put them on the “Floibahn” and they are met by staff at the top and spend the day doing their classroom activities and play outside, then ride back down and are picked up by their parents. Although our walk back was downhill all the way, I was beat by the time we finished and my muscles were burning from the downhill slope for the 3 kilometers or so we walked. It was a good thing Suzy begged off as it would not have gone well for her. By the time I got back to the room I could barely walk and she on the other hand had had a restful sleep of several hours and was feeling better. While walking back with Chase I asked him where we could get a good hamburger in town as we had been eating a lot of fish since the trip started. He pointed put a place near the “Floibahn” called “Inside Burger”. Once Suzy got recovered and I had a chance to rest a bit, we walked back past the “Floibahn” and found the restaurant. It was definitely a young people’s place, but did have an excellent assortment of burgers and sides as well as a lot of different beers on tap. The décor was 80’s metal rock and we were the oldest people in the place by far, but we enjoyed it as a little adventure by ourselves, plus the burgers were excellent! Although it was after 9 p.m. when we finished, it was still light when we left, so we walked back a different way and checked out some of the other scenery. There is a place near the waterfront called the “Fish Market” which is a series of red canopies that enclose small food stands and are very popular with the cruise ship tourists from the ships docked nearby, especially the Chinese. We poked our heads into some tourist shops still open, but bought only post cards. It was another late night when we finished and sleep came quickly.
The next morning after breakfast we all walked with our leader to the Fish Museum which is located at the harbor in a former warehouse for the exporting of dried and salted cod (called stock fish) for several hundred years. The museum is a learning center for school groups as well as tourists, so the museum guide provided us with a lot of information on the 1000 years of history of the Bergen area, about fishing techniques over the years, the collapse of the herring fisheries in the early 20th century from over fishing, and the current state of aquaculture in Norway. We also had a discussion of whaling and how that has changed over the last 300 years. Norway does very little whaling these days, and the only species hunted are the small Minkie whales which are a sustainable resource and are humanely harvested. We also saw a video on the demise of the sealing industry in Norway from sealskin coats being a coveted high fashion item up to the early 1960’s until celebrity and Greenpeace backlash at the way seals were hunted closed down the industry in just a few years. It’s hard to believe that a brutal killing business existed only to meet he desires of people for fashionable coats. After our museum learning experience, we had lunch in their restaurant in a private room, with a very good salmon main course. As we were doing dessert and coffee, a young woman came in dressed in a traditional Norwegian costume and played some traditional music on a Norwegian version of a violin. It is a bit bigger than a regular violin and had dragon’s head carved on the end. It also has 7 strings, 5 are played as usual and two are harmonic resonators. Some of the tunes sound a bit like Scottish or Irish fiddle playing and indicates how the cultures overlapped during the Viking era and the middle ages as people ventured back and forth over the North Sea. The young lady answered our questions for a while and we learned that musicians who study the traditional instruments and music don’t do classical studies in orchestras and vice versa. We also learned her instrument was just over 100 years old! Follow this link for a short video of her performing for us. Musician
After lunch it was back to the hotel and regrouped for the afternoon. I took Suzy up on the Floibahn” so she could have the view, but we both rode it back down! We then went in search of an ATM and after a couple of false starts were successful. We stopped for ice cream in a park on the way back (they have great soft ice cream in Norway that does not get drippy in the heat). Our next event was a one hour discussion at the hotel with Chase’s father who runs a small business that installs Internet and TV cabling to distribute signals for apartments and office buildings where a satellite dish is impractical to use. Our group had fun kidding him about his son Chase, but we did learn a lot about how much it takes to be an entrepreneur in a social welfare country. Hiring issues, benefits issues, tax issues—a lot of balls to juggle. After that we went to a separate section of the hotel dining room and had our farewell to Bergen dinner as a group. Chase’s Dad joined us, but Chase disappeared just before we sat down and reappeared a bit later dressed in traditional Norwegian clothing. It was very colorful, but Chase related that it is all wool and itches. He let us take pictures of him and with him. We were at a round table of 8 and had a lovely evening chatting and getting to know the other 3 couples at the table. After dessert and coffee it was time to go pack up and get some sleep as the next morning we would be heading off to the countryside to visit a fish farm and upon our return we would be taken to our ship for the coastal portion of our trip.
After breakfast the next morning we bussed quite a ways out of town up the coast and onto islands via tunnels and bridges to visit a fish farm. Aquaculture is big business for Norway. Although cod and haddock are still wild caught commercially, salmon and a salmonid relative, the arctic char, are all raised in farms. Along the way we passed several large oil platforms that were in for repair and refurbishment. The salmon farm we went to is also a learning center and has a small museum and a restaurant that serves an excellent lunch of fish soup (really like chowder), bread, salad and a dessert. We enjoyed the lunch, then had a presentation and film given by the son of the owner who took us thought the entire process of hatching the salmon from fertilized eggs, raising the salmon fry and on to the smolt stage at which point they are vaccinated and placed into the ocean pen enclosure where they will grow to the size and weight desired. We also got information on the business side of things and how important these fisheries are to the economy of the area and to Norway. We also received a safety briefing before walking to the dock and loading up on a rubber hulled speed boat for the ride over to the platform in the ocean where the pens were. Once at the platform we could see closed circuit TV pictures of the five stock pens with the fish in them. There are also some tiny fish in with the salmon that feed on algae and keep the salmon clean. We were shown the pelletized feed and then went out by the pens to see the feeding apparatus distribute food in a circular arc and all the excitement of the fish feeding. The particular pen we saw had fish about 10 – 12 inches long. It takes about 18 months for the fish to grow big enough to harvest. At that point, a specialized boat sucks them out of the pen into a large live well and they are transported to a processing facility where they are anesthetized, humanely slaughtered, and processed into filets for flash freezing or for fresh fish markets locally. We returned to the shore via the speedboat and had time to visit the museum with a local employee whose family had lived in the area for four generations, well before roads and electricity when the only way to Bergen was by boat and most people raised sheep and fished from small boats. The catch from a day of fishing would be rowed into Bergen and sold in the fish market, and then the fisherman would have to row back home—definitely a hard life. These island communities did not have trees, mostly scrub vegetation. Heating was done with peat which was gathered by hand from the peat bogs on the islands, cut into squares, dried on end and burned. It took a whole lot of peat to keep a small cottage heated through the winter! This was particularly interesting to me as I had met some of my Scottish relatives years before who gathered and heated with peat up into the 1990’s, using the same tools and techniques as the Norwegian islanders did. The museum’s artifacts, dioramas and photographs were quite interesting, but before too long we had to depart back to Bergen and get to our Hurtigruten ship for the sea part of our adventure. Stay tuned for Part 2 of the blog that will cover the 6 days we spent on the ship!
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