High seas, family, adventures

18/4 - this was a big day, sore feet at the end!
Very happy with the hotel breakfast, plenty of bacon, sausages and scrambled egg as well as a good spread of cold meats and cheeses, Pete had his favourite cereal and fresh fruit, and the cuppa was nice and hot. We were on the doorstep of the Bryggen museum when the ‘Open’ sign went out so spent more than an hour in there. What a find, so interesting and really well set out. We were chatting to the museum staff afterwards, it was built in the 1980’s I think and was a very standard ‘exhibits in cases, quite regimented’ but was revamped completely in 2019 and all the uncovered parts of the museum footprint were exposed under glass or glass ramps leading down a couple of levels for all to see. The storyboards were fairly brief but well explained, the timeline was in every section, there were cabinets with groups of finds, and small ‘open me’ cabinets with treasures inside such as a child’s leather shoe with delicate patterns on it, and a set of coloured glass beads in another. We could see the remains of small buildings, or really the burnt remains of their wooden walls.

The boards also told of life in the Bryggen area from around the 11th century, it wasn’t a Viking settlement as such but a trading port working with ships from all around the known world for example Syria, Morocco, Turkey, Spain and of course the rest of Europe, much of it with England and the Netherlands. The town has had around 35 fires in its existence and that showed up in the finds. They had found the remains of a leatherwork shop and…….there we found an 11th century Akubra, just like Pete’s, I was pretty excited about that. There was a small amount of jewellery, some pottery, lots of fishing weights, an intact bow and arrowheads, knives in scabbards, too much to list more.

On the lowest level was a 4m high keel of a ship, and a big piece of the boat’s framework with a very clever animation of a ship inside and out ending up with the screen meeting with the framework. They had an explanation of the runic alphabet and a display of rune sticks with their translations underneath such as ‘Thorkell the minter sends you pepper’ and ‘I love that man’s wife so much that fire seems cold! And I am that woman’s lover’. They were mild compared to a couple with some very old Anglo-Saxon words that are in dodgy use today! There was a kids area with push-aside flaps inviting you to smell and identify it – grass, burnt wood and poo amongst others.

I was very taken with a representation of a small chapel with an altar area, religious finds in cabinets, even a skeleton and a very old linen shirt in great condition, found in a bog which preserved it for hundreds of years. There was a very sobering cabinet with a small wooden box, simple carving, and meant as a casket for a tiny foetus, along with a collection of bears claws which were supposed to prevent difficult births and diseases.

On the way out I was waiting for Pete and got talking to the two staff members and said that my great grandfather was Norwegian and where he came from, turned out the young man came from the Stange area so we had a good old natter, maybe he was my cuzzy?? They were both very knowledgeable about the museum, the history and other places to visit, in fact he told us about three famous paintings in St Mary’s church next door: one of John the Baptist, the artist had been paid to portray the person who commissioned the painting and if you look closely John the Baptist and the face of the executioner are the same; one with protestants on one side going straight to heaven and Catholics on the other side being tempted sideways by all sorts of things and being stopped by angels at the gates of heaven; and the third of Mary and baby Jesus, the face of the baby resembling a rather old, chubby, red-cheeked man who had paid for the portrait. We went across to the church to have a look but it wasn’t open unfortunately because it has a real mixture of Romanesque, gothic etc architecture due to different additions and partial rebuilds over the years.

We had a half hour so went over to the fort where we’d walked on Sunday, hoping to get into the old chapel/hall but in the end it was stupidly expensive per person for what you got so just I went in and took a few photos and had a brief walk around. I’ve attached a photo of the destruction of the hall in 1944 when a boat laden with about 150 tons of explosives tied up at the wharf outside, exploded and destroyed a huge part of the city, not a lot left standing. The ship’s anchor ended up being hurled back over the mountain behind the city, people were sucked out of nearby buildings and thrown to the ground, it was huge. But the hall and parts of the fort were rebuilt to the exact old plans on top of the undamaged underground chapel, storage etc and that mix is what we see today. Now it’s used for receptions, I believe the King held one there a couple of days ago, and for functions and big meetings. There’s a very long modern tapestry along one wall and a very large bright tapestry in the altar area (or the ‘top table’ if you like). Down below you see the old window nooks, big heavy strong arches, but it’s set up with tables so hard to get a good grip of what it once was. Worth a look though only for one of us.

We had a ‘Food and Culture’ tour booked at 12.30 so had 15 minutes to spare before that started. 26-year-old Victoria was a very enthusiastic guide for our small group of six and we enjoyed the three hours very much. There were two Aussies from Sydney who had been on the Jupiter and were on the four night extension in Bergen and Oslo offered by Viking (expensive, posh hotels, train trip and a few excursions but we came out of it cheaper doing it ourselves), and an American couple. We had fluffy fishcakes, a pastry, delicious lunch of mashed potato with fish, baby leeks and bacon, and later beer in the cellar of a 600-year-old bar, the oldest in Norway. We learned about life in Norway now, and she led us down tiny back alleys we’d never have found on our own, in fact would be pretty wary of going down them but it’s amazing what you find. We learned about life in Bryggen and Bergen over the last thousand years. One stop was at the uncovered remains of St Catherine’s hospital, two rooms and a central washing area, one had a fireplace, and the walls were built up to about 1m high. It was destroyed in 1248.

There was a great explanation of how houses were built and how they are being rebuilt to the old plans using historical methods, she’s currently doing a carpentry course learning about restoration so we got a lot of that, as well as her enthusiasm for zip-lining, hiking, running and a lot of other things. Interestingly she admitted to being on the spectrum and having to go from one thing to the other at full speed.

Lunch was at a little place a bit above Bryggen, a restaurant in an octagonal building that used to be a public bath house and inside part of it is still partitioned off ‘like the slices of a pizza’ as she put it. We sat outside in the sun and chatted while we ate, they’ve got a lovely terrace and the whole place had a garden outside with little pansies, polyanthus, a few daffodils coming out, and several small rhododendrons which will look beautiful in a few weeks. We finished at the Christian II bar, 600 years old, and heard about how the streets all came to be cobblestones while we had a beer, brewed to a very old recipe and only about 1 or 2% alcohol. https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigbrit_Willoms, quite long but a tale of intrigue leading to the cobbles.

I would definitely recommend this tour BUT in future management needs to ensure that guides are easily identifiable and that the meeting point is clear. Four of us were told to be outside the Information Centre, two were told differently. The guide had no identifying notice, bag or jacket and we were all early and waiting and very concerned that we had missed the tour until she came to us asking if we were looking for the food tour. This is quite a glitch and shouldn’t happen. I’ve put that in my tour review so hopefully it is taken into consideration.

We had a quick walk to the Nordnes area to meet up with Aussie guide Emma, the two Aussies from the previous tour, an American mother and son, and another woman, so not a huge group which was good. It was called ‘Merchants, Witches, Crime and Hidden Alleys’ and that really summed it up, we got it all. Much of the area was rebuilt following a devastating fire in the 1950’s so there are a lot of very standard concrete apartment blocks, but it also contains some of the oldest, best preserved wooden houses in the city which are under heritage protection and cost an arm and a leg to buy even though they are really tiny. One in the red light area dating from about 1600 and renovated inside just sold for 16M Kroner - $NZ 2.5.

Emma’s tour of Nordnes’s dodgy and very interesting past was excellent – it was fast-paced and full of life, great information about all sorts of things, how the area has grown, why the buildings are as they are, how parts were destroyed by fire or explosion, who lived where and why, history, mystery, witches and what happened in which year. A very good tour, definitely recommended if you have a couple of hours to spare, have good walking shoes and love history.

Things we learned: ‘smaut’ means cobbled alley with wooden houses so there were a lot of xxxx-smauts around. One street had fancy looking concrete/stone faced houses on one side of the street which had belonged to merchants (warehouses were on the other side of the street), they were in Dutch or German or Danish style to look at, painted different colours, but look down the alley and they were just a big wooden box with a stone front – wood was a quarter the price but the façade looked good. They would have had big gardens running down the back, now built over and very little greenery to be seen these days – but a lot of carparks though and one had a long double row of electric car charging stations. Emma said that people pay so much a month for a car-share and the cars are parked all round the city, you just get a code, unlock one of them, drive to wherever and then park back in the same place when you’re done. As the tour was ending she commented on ‘rush hour’ but there would have been less traffic at 4.30pm than in Trafalgar Street at 6pm on a Sunday. Roads in the suburbs are mainly narrow though the traffic didn’t seem to go very slowly despite all the twists and turns – a bit like driving up and down Richardson Street or Clevedon Terrace I think.

We found the tall memorial to 350 women burnt to death over a couple of centuries for being witches – a sad fact that many had been poor widows scratching a living, maybe selling herbs or something, or someone just didn’t like them. Next along was ‘gallows hill’, the main execution ground that was something of a theatrical spectacle for the lower classes, and after that we were down to the waterfront to ‘The Pot Hole’, two or three old wooden streets that had been the red light district managed by a couple of madams who lived in the posh area across the harbour, a real rabbit warren and again the houses were expensive and tiny, very cute though in these very old pockets still existing. The tour finished at the main theatre area and we headed off back to the hotel, all very satisfied with our two hours with Emma.

Fun fact – Norwegians are the world’s largest consumers of frozen pizzas, 25 million per year in a population of about 5.4 million. A frozen pizza costs about $7.75 whereas a same-size Dominos would cost just over $38.50, so that would explain it.

We weren’t tempted by pizza for tea, instead went round the corner to a street stall recommended by Victoria as having the ‘best, best, best’ reindeer sausages in town and indeed they were tasty as we sat on a bench opposite McDonalds and ate them with several very interested seagulls hoping for crumbs but there were none with Pete Gillin around. We got pastries from the next-door bakery and had another quiet evening in front of an episode of ‘Vera’, nice and warm in the hotel away from a fairly biting breeze once the sun had gone down.

I've got heaps of photos so will upload another set, please check....もっと詳しく