Norway – Bergen (Post #28)
Hi friends!
This is Michele…today is Saturday, July 23rd and I am sitting in a bar typing this and drinking incredibly cheap beer – $4.50 each – a super bargain here in Norway. At 10:00pm (in about 30 minutes) the beer price goes up to $8 a beer, which still is not bad. So, where is here? Well, we are in Bergen, Norway, a beautiful city, with beautiful surroundings. We took a 6.5 hour train from Oslo to Bergen yesterday (Friday). The Lonely Planet book said that all subsequent train rides would be ruined after this and at first I thought this would probably be a complete exaggeration, but it was not. Every minute of the train ride could have been a post card. Here are a few pictures I took from inside the train…
Notice the little hut in the picture below. They are everywhere in Norway, next to lakes, trails and steams. They are for hikers to stay in so that people can do multi-day hikes without having to carry a tent.
We are here in Bergen staying in an interesting place called the Crowded House – it is not crowded nor is it a house. It is sort of a hotel but we are sharing bathrooms and showers with everyone else on our floor – which is fine. We have adapted to this life style. The first thing we did yesterday was go to the tourist office and get information, go grocery shopping, and do our laundry (for free!). This is our routine now when we get into a new city. We have a system – get into a town before 5pm if possible, visit the tourist office, try to get a hostel/hotel near the train station, buy groceries for the stay (especially like now, where we cook all our meals), and look into laundry. After this stuff, we took a walk around the city at night and went back to our rooms. We always have two single beds and if we are lucky our packs also have a place. Our packs are our suitcases of course so it is great if there is a place to put our packs other than the floor. This place, like all the places we have stayed, has two single beds. This place is a bonus because it has a desk and a small table (think IKEA furniture for the desk and table). Mike has his pack on a table that kept rolling to the other side of the room so we had to block the wheel with one of his shoes.
Anyway…Today we went on the most beautiful hike. We took a cable car (like a tram) to the top of a mountain and then hiked for 3.5 hours to a neighboring mountain before walking about 45 minutes down to the city of Bergen. Here are a few pictures…
The first one is a view of the city of Bergen, Norway. I took this right as we steped off the cable car/tram thing. The other two below, I took while we were hiking. We had a fantastic time!
I do have the ability to upload pictures here so I will add more to the webshots site tomorrow. And speaking of tom0rrow…we are going on an all day excursion staring with a boat trip through the fjords, then a bus ride up the crookedest street in Norway (13 hairpin turns – yes, I will bring the motion sickness pills!) followed by a train ride back to Bergen. Talk to you soon!
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Tags: Category #9: Norway
Michele Harmon
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