Bergen's Cloudy Sunshine

Bergen from the top of Mt. Fløyen

When my plane landed in Bergen, Norway, it was sunny. By the time I got off the bus and walked to my hotel, it was raining. When I left my hotel thirty minutes later to explore the city, it was sunny again. An hour later, and I was huddling under a bus stop to avoid getting my lucky airplane shirt completely wet (it’s a blue and white long-sleeved shirt, and every time I’ve worn it on a flight, that flight has departed on time).

Luckily, I had an umbrella with me the whole time, and you should too if you decide to come to Bergen. And you should come to Bergen, I’ve really enjoyed my time here.

I chose to start my adventure in Norway because it felt like somewhere I’d be comfortable after spending so much time in Copenhagen. I thought: how different can all the Nordic people be? I was pretty much right. Norwegians are blonde, reserved, and sunburned, like the Danes. The language looks very similar to Danish, so I can recognize all the travel and food word, at least when I see them written down (bread, coffee, thank you, excuse me, hello, exit, entrance, etc.) There is less English signage here than there was in Copenhagen, probably because it’s a little less cosmopolitan. Also, there are almost no bikes. Copenhagen was stuffed with people who biked fast from point A to point B, but here, because of all the hills, biking is more for exercise and less for commuting.

When I was researching my trip to Norway, all the travel blogs told me to skip Oslo, Norway’s capital, if I didn’t have a lot of time. I’m in Norway for eight days and I like to stay in places for at least a few days so I can see the city without rushing around like a madwoman. So, I decided to save Oslo for another trip and head somewhere different.

Bergen was Norway’s capital for two hundred years during the Middle Ages because it was a major hub for trade—the fishing wharf is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Until the Norwegians discovered oil in the 1960s, fish was Norway’s most important export, and so Bergen, on a fjord that opens into the Atlantic, made perfect sense.

Bergen's harbor

Bergen is a big stop for cruise ships and the University of Bergen is in the city center, so in central Bergen it’s half young students and half old retirees. There are also a lot of German tourists—my walking tour had ten people on it, and seven were from Germany. Two were from the UK, and the tour guide was a Canadian named Sami who fancied himself a “student of the world.”

The best way to describe Bergen is if you visualize the houses as a liquid, like water, that spills between seven mountains and pools in the center. Only one of Bergen’s seven mountains, Ulriken, can technically be classified as a mountain, since apparently something must be taller than 600 meters or it’s just a hill. Ulriken is 643 meters, so it just barely counts as a mountain, a giant boulder sticking out of the ground. You can take the cable car most of the way up the mountain for about $35, or you can walk the Sherpa Steps up. I took the cable car because I’d already hiked about six miles that day, but I hiked the rest of the way to the summit (more about that to come in another post). Mt. Fløyen is a much more accessible hike, or there’s a (much cheaper) funicular you can take to the top for only about $7 and then walk back down.

Central Bergen from the top of Mt. Ulriken

I did visit a few of Bergen’s museums: I liked the city’s archeological museum and the Rasmus Meyers Museum, Bergen’s collection of art from all of Norway’s most significant artists beginning with Norway’s first European-trained painters in the 1700s and ending with Edvard Munch, whose most famous painting is The Scream (go Google it if you don’t know what I’m talking about). The natural landscape dominates Norwegian painting in a way I haven’t seen in any other country, probably because nature is such an enormous part of Norway’s national identity, and at this point, Norway was ruled by the king of Denmark. Genre painting (everyday scenes of everyday people) was also very popular. So, in Italy you’d see paintings of the saints, Jesus, and some Greek and Roman myths, in Norway you see paintings of fjords, little red cabins, boys playing on the beach, and girls holding cats. But I liked it!

So you should come to Bergen too and see the beautiful views, feed the overfriendly pigeons, hike up the mountains/hills. Just bring an umbrella!