Norway 1: Bergen 13/08

One more place is now marked in my travel wish list- Norway.

Travelling during COVID time including extra measurements such as extra clean, masks, the feeling of unsafe… Schiphol airport was again full of travellers, more than I expected, but I guess it’s because of holiday period of the year, also more people got vaccinated. There was however no sort of checking this COVID information before flying :)

But immediately after arriving to Bergen, we all were led to the airport security checkpoint and divided into  2 lines, fully vaccinated in Europe and negative test. Most of people lined up on the first one, showing the vaccination rate is quite high in Europe. This process was quite neat and tight. 

 My first impression arriving to Bergen was, it’s sunny, not raining like weather forecast, very warm welcome 🤗  But…(tell you later) . Second impression was, there were many tunnels. From the airport to the city I counted 3 tunnels, one was even longer than 3km I guess. 

We had a nice time (s)trolling around, visiting the most famous area of Bergen called Bryggen. It's an old commercial area near to the harbour and has a many buildings with an unique wooden structure. It suffered several fires during centuries of its existence. There are still many shops and cafe around. 

Bryggen by night

The weather was quite supportive until it started pouring rain…and stopped, and rained again. Later on my friend told me that in Norway, Bergen is called the rain city. No wonder... It actually reminds me of Normandy area. After strolling around under the unstable pouring rain and sun, not sure whether we should stop or continued, we decided to take a cable car to the top of Fløyfjellet mountain. Later on we realized that its actually quite easy to just walk up/down, well, when its not raining.

A view from the top of the Floyfjellet mountain

The view from the top of the mountain was quite spectacular, but the wind got so strong that I started feeling so cold. Walking around was a kind of solution (or not). We found out a way to go up hill, and kept walking under the heavy rain/stop, and stopped at a lake. On top of a mountain, under the rain, the view of the lake with pine trees around and the smoke got out of a left-over BBQ was really amazing. That place reminds me of the picture I usually saw about Da Lat, and a song about it as well. We stayed at a porch of a closed cafe there and watched the rain dripping from its roof. I wish it had opened - would be a perfect fit for the view and weather. 

By the time we got off the mountain with cable car, it suddenly sunny. However our shoes were soaked in water and we were tired. Stopping by the closet cafe in front of the cable car station, I took off the shoes, socks and hanged it at the bottom of the chairs hoping for it to dry with some last sun of the day, and hoping not many people notice me with the strange look barefoot (haha okay well i didn't care that that much :P ). Accompany us were not only beautiful sunlight but also some sparrows. They perched so confidently on the two opposite empty chairs, just like us guests. They were looking at us, waiting if we had any leftover and one even dared to come like 10 cm close to us for some breadcrumbs. The scene was just so lovely (And I guess there were not so many cats around :P, or at least not some like my cat). The walk back to the hotel also shown a lovely Bergen.

Sparrows on the chairs

For dinner, we wanted to eat seafood - We were in Norway (yay). But Googling around about seafood places, just shown they were all either fully booked, or either not with good reputation. After got back to the hotel for changing, we said that we would just walked to the Bryggen area again and see what we could get....Well, we even not reached there yet, we saw a small subtle restaurant on the way and people through windows were eating something with gloves.... Yeah, let's head there and ask for a place. And it was a really a nice surprise dinner. We got crabs (as we wish for seafood) event hough we had to wait for quite long (Meanwhile we really talked a lot about the day and others...) It was spicy and delicious. And definitely a local restaurant, not on the TripAdvisor list. What a nice way to end our first day in Norway :)

Dinner with Crabs