6.29.2005

god morgen bergen!

Wednesday morning I woke up and looked out of our porthole to see beauteous Norway! Houses built all up and down lush green mountains surrounding our harbor… “pretty much amazing”, as Rachelle would say. Amy had woken up at 5am to watch for a few minutes as we pulled into port, which was also rumored to be exceptionally beautiful… but I definitely slept like a rock through that one. Unfortunately, even earlier than that, we all awoke to an announcement that internet and phone services wouldn’t be available at all in Norway, which is mostly a bummer because we had planned on using free internet while we still could (they start charging upon departure from Norway) to make reservations for train travel and hostels in Spain, Holland, and Poland. We did find an internet café in town that we stepped into briefly to check e-mail, but prices were a bit steep (about $4/half-hour with student discount). Through Semester at Sea, we went on a short city tour/orientation of Bergen, which was definitely helpful to get our bearings before running amuck on our own. Thankfully we are much closer to the city here than in Iceland and it’s only a few minutes walk to one of the main squares. Perhaps the feature of the tour was riding the funicular (“incline” as we say in Pittsburgh) up to the top of Mount Floen. At the top, there were hiking trails everywhere (wish we’d had time to explore) and of course an excellent view of Bergen, which is surrounded by seven fjords and seven mountains! Riding the funicular was fun even to us (having ridden inclines before) because their entire system is incredibly modern with reusable tickets that function in a similar way to BART cards (in the California bay area). We went exploring around the city a bit after that, but everyone closes earlier in Europe (to allow people more leisure time), so we still came back to the ship relatively early and called it a day.

amy and i, atop mt. floen

view of bergen from the mountain

view of the hanseatic wharf from across the way

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