7.02.2005

some things never change...

Even on the other side of the world, I am still a klutz. Accentuated by the constant time change, rocking ship, stress of schoolwork… my clumsiness has been in its prime. For example, Amy and I were just eating dinner on the ship out on deck six and while trying to fill my water bottle from the pitcher on the table, I managed to dump the whole pitcher of ice and water all over the table, the deck, and myself. Thank goodness for the amazing crew on this ship – they are so nice whenever I muck anything up! Anyhow, we have been in Norway for a few days now and once again, I have failed to journal on a daily basis… so I am going to have to backdate things again to keep my head on straight as I’m writing. We haven’t been as busy in Iceland, but it gave me time to work on catching up in my three classes which has been a disastrous task! As for today, we decided to spend our last day in Norway wandering museums and collecting information to use in field reports for our classes. First we went to the Hanseatic Museum downtown, which is more or less a reconstruction of what the building would have looked like on the inside when it was inhabited by the German merchants. It’s in a huge row of buildings in an area of town called Bryggen, which encompasses the entire area in which the German merchants used to reside in a segregated community. The row of buildings is architecturally incredible because these buildings all look like little town houses from the front, but are actually warehouses that go back quite a ways (with stairs and passages between warehouses). The buildings are pretty much right on the pier so that ships could pull up to the pier and goods could be immediately transferred to the warehouses – quite impressive! Next we headed down the street to the Bryggens Museum which was about the overall history of Bryggen. They had an interesting exhibit about all of the fires that have destroyed various parts of Bryggen over time, and the archaeological evidence that has been found in reconstructing Bryggen. In the basement, they also had a big model of a Viking ship which was pretty cool (especially since we didn’t make it to Oslo to see the Viking ship burial grounds). They also had some bits about runes and the history of the church in Bergen which hopefully I will be able to incorporate into a paper for one of my classes. Satanists have burned many of the churches to the ground over time, and I had hoped to find more background information about this but didn’t. I also hoped to find more information about the history of trolls in Norway (to write a paper for folklore class), because there are trolls in all forms all over the city! Unfortunately, despite all of the touristy troll knick-knacks, I didn’t find anything about their historical significance. We wandered around a bit again downtown today and I got a couple of things for Sean, Mum and Dad… but that about sums up the day. We got back to the ship really early to avoid the rush to make “on-ship time” which is 21:00 (9pm). For the entire time we’ve been in Burgen, I’ve been dizzy and bumbling around feeling quite “land-sick” (guess I got used to being on the boat pretty quick), and finally today that wore off. Unfortunately we set sail again in just a couple of hours at 23:00 (11pm), so I’m pretty sure I’ll be back to the same routine of stumbling around like a fool... as if I don’t have a hard enough time keeping my clumsiness in check when I’m not on a moving vessel! Ah well that’s it for now… still working on getting my pictures small enough to upload but hopefully (I swear) I will add them in soon. Thanks also to everyone who has e-mailed me – I’m having a tricky time responding to e-mails right now with our dodgy internet situation, but I still enjoy hearing from people and hopefully will get to write back at some point! p.s. Laundry day is finally here (tomorrow) and I am SO excited!

creepy crosswalk sign, yeah?

city square near fish market

central city plaza

look it's our ship! (low center)

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