From Oslo to Bergen

Sunday was a slow day, this time because of the persistent rain. We ate breakfast as usual at the hotel and then walked in the rain to the train station to reserve seats on the train to Bergen. We have rail passes that cover the bulk of the tickets, but it's a good idea (and on some trains required) to reserve a specific seat which costs a few dollars extra. The rain wasn't heavy, but we knew we weren't up for as much walking around since it was in the 40s and misting making it pretty unpleasant to be out and about.

After the tickets we stopped by and looked in the window of one of Kerrie's favorite designer's shop, Gudrun Sjoden. It was closed but I could see her wheels turning. Then, it was on to Oslo's cultural history museum for some viking artifacts, a late lunch/early dinner of noodles at a warm cafe, and then on to the Oslo art museum. The art museum is best know for having a large collection of Edvard Munch paintings (best known for The Scream). Munch lived in Oslo and left all the paintings he owned to the city council when he died. A highlight for me, though, was seeing Rodin's The Thinker. I always thought it was life-sized, but it was only a couple feet tall.

Yesterday was a full day--we got out early, but because of a mis-set alarm we missed breakfast at the hotel. A nearby cafe provided some coffee and pastries, and thusly fortified we headed south to the marina to catch a ferry. Several of the cities more interesting museums are across the harbor from downtown Oslo, but the ferries go around the circle of stops every half-hour and are on the municipal transit system so it's really convenient to hop over there. The first spot was the Viking Ships Museum, which was built to house three recovered viking vessels that were all part of burial mounds in Norway. The array of artifacts and the way the boats were presented really impressed both of us.

The second museum across the bay was even more fascinating. A Norwegian named Thor Heyerdahl was interesting in how ancient cultures could have communicated across vast distances. At the time (1940s) scientific opinion was that the craft of the ancients wouldn't have survived sea voyages. Thor decided to prove that it was possible by building a balsa wood boat and sailing it from the coast of Chile out to Polynesia to prove that some of the people could have made it from the east, not just from the West through Asia as was believed. Later he sailed a boat made of papyrus from Egypt to South America showing again how those cultures could have had at least tenuous links. Seeing scale models of the boats and imagining being out on the ocean for 150+ days in them was mind boggling.

After the museums, we got the ferry back, grabbed lunch, caught the last train to Bergen for the night. After a six hour train ride we checked into our hotel which is old, friendly, cute, and cozy.

Today we tooled around Bergen and made our reservations for Fjord excursions tomorrow. We checked out an open air market, wondered around an old fortress, shopped at an indoor food market with dozens of stalls, and tried to go to the leprosy museum only to find out it's only open in the summer months. It threatened rain all day but never let loose--apparently Bergen rivals Seattle for rainy days per year. We're supposed to get poured on tomorrow, though, so hopefully it'll be dryer to the east when we go sightseeing.

I haven't gotten pictures copied over and uploaded yet so there's nothing new to show. I hope to get some up later tonight or tomorrow.