Norway Trip 2010 / New Zealand 2011

When we woke up the first day back in Austin the dawn came startlingly early and bright. All day rich sunlight poured down from the sky in seemingly limitless supply making us giddy with light.  We celebrated by going to a new breakfast taco restaurant that had opened up near our house.  After the great amounts of sunshine the most noticeable thing about being back in the US is the tremendous depth of diversity.  In fact we seem to have an abundance of a lot of things: diversity, creativity, wildlife, good food, good beer, customer service, and the obvious public health niceties like water fountains, public restrooms, and stairs built to code.

But there are definately things to miss about Norway. It felt safe and stable and sane. No hurricanes, tornadoes, hail storms, volcanoes, earthquakes, flash floods, or rattlesnakes. No endless Republican and Democrat shouting matches, no KKK, or gun-runners, or religious cults.  No freaking out if people say Merry Christmas instead of Happy Holidays or getting outraged if government officials suggest we should lower our sodium intake. Just a nice stable place with pretty fiords, the North Sea, tundra, moss, pine forests, lots of long legged blondes, and average food.

I’m glad we went and happy to be back.

After all the stories about how much it rains in Bergen the city has had an unusually dry Fall.  We have used our umbrellas, raincoats, and galoshes about a fifth as often as we had been warned we would need to, and my promise to myself to walk up one of Bergen’s mountains any day it didn’t rain has resulted in A LOT of mountain walks.  Bergen has also been unusually cold this year, so when it finally precipitated Saturday night the water came down in the form of snow and we instantly changed our Sunday plans from going to see the art museum again to walking up Mount Blåmanen.  We took the Floibanen funicular up to the halfway point where Kaitlin left us to go exploring on her own while Paul and I took the road to the top.  At several points along the way we were treated to Bergenites reveling in it having been cold for long enough to solidly freeze the mountain’s lakes and ponds. On the way up we saw an impromptu hockey game starting on a frozen pond.  People, who had brought shovels all the way up the mountain with them, were skating back and forth shoveling the snow off the ice to clear a rink.  Near to the hockey players we were delighted to find that the lone cafe on the mountain was open (we’d only ever seen it closed before) and joined a bunch of  snow-suited hikers in making little puddles of melted snow on the floor as we drank spiced lemonade and ate a cinnamon roll while watching the fire through a glass-fronted stove.  Further on, we saw two skaters making virgin tracks across a long lake.  We stayed on top of the mountain as long as we could and still be assured of getting home before nightfall.  It was very beautiful and hard to pull ourselves away.  On the way back, people were sledding down the middle of the road on small snow-shovel sized plastic sleds and we saw several ski tracks.  When we got back to the hockey players, they were well into their game.  By this point, a small audience had formed on one of the pond’s banks.  We stopped and watched for a while.  Street lights we starting to turn on by the time we reached city-center at 3:30.

What the top of the mountain looks like without snow: here.

For the past 20 years, families, schools, businesses, and organizations of Bergen have made gingerbread houses to re-create a fantasy city of Bergen.  The gingerbread houses are collected in a big white temporary building set up on the city’s main pedestrian mall.  Special gingerbread-house-arrangers come to arrange the donations into a cityscape.  The end result is more impressive than one might think and it’s a huge deal to Bergenites.  Last year, someone broke in and vandalized the 2009 gingerbread city and everyone is still talking about it.  For a while they didn’t know who did it, although the police were confident they would find the person.  When asked if the the police thought they could catch the vandal, news articles at the time quote police superintendent Erik Sveås as saying, “Those who are behind it must have…got gingerbread dust all over them.  You can probably…smell them from a long way away.”  The story has a good ending–everyone rallied and re-baked their houses and set it back up and the culprit came forth and apologized.

This year, the city was built with 1,960 structures and had around 12,000 volunteers.

Video of this year’s city.

Photo of this year’s city. Photo of the 2008 gingerbread city.  And one more.

A cold front is hitting Bergen–worst for late November in 100 years.  It’s not actually all that cold if you’ve lived through a Wisconsin winter but it’s cold enough.  The weather report reads: “Clear. High: -4 °C .  Wind ENE 14 km/h .  Windchill: -12 °C  Nightly Low: -7 °C.”  Everyone is walking around in a deep glower.  This normally hyper-fashion-conscious city has gone rapidly downhill with people putting on any combination of hat, scarf, gloves, and puffy Michelin-man style coats to stay warm.  The girls have even given up their thin-black-leather high-heeled boots in favor of stocky fur-lined workman-style ones.  It will need to drop a few more degrees before they are willing to put something over their mini-skirt/tights combo however.

Kaitlin, Paul, and I went out into this cold around 2:30 yesterday to catch a rare winter farmer’s market along Bryggen, before going to the stage area near the large octagonal fountain by the museums called the Lille Lungegaardsvannet.  It was the night of the Lysfest i Bergen when they light up the Christmas tree set up in the middle of Lille Lungegaardsvannet and hold a concert.  As the concert started–a mish-mash of musical ensembles from the retired military brass band, to little kids all dressed as Santa’s elves, to a very good female vocal quartet, to hip hop–people began to pour into the large paved space that surrounds the fountain.  The mood was happy and festive with everyone quite happy to be crowded close to the stage as that meant they were warmer.  After the countdown to light the tree I started smelling burning paraffin.  Then the big screen that the TV channel put up to show the concert to those too far back started panning the crowd.  It looked like dozens, then maybe hundreds, of people were carrying lit torches.  In the end, the number of people carrying torches may have gotten into the thousands.  The report was of a 30,000 person crowd and I would guess about every 10th person was carrying a torch.  The torches lit up people’s faces, turning everyone firelight-beautiful.  Kids were jumping around waving glow-sticks.  A wind picked up, blowing glowing chunks off of people’s torches, which seemed like a bad thing to me given all the dangling scarves and bouncing hat pom-poms, but no one seemed concerned and the news didn’t report any accidents.  When the concert ended, there were fireworks over the lake.

I don’t think the event translates well to media but here is a video, news report, and some pictures. 1, 2, 3

Yesterday evening, we had a wonderful dinner in a Norwegian home here in Bergen.  Paul has a friend back in the US who has a friend in Norway.  She introduced Paul and Y. via email and we met him at a bar for a couple of drinks in September.  He wanted to invite us over to his house sometime but then we never heard from him so we assumed it was off.  Then out of the blue–would we want to come over this Sunday?  He and his wife have 3 kids at 7, 4, and 10 months.  Think Carl Larsson cute.  Think cute, cute, cute.  It was hard not to just stare.  They were well behaved and in awe of our American existence.  The parents spoke fluent English but the kids needed to ask them to translate their questions.  Of course with a 7 year old boy it was a slanted interview.  I said that I have killed scorpions, Paul that he has killed a rattlesnake, Kaitlin that she tried frog’s legs, and that our house has been hit by a hail storm.  No more questions–that’s all the more they needed to know.  We gave them 3 cowhide coasters with stars, longhorns, and the shape of Texas sewn on–a popular move.  Dinner was reindeer steak with mushrooms, vegetables, gravy and lingonberry sauce.  Lattes and homemade cake afterwords.  All very good.

Løvstakken  is the name of a mountain across the bay from Mount Blåmanen.  Most tourists go up Mount Blåmanen because it is the one with the funicular, but locals are just as likely to head up the Løvstakken trail.  If they can find it.  I spent weeks missing how to get there.  However once I finally figured out that the sign with the arrow pointing right meant, “turn right, then go around to the back of the big silver apartment building, cross the apartment complex’s backyard to the woods where a small trail goes up the mountain” I was set.  The trail is muddy and haphazard and at times gets very steep.  I fell in love with it and am now happily alternating my daily walks between Løvstakken and Blåmanen.

The following pictures were taken around noon on a sunny day.  I am not used to how low the sun hangs in the sky at this latitude by mid-October.

Lower portion of the trail which can get very muddy.

Low hanging sun over a Løvstakken bog.

Low sun about a third of the way up the mountain.

View from halfway to the top.

View from the top. And the other side.