Fun Bergen fact: it’s the rainiest city in Norway, averaging over 90 inches of rain per year. That’s nearly double the rain of Seattle or Portland, and tracks with or exceeds some Hawaiian cities.
Second fun Bergen fact: according to our tour guide yesterday, this May is on track to likely be Bergen’s coldest on record. Neat. This luck lines up well with our cold cold visit to the Netherlands and Belgium last spring, where it snowed on us and I had to buy some (really excellent) gloves and Serious Socks.
So it’s wet and cold here, and I am somewhat regretting at this point not bringing my winter hat because how chilly could it get? I have been adamantly refusing to purchase yet another winter hat (because I own so many), despite Rhett’s argument that at least a hat is “more useful” than a mug. Wrong, it is not, because a hat can only be used at certain times of the year. Mug? Mug is timeless. Mug knows no season. Mug is best.
Also, it’s going to be 70 in Copenhagen for the rest of our trip, so a hat is definitely a stupid purchase (and then I’d have less room for candy, and also what happens when my hat gets wet?).
But back to Bergen: the locals are very proud of their distinct culture and dialect. They say other Norwegians are born with skis, but in Bergen – it’s the umbrella. “I’m not from Norway, I’m from Bergen” is a bit of a local joke that runs so deep that when Brexit happened, a local news station created a commercial for Bergxit, joking about how Bergen was going to break away from Norway, and anyone who couldn’t properly roll their Rs in “rhubarb” would be left behind.
Anyway, little did we know that Sunday would be the last day we’d see the sun in Bergen!
We’ve spent most of the day not walking around, so we decided to go for a walk once we find our little apartment. All of the houses here are excitingly colorful and densely packed, at odds with Oslo’s modernity and the traditional homes in Balestrand, and our place is just a five minute walk from the ferry terminal, right next to Bergen’s narrowest street.
It hardly qualifies as a street – it really looks like just a path – but we’re right between the two major docks in the town, so we get to watch a parade of cruise ship tourists coming up our street for most of the days. They like to stop and take pictures of the little alley, which opens into a really cute courtyard between several colorful homes.
Our evening walk took us to the end of the peninsula to a look-out over the fjord. It’s cold and windy (what a surprise), but still a really pretty view over the fjord that we had just passed through to get to Bergen.
Our first full day in Bergen was all kinds of rain. We discovered some wonderful cafes and bakeries nearby, and went on a few moist walks in our neighborhood. Bergen has a beautiful city park, and lots of tulips and lilacs are in bloom right now. We hid in a gazebo because the gazebo was sheltered. Most of the locals are relatively fearless, because you can’t let the weather run your life. Most people are in rain jackets and have nice rubber boots, and I somewhat regret leaving my waterproof hiking shoes at home. At least my shoes dry quickly.
Our dinner was traditional Norwegian fare at Pingvinen (The Penguin). Lots of fish and meatballs and mushrooms (yay). Rhett’s mashed potatoes looked like normal mashed potatoes, but they had fish mashed in them (I so regretted my fishy stolen bite).
We had opted to put all of our activities on our second day – going up the funicular to Mt Fløyen, and then a guided walking tour of the city’s historical section, Bryggen.
The funicular is a fun little tram up the mountainside. I suspect most of the locals just walk, but I have weak flatlander legs and I didn’t want to murder our elders, so funicular it was. We got in just ahead of a tourist group and rode up the steep mountainside, just as a cloud was beginning to vacate the mountaintop. It offered a really nice but chilly view of the surrounding fjord.
We did a few short hikes on the mountain, around a tiiiiiny tiny lake and then up to a viewpoint. This was the moment a spooky cloud decided to roll past, making our hike lovely and hard to see. There was a group of kids picnicking on the shores of the pond by the lookout, singing a song in Norwegian. We skirted around the rambunctious children, and their voices only somewhat faded across the small pond. It felt like we were soon to be murdered by the spirits of the children who were Totally Not Ghost Children. And we weren’t gonna get away fast, because we had weak ankles and the trail was small, muddy, and quite uneven (but mainly the ankles).
However, the cloud did pass for about thirty seconds at the lookout point, offering a nice view of the town and its port.
Hiking all around Floyen is delightful, as ferns and moss abound on almost every surface it can. It was a really great short hike, and there are plenty of non-intimidating options if mountains aren’t your usual walking terrain.
After lunch, we embarked on our walking tour of Bergen, through the historic town of Bryggen (all of the pointy, colorful houses you see in the photos), and up into some nice historic residential neighborhoods. These neighborhoods were mostly car-free, which made for excellent walking.
Here are some more Fun Bergen Facts, because apparently I’m educational today:
- It was primarily a very wealthy fish trading community, playing a key role in the hanseatic trading league with its neighbors
- If you painted your house white, you were mostly trying to flex on your neighbors (so all the houses you saw coming into port were white)
- It was the capital of Norway for a whopping 66 years
- Wood was primarily the cheapest and most accessible building material
- On average, Bergen started on fire every 30 years for a long time because of said abundance of wooden structures, and despite people’s best efforts for that to not happen
- Otherwise, it had key military importance, and now there’s a lot of oil business that gets run out of Bergen
- A ship in the harbor blew up during WWII and is the primary reason the other side of the harbor is all modern buildings
- All the historic buildings can be painted only from a list of approved colors, so the town remains historic-looking
Our tour took us up some of the winding slopes and past key restaurants and old stock exchanges. The buildings in the old districts are beginning to lean as their old foundations are rotting, and the city is using fees from cruise ship passengers to fund the restoration.
It’s an easy city to walk in and explore. My favorite is how there’s a huge carnival on the shores just outside of the old town, so you can stand in Bryggen and catch strands of Post Malone drifting through the alleys.
Oh yes, and I found a place to finally get my waffles in Bryggen. Waffles!
On our final morning, we bade farewell to our favorite little cafe (Løvetann Cafe, mediterranean fare) and took the bus to the airport. When you arrive at the airport, you are greeted by a big ol’ sign that says Bergen? And I was at first unsure if the airport even knew where it was.
Anyway turns out it’s ✨ art ✨ by an Icelandic artist, design to inspire curiosity about the region. Well, mission accomplished?
I forgot how wonderfully automated European transit hubs can be – we did not speak to one person (minus the security people) during our swift self-check-in and self-baggage deposit process. I put airtags in every bag just in case we managed to goof that up or Norwegian air lost our stuff, but we landed in Copenhagen successfully, to finish the last leg of our nordic journey: Denmark.