Bergen

Thursday was our stopover in Bergen, Norway's "second city". and my favorite. With its hilly terrain and lovely structures, Bergen reminds me of a cross between Belvedere where I grew up, and the Claremont section of Oakland - but with the added advantages of a university, romantic cobblestoned streets, and a Swiss-style peak accessible by funicular with extraordinary views available from the top and trails leading from there into the forest.

So I was among the first down the gangway when it opened, and explored a park near the ship that I hadn't seen on our earlier visit. Kristiana caught up with me a little while later and we set off uphill, choosing our direction from a small sign pointing the way: Barista Kaffehous, 300m.

300m upwards into a hilly neighborhood is a fair distance, and took us past lots of homes, small squares, and vistas with sightlines across the city. Bergen is the kind of town where businesses appear inoffensively on residential streets - you don't need to go down to the city center to find a grocer, hairdresser or video rental - and it was on one of these streets that we found our kaffeehous, which was closed. Closed! Norway is in most respects a highly enlightened society, but a coffeehouse that doesn't open until 11am is in my opinion a throwback to barbaric times.

We continued upward, coffeeless, for some time until Kristiana's patience for my choosing the upward path at each fork was exhausted. She turned downward while I continued upward. Only a couple of minutes later we each, on our respective paths, encountered a station along the funicular path to to the city peak. The ticket machine at mine wasn't working, so Kristiana bought two tickets at hers, boarded, hopped out at mine and handed me a ticket through the rails, to the amusement of thr tram's conductor. Reaching the top we had the pleasure of a view of *everything*, which was quite a lot, as Bergen is a much more extensive city than is evident from its seaport. Eventually we'd had enough and took the tram back down, all the way to its base just a block or so off the tourist waterfront. The line waiting to board was immense - we would not have boarded had we been faced with it. We answered the "is it worth it?" questions of some fellow travelers with the advice that they walk to a higher station, but they seemed disinclined to do so. This was a pity in my opinion, because I thought those very streets the most charming part of my visit to the city.

We still had an important errand to do, a visit to Gallerie Bryggen, a sort of Viking/Norse/Celtic art/artifact shop where we had whiled away some hours on our previois visit buying, among other things, a very beautiful and somewhat expensive decorative mirror. A nightmare of shipping strikes, shipping delays, breakage and insurance failure followed which I will spare you except to say that both we and the gallery found ourselves hard done by, and we arguably somewhat more so. So this meeting was something of a settling of accounts, among parties too weary of the history to negotiate very hard. Ultimately our sadly missed mirror was transformed into an agreeable discount on a very beautful handmade silver pendant in the shape of a viking ship's prow, and we all emerged satsfied enough an on good terms.

We dawdled just a little more before our official all-aboard time of 2:30. To avoid the now dense mass of other tourists streaming to and from the ships we took one of the higher roads. This turned out to lead us past a small supermarket where we stocked up on bottled water at something less than the cruise's Evian prices.