Norway in a Nutshell

Our flight from Stockholm to Bergen was a little over an hour, and we arrived late afternoon. Bergen is on the western coast of Norway. There isn't much to the seaside town, so we were able to walk most of it in a short time. Our hotel was old and historic. What it lacked in comfort it made up for in character, with dark wooden floors and patterned wallpaper. With the windows open we could hear the live music from the neighboring bar.

After checking in we hit the fish market. It seemed like a great way to try some local, fresh delicacies. Bryan and I both sampled some smoked whale - I'm pretty sure it was raw. The smoky flavor made it hard to distinguish what the meat tasted like (a smoky meat with a hint of fish is about the best I can do.) I tried some smoked salmon after that and liked it much better. Bryan ended up getting a cooked whale burger and I got some deep-fried shrimp. We both came to the conclusion that our meal had the quality and price you can expect from a restaurant aimed at tourists. What we had hoped would be our evening meal we decided was just a snack and went to a local pizza place for dinner.

The next morning we had to be up bright and early for our "Norway in a Nutshell" experience. This is a popular tour route for tourists that takes you from the west coast to east coast on a variety of different methods of transport. We had the option of doing the land version on the Bergen Railway, supposedly one of the most beautiful railways in the world, or doing a boat through the Sognefjord, Norway's longest and deepest fjord. It was a tough call but we went for the boat. It was a large boat and a smooth ride (oddly, with Bonanza reruns on a television in the boat). I expected jagged and rocky cliffs but got a mixture of rock and lush green, with cottony wisps of low-lying clouds spattered in between. We passed several towns with colorful cottages seemingly in the middle of nowhere. We eventually stopped for the night in one such town called Flam.



There wasn't really much to the town. There were three restaurants and a couple souvenir shops selling trolls and overpriced sweaters. We had a filling lunch of Norweigen meatballs and then had dinner at the brewpub, where we tasted several beers and I had a pizza with goat cheese from the neighboring town of Undredal.

This morning we got ready for the rest of our journey to Oslo. We hopped aboard the Flamsbanna, the steepest standard gauge railway in Europe at 2,831 feet. The cars are very old-fashioned, almost antique looking on the inside. The trip is only about an hour but is very picturesque, passing several waterfalls and running alongside bubbling brooks up the mountain, occasionally going through tunnels originally dug by hand. We switched to the Bergen railway in Myrdal and then eventually switched to a bus that took us through more modern looking suburbs before arriving in Oslo. It was lashing rain when we got here but we still hoofed it to the hotel with our bags, before finding a local restaurant called Nilsen Spiseri. We will probably hit a few more Nilsen restaurants/bars before we leave. Tomorrow is our last full day and we plan to take full advantage of it. More then...