Bryggen Hanseatic Quarter
July 19, 2023
Just down from our hotel is a touristy district with shops and restaurants. It tries to maintain some of the flavor from the time of the German merchants. After all the fires over the centuries, not much remains that would be considered "original," but it is still worth visiting. We ate in one of the restaurants with Torrey and Christopher on our first night there. It was expensive and very good. Eating out in Norway is expensive even for the locals, so they reputedly don't eat out much.
I took some online Norwegian lessons before the trip. I had no intention of trying to speak it with anyone, but I wanted to absorb some of the flavor of the language and be able to make out some signs. The lessons were not very practical, but I still found I could read some of Munch's scriblings from his journal pages posted at the Munch Museum. My favorite phrase I was taught was “Bjørnen spiser elgen,” “The bear is eating the moose.” I thought maybe I’d get to use the line during the train ride across the mountains and countryside. But I never saw a bear, and this is the only moose I saw.
By this point we had covered most of the interesting things to see in Bergen and had eaten rather well, including the good breakfast buffets at both of our hotels in Norway. So then we needed to decide what we wanted to do for our last day before flying to England.