Bergen with Miriam

Heidi volunteered her childhood friend, Miriam,  to be my keeper in Bergen.  After the Hurtigruten docked, she met me at the bus station and we returned to her flat in Olsvik just outside of Bergen.  The picture is from her terrace as the sun went down.  Not only did she provided me with a bed, but meals, tour guide and this morning, we took the bus together from Olsvik, a suburb where she lives to Bergen to make sure that I got the right bus! 

Bergen is built on a peninsula and the city sprung up around the perfect, natural harbor.  Seven mountains surround the city and as Bergen grew outward, it spread up the hills and into other inlets like Miriam’s .  Bergen has a long history—briefly –it was founded in 1070 by King Olav Kyrre and by the 13^th century, the city became the first capital of a united Norway and a great ecclesiastical center with 20 churches, 5 monasteries and two hospitals for the poor. It’s importance increased when it became the hub of the medieval German Hanseatic League in the north.  One of the most photographed and visited areas in Bergen is the Bryggen, an area of Hansa houses and warehouses that line one side of the harbor.  Fire was the biggest hazard to these wooden houses, but in 1944, an explosion on an  overloaded German munitions ship devastated much of downtown Bergen including Maariakirke (St. Marys’ church), Hakon’s Hall and many of the houses along the harbor and into the surrounding hills and sent the ship’s anchor flying to the top of a nearby mountain.  Some of the houses were rebuilt and now Bryggen faces a new problem—the area is sinking and is slowly rotting.  There are periods of time during the winter months when the water from the harbor floods the houses. 

It alternated between light rain and heavy heavy most of the day, but like Seattle, I put on my raincoat and saw Bergen!  The historical center is easily walkable from the Fisketorget (Fish Market),the medieval hall of Hakonshallen, and the Bergen Knustmuseum  (museum) that holds some of Munch’s masterpieces  especially “Woman in Three Stage”, “Jealousy”, and” Melancholy”.  I discovered a new –to me- artist, Nikolai Astrup and a female painter, Harriet Backer. 

 Everywhere I’ve been from the extreme north to Bergen, the effects of World War II are overwhelmingly obvious.  In Bergen, the German munitions ship explosion is said to have damaged almost every building in Bergen!  As Hitler's army retreated, towns were destroyed as part of Hitler’s scorched earth policy.  Towns were rebuilt and there are very few signs of the devastation now except for some pretty utilitarian and kinda ugly architecture that was quickly built post war.  Maybe their revenge is that now Norway is getting all  those German euro from the tourists.  On the cruise, most of the passengers are Norwegian, but German is a close second.   I’ve only met one other American couple, a Canadian guy, and a young man from Australia on a walkabout.  But life is much easier for me that everyone speaks English.

Speaking of English, children start studying English in the first grade and an accent like my father had from learning English as adult, are nonexistent now.  There are no dubbed movies in Norway so American and British movies are all in English with subtitles. The wide use of computers has also made English an valuable language to know.   The cadence of Norwegian-Americans English in places like North Dakota and Minnesota—think “Fargo” are also absent in Norway.  They learn English so young, they learn all those rules of our language.  Teaching first grade English was voted the “most fun job” in Norway a few years ago.  Even though everyone can speak English and there are only 4 million Norwegians speaking Norwegian, there is tremendous pride in their language and there is no chance of English replacing Norwegian in everyday speech.  Also, they are rightfully proud of the Norwegian authors, composers and artists like Ibsen, Grieg and Munch.  Just an aside—I just finished reading   A Year of Reading the OED  ( OED stands for Oxford English Dictionary) and the author states that English has almost twice as many words as other European languages—or I think that's what I remembered-- and it’s obvious from the book that lots of those words are not words that many of us understand or use!  It does make learning English more of a challenge.