Day 2: departure
Oct. 14th, 2004 01:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenCabin 370, M/S Polarlys, 11:48pm, 1 Oct 04.
Bergen is a beautiful city, but then, beautiful cities are ten a penny in Norway. English cities slump flatly, as two-dimensional as a stranded jellyfish, dying and drying on the beach. Norway doesn't have enough flat land to waste on this – if it's level enough so that you won't fall off it if you stop paying attention, you farm it or put an airport on it. Thus many of its towns sit at the conjunctions of mountain valleys – the locals wouldn't call them mountains, but they're spoiled – spreading tentacles of development along the valley bottoms. The centres may be small and condensed, but the outlying residential areas branch out and away, winding for kilometres along the lower land, divided up by towering spines of tree-covered rock. It's pleasing by day and nighttime both: in the light, rather than a sprawling conurbation, there's a lace doily of development, dissected by tree-covered peaks. In the night – and bear in mind, nights and days here can last for months – you can see how far up the slopes people live.
With its plenitude of watersheds, if Norway were the gargoyle of north-western Europe, it would have hydroelectric power coming out of its ears, nose and mouth. Result: electricity so cheap that by British standards it's free. You fit a lightbulb and then turn it on just once; turning them on and off shortens their lifespan. When I first visited a Norwegian household, a plague of blown bulbs (lyspære in Norwegian: "light-pears") followed me like some tungsten Typhoid Mary. Heating and hot water run straight off the mains – domestic gas and oil, central heating systems and timeclocks are unknowns. People heat their bathroom floors, because it's unpleasant to stand on cold tiles. (Mats, schmats. Why clean them?) People heat the driveways of their houses – it's easier than shovelling snow or spreading salt. Think about that. Power is so cheap, people heat their gardens. It's another world.
So at night, it's lit up like a fairground. In Britain, you can only see the extent of a town from the air or a high tower. In Norway, just look up: the land rears up into the sky on all sides. In the dark, you can trace streets and neighbourhoods on the hillsides, like a map in reverse. The horizon is above you – to the sides lies landscape.
In recent, richer years, they're also got really good at digging tunnels. They need to be. A few strategic bores can save hours of driving. Dozing in the back seat of a car for any distance in some parts is a punctuated arrhythmic series of starts and stares: darkness falls many times an hour but the nights are just two minutes long.
Bergen has a long history, longer than this mere centenarian of a nation. Annexed by Sweden for a century before that and Denmark for the preceding few, Norwegians date their history in terms of things like the writing of the constitution and so on – actual independence is almost within living memory. The second-greatest city was a major trading port, strategic within the Hanseatic League, nearly half a millennium ago. It grew downhill, from a precipitous fishermen's hamlet above the bay – now largely uninhabited but preserved as Gamle (Old) Bergen, a free open-air museum with views to die for – to a waterside port known as Bryggen. Few original buildings remain intact among a higgledy-piggledy maze of rebuilds, replicas and new ones carefully built in a matching style. Waterfront ones hold souvenir and craft shops; away from the promenade are offices and an art school, but it’s still very much alive. Downstream, as in London, former warehouses are busily being converted to apartments.
Many of the original structures were lost to fire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Few buildings were of stone; then as now, the Norwegians like their houses made of wood. They tell me it's warmer. Homes and workplaces are built of horizontal logs or planks, churches of vertical staves – thus the famous stavkirke, of which under thirty survive. Although widely known in subculture circles today for alternative electronic music from Apoptygma Berserk to Royksopp, the local black-clad spotty youths favour black metal. Some of the more impressionable – or more stupid – ones moved from this into Satanism and thought it'd be cool to, like, burn down some of those old churches, man.
It's fair to say that black metallers are not universally popular and well-loved in Norway.
In older times, Norway's most famous musical export was local boy Edvard Grieg, who remains much loved today. Given early recognition by Ole Bull, a Bergen violin prodigy, Grieg was schooled in Leipzig and spent much time in England, but his music is rooted in traditional Norwegian folk melodies. Brits of a certain age might remember BBC2's slightly surreal science-fictional game show "The Adventure Game"; its theme tune was Grieg's Norwegian Dance number 2.
Some way out from the city centre, his house is now open to the public, carefully (if not entirely authentically) preserved or restored to how it was when he and his cousin and wife Nina, lived there. It's filled with old photographs, paintings, busts and statuettes, with some authentically Norwegian features such cast-iron woodstoves in each room and elaborate silverware featuring traditional motifs such as reindeer, eagles' claws, fishes - and small dangling crinkled petals, which scare off the trolls with their sparkles, you see.
In the grounds sits a small purpose-built museum. Its main contents are a photographic biography and a restaurant with spectacular clifftop views over he fjord. Further along is a tiny grass-roofed concert hall, with the composer's statue standing by its door. It's all to scale: Grieg was a small man. With a shock of prematurely-white hair and a bushy moustache, he reminds older Brits of Lloyd George; Europeans and Americans might perhaps think of Albert Einstein and Samuel Langhorn Clemens. An abstract iron sculpture by the entrance, intentionally rusted into rich earth tones, suddenly turns into his profile when viewed from the correct angle. Just past this, you walk down a steep path to a tiny waterside cove, where high in the cliff above is a sealed doorway: his tomb.
Bergen's days as a port are gone, with dockyards now holding technology industries who preserve a crane here and there as a reminder and place vaguely boat-shaped sculptures in fountains out front to prompt you – or perhaps themselves – as to what the district once was. Now, it's a university town – there are over 20,000 students, a tenth of the population. The fish market in the main square still goes on, huge stone tanks holding squabbling crabs, morose lobsters and miscellaneous threateningly-large fish, who perhaps have an inkling that their future contains kettles. Now, though, there are more coffee shops than fishmongers and the old meat market is just one among many restaurants, from Indian through a throng of Chinese to Louisiana Cajun. And don't forget the Irish pubs.
More appealingly and away from the hurly-burly of foreigners being relieved of their burden of cash, hiding down at the far end of the south quay, is northern Europe's largest aquarium. Inside, you'll find the usual assortment of piranhas, lungfish, neon tetras and invisible frogs, but it's good to see that most of the exhibits are locally-caught. (A Norwegian friend once gravely informed me that the panels next to the tanks only tell you about marine biology in English – the Norwegian texts are serving suggestions.) Different tanks display different ecosystems, from deep sea to littoral shallows. One holds a swirling vortex of pelagic species – herring, mackerel, sprats and "sardines", which were first preserved and tinned here in Bergen. A miniature kelp forest has impressive breakers crashing through it – you can't help but think "poor fish" as they're sloshed around the place, but they don't seem fazed at all. Other tanks show you other environments, such as that beneath the piers and quays - their décor including bicycle wheels encrusted with barnacles and discarded car tyres with lobsters lurking within. There's even a miniature salmon farm and an indoor fish ladder to illustrate their lifecycle.
Rarer specimens include tropical exotica like triggerfish, Technicolor wrasse, scorpion fish and more – all, their labels proudly proclaiming, caught in Bergen waters. These involuntary hitchhikers are mostly carried here by the Gulf stream, that warm current which is all that keeps Norway habitable, right up to Kirkenes in the far north, on the Russian border, where its tail ends curl into the bay and provide geographically-aberrant temperate climes – meaning it's not always completely frozen over.
Not all the foreigners came by sea the hard way, though. Many came by boat or plane or even overland, like American lobsters, various southern European species of trout and even minnows. These sit segregated into their own tanks. They were imported – for farming, food, or fun - but all have escaped into the wild and are doing well in these frigid but fecund waters. The colder the water, the more dissolved oxygen it can hold, so polar oceans teem with life where there are the nutrients to support it – and the Gulf stream also freights these in, dragged up from the depths. Some of these immigrants are taking over, either eating the locals or just crowding them out. Wherever Man goes, alien life follows... and all hell breaks loose.
Outside, the aquarium blends into a little SeaWorld™ (but without all the showbiz, which suits me fine). There are Gentoo penguins and a small colony of seals. From the upper stories inside – it's built on a hill, if you hadn't already guessed – windows look into the bottom of the seals' pool, with a big chart to help you individually identify them by name.
Moving back into the open air, a large part of the seals' pen was cordoned off to give some space to a mother and her cub. They're not tame and they don't do tricks, but the baby, still under a year old, already knows it's worth hauling himself out of the water for a fish. I got the impression that the cooing of the crowd left him much less moved than a fresh herring.
Bergen faces the sea, indeed, enfolds two arms of it in its two fjords, the old and new harbours - but in a more metaphorical sense, it revolves around it. One of lifelines of the far North is the Hurtigrute – the Coastal Express, more literally "the fast route". All year round, this continuous line of daily ships plies up and down between this southernmost extreme (already further north than anywhere in mainland Scotland) and the Northlands of Finnmark. Even in October, a ship a day departs in the direction of the nearer Pole, returning eleven days later to do it again. For the locals, it's a rather flash bus service. It stops several times every day and night, and people leap on and off just to go up the coast a bit and visit Granny. Today, it's faster to fly, but the modern Hurtigrute ships are luxuriously comfortable and it's a very pleasant way to travel. The bulk of the passengers, though, are represented by the masses filling the restaurant: Brits and Germans taking "the most beautiful voyage in the world".
Next stop for me: Ålesund.
Bergen is a beautiful city, but then, beautiful cities are ten a penny in Norway. English cities slump flatly, as two-dimensional as a stranded jellyfish, dying and drying on the beach. Norway doesn't have enough flat land to waste on this – if it's level enough so that you won't fall off it if you stop paying attention, you farm it or put an airport on it. Thus many of its towns sit at the conjunctions of mountain valleys – the locals wouldn't call them mountains, but they're spoiled – spreading tentacles of development along the valley bottoms. The centres may be small and condensed, but the outlying residential areas branch out and away, winding for kilometres along the lower land, divided up by towering spines of tree-covered rock. It's pleasing by day and nighttime both: in the light, rather than a sprawling conurbation, there's a lace doily of development, dissected by tree-covered peaks. In the night – and bear in mind, nights and days here can last for months – you can see how far up the slopes people live.
With its plenitude of watersheds, if Norway were the gargoyle of north-western Europe, it would have hydroelectric power coming out of its ears, nose and mouth. Result: electricity so cheap that by British standards it's free. You fit a lightbulb and then turn it on just once; turning them on and off shortens their lifespan. When I first visited a Norwegian household, a plague of blown bulbs (lyspære in Norwegian: "light-pears") followed me like some tungsten Typhoid Mary. Heating and hot water run straight off the mains – domestic gas and oil, central heating systems and timeclocks are unknowns. People heat their bathroom floors, because it's unpleasant to stand on cold tiles. (Mats, schmats. Why clean them?) People heat the driveways of their houses – it's easier than shovelling snow or spreading salt. Think about that. Power is so cheap, people heat their gardens. It's another world.
So at night, it's lit up like a fairground. In Britain, you can only see the extent of a town from the air or a high tower. In Norway, just look up: the land rears up into the sky on all sides. In the dark, you can trace streets and neighbourhoods on the hillsides, like a map in reverse. The horizon is above you – to the sides lies landscape.
In recent, richer years, they're also got really good at digging tunnels. They need to be. A few strategic bores can save hours of driving. Dozing in the back seat of a car for any distance in some parts is a punctuated arrhythmic series of starts and stares: darkness falls many times an hour but the nights are just two minutes long.
Bergen has a long history, longer than this mere centenarian of a nation. Annexed by Sweden for a century before that and Denmark for the preceding few, Norwegians date their history in terms of things like the writing of the constitution and so on – actual independence is almost within living memory. The second-greatest city was a major trading port, strategic within the Hanseatic League, nearly half a millennium ago. It grew downhill, from a precipitous fishermen's hamlet above the bay – now largely uninhabited but preserved as Gamle (Old) Bergen, a free open-air museum with views to die for – to a waterside port known as Bryggen. Few original buildings remain intact among a higgledy-piggledy maze of rebuilds, replicas and new ones carefully built in a matching style. Waterfront ones hold souvenir and craft shops; away from the promenade are offices and an art school, but it’s still very much alive. Downstream, as in London, former warehouses are busily being converted to apartments.
Many of the original structures were lost to fire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Few buildings were of stone; then as now, the Norwegians like their houses made of wood. They tell me it's warmer. Homes and workplaces are built of horizontal logs or planks, churches of vertical staves – thus the famous stavkirke, of which under thirty survive. Although widely known in subculture circles today for alternative electronic music from Apoptygma Berserk to Royksopp, the local black-clad spotty youths favour black metal. Some of the more impressionable – or more stupid – ones moved from this into Satanism and thought it'd be cool to, like, burn down some of those old churches, man.
It's fair to say that black metallers are not universally popular and well-loved in Norway.
In older times, Norway's most famous musical export was local boy Edvard Grieg, who remains much loved today. Given early recognition by Ole Bull, a Bergen violin prodigy, Grieg was schooled in Leipzig and spent much time in England, but his music is rooted in traditional Norwegian folk melodies. Brits of a certain age might remember BBC2's slightly surreal science-fictional game show "The Adventure Game"; its theme tune was Grieg's Norwegian Dance number 2.
Some way out from the city centre, his house is now open to the public, carefully (if not entirely authentically) preserved or restored to how it was when he and his cousin and wife Nina, lived there. It's filled with old photographs, paintings, busts and statuettes, with some authentically Norwegian features such cast-iron woodstoves in each room and elaborate silverware featuring traditional motifs such as reindeer, eagles' claws, fishes - and small dangling crinkled petals, which scare off the trolls with their sparkles, you see.
In the grounds sits a small purpose-built museum. Its main contents are a photographic biography and a restaurant with spectacular clifftop views over he fjord. Further along is a tiny grass-roofed concert hall, with the composer's statue standing by its door. It's all to scale: Grieg was a small man. With a shock of prematurely-white hair and a bushy moustache, he reminds older Brits of Lloyd George; Europeans and Americans might perhaps think of Albert Einstein and Samuel Langhorn Clemens. An abstract iron sculpture by the entrance, intentionally rusted into rich earth tones, suddenly turns into his profile when viewed from the correct angle. Just past this, you walk down a steep path to a tiny waterside cove, where high in the cliff above is a sealed doorway: his tomb.
Bergen's days as a port are gone, with dockyards now holding technology industries who preserve a crane here and there as a reminder and place vaguely boat-shaped sculptures in fountains out front to prompt you – or perhaps themselves – as to what the district once was. Now, it's a university town – there are over 20,000 students, a tenth of the population. The fish market in the main square still goes on, huge stone tanks holding squabbling crabs, morose lobsters and miscellaneous threateningly-large fish, who perhaps have an inkling that their future contains kettles. Now, though, there are more coffee shops than fishmongers and the old meat market is just one among many restaurants, from Indian through a throng of Chinese to Louisiana Cajun. And don't forget the Irish pubs.
More appealingly and away from the hurly-burly of foreigners being relieved of their burden of cash, hiding down at the far end of the south quay, is northern Europe's largest aquarium. Inside, you'll find the usual assortment of piranhas, lungfish, neon tetras and invisible frogs, but it's good to see that most of the exhibits are locally-caught. (A Norwegian friend once gravely informed me that the panels next to the tanks only tell you about marine biology in English – the Norwegian texts are serving suggestions.) Different tanks display different ecosystems, from deep sea to littoral shallows. One holds a swirling vortex of pelagic species – herring, mackerel, sprats and "sardines", which were first preserved and tinned here in Bergen. A miniature kelp forest has impressive breakers crashing through it – you can't help but think "poor fish" as they're sloshed around the place, but they don't seem fazed at all. Other tanks show you other environments, such as that beneath the piers and quays - their décor including bicycle wheels encrusted with barnacles and discarded car tyres with lobsters lurking within. There's even a miniature salmon farm and an indoor fish ladder to illustrate their lifecycle.
Rarer specimens include tropical exotica like triggerfish, Technicolor wrasse, scorpion fish and more – all, their labels proudly proclaiming, caught in Bergen waters. These involuntary hitchhikers are mostly carried here by the Gulf stream, that warm current which is all that keeps Norway habitable, right up to Kirkenes in the far north, on the Russian border, where its tail ends curl into the bay and provide geographically-aberrant temperate climes – meaning it's not always completely frozen over.
Not all the foreigners came by sea the hard way, though. Many came by boat or plane or even overland, like American lobsters, various southern European species of trout and even minnows. These sit segregated into their own tanks. They were imported – for farming, food, or fun - but all have escaped into the wild and are doing well in these frigid but fecund waters. The colder the water, the more dissolved oxygen it can hold, so polar oceans teem with life where there are the nutrients to support it – and the Gulf stream also freights these in, dragged up from the depths. Some of these immigrants are taking over, either eating the locals or just crowding them out. Wherever Man goes, alien life follows... and all hell breaks loose.
Outside, the aquarium blends into a little SeaWorld™ (but without all the showbiz, which suits me fine). There are Gentoo penguins and a small colony of seals. From the upper stories inside – it's built on a hill, if you hadn't already guessed – windows look into the bottom of the seals' pool, with a big chart to help you individually identify them by name.
Moving back into the open air, a large part of the seals' pen was cordoned off to give some space to a mother and her cub. They're not tame and they don't do tricks, but the baby, still under a year old, already knows it's worth hauling himself out of the water for a fish. I got the impression that the cooing of the crowd left him much less moved than a fresh herring.
Bergen faces the sea, indeed, enfolds two arms of it in its two fjords, the old and new harbours - but in a more metaphorical sense, it revolves around it. One of lifelines of the far North is the Hurtigrute – the Coastal Express, more literally "the fast route". All year round, this continuous line of daily ships plies up and down between this southernmost extreme (already further north than anywhere in mainland Scotland) and the Northlands of Finnmark. Even in October, a ship a day departs in the direction of the nearer Pole, returning eleven days later to do it again. For the locals, it's a rather flash bus service. It stops several times every day and night, and people leap on and off just to go up the coast a bit and visit Granny. Today, it's faster to fly, but the modern Hurtigrute ships are luxuriously comfortable and it's a very pleasant way to travel. The bulk of the passengers, though, are represented by the masses filling the restaurant: Brits and Germans taking "the most beautiful voyage in the world".
Next stop for me: Ålesund.
