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July 19th. Bergen
Ellie pointed out that near one of the towns we passed through on our train to Bergen, Finse, the battle of Hoth was filmed in The Empire Strikes Back.
Bergen has an average of 80 sunny days a year, the rest of the year there is some sort of precipitation. According to the weather app, we are going to experience two of those sunny days. (Yeah!) After the rush of the last two days, we all needed to sleep in a little this morning (Ellie really needed a good sleep in...). Luke and I went for a run down to the harbor . We arrived just as the cruise ships were dropping off all the passengers for their day in Bergen. On our way back to the hotel we came across a German tv show being filmed on one of the back streets.
We got breakfast at local convienience store that had decent coffee and good bakery goods. (My favorite is the skoleboller, which consists of sweet bread with custard in the middle and sprinkled with coconut) We ate our breakfast in front of a bizarre statue of Norway's greatest playwright, Henrik Ibsen. Our fjord tour train was going to leave about 1:00 pm so we had time to walk back to the harbor. Bergen is not the biggest town, but it is popular with tourists. There A LOT of tourists! (I realize that we are also tourists, but we are the cool unobtrusive kind [I hope]). On way to the train station we stopped at the fish market and tried some cod cakes. I thought they were quite good. Other people in the group did not appreciate them like I did. Bergen (like Visby) was a major port for the middle ages trading powerhouse, the Hanseatic League. It's main export was dried cod which provided cheap protein for much of Northern Europe.
We booked a "Norway In A Nutshell" fjord tour a couple of months ago and did not quite know what to expect. The first leg of the journey was a hour and a half train ride through the mountains to the town of Voss. We then boarded a bus that took us down this crazy switchback road to the town of Gundvangen. We boarded a boat at Gundvangen and had an hour and a half journey through the fjord to the town of Flam. This boat ride was incredible! High green mountains on both sides interrupted by waterfalls and little villages. We even saw some wild goats! I felt like I was a part of the Fellowship of the Rings floating down a river in Middle Earth. We took lots of photos, but they don't do justice to the beauty of the fjords.
In Flam we had some decent pizza and overpriced beer for diner and then boarded the Flambana train to Myrdal. The tracks wound slowly through the mountains. The views were spectacular (of course), but what made this day complete was our stop at the Kjosfossen waterfall. The train stopped and we all got off to get closer to the waterfall. All of the sudden music started playing and a women in a red dress started dancing near the waterfall???? (I think she represented some mountain fairy
or something) It was one of the cheesiest/coolest things I have seen.
The last leg of the trip was a two hour train ride from Myrdal back to Bergen. We arrived at our hotel at 10:30 pm happy, but tired.
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