The foreign press keeps writing nice things about my medieval hometown, Bergen on Norway’s west coast, and the tourists are milling around downtown in the glorious weather. So I decided to pick up a camera and pretend to be one myself. The results, with an emphasis on wooden houses and eclectic architecture, are below the fold.
Crossposted from European Tribune.
If you’d like a soundtrack, click on Grieg for the Adagio from his piano concerto in A minor, op. 16, performed by Leif Ove Andsnes and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. Grieg, a Bergener himself, conducted this ensemble in his day, but the present maestro is Dmitri Kitajenko in a recording from the piano-shaped Grieg Hall.
Here are the pics from around town. Click to enlarge (make sure your browser is set to resize).
Brief annotations and an anecdote to follow:
The second picture is a view of the 12th century St. Mary’s church. Pictures #4, 5, and 7 feature the old Hanseatic wharf, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Some of the warehouses date back to the 14th century. The sixth pic is from the open-air fish market nearby.
The fifth picture from the bottom features Mon Plaisir, a mountainside temple pavillion from the 1830s. Its inclusion is due to a nice summer memory: Some years ago I was struggling with an article for a book. Trying to cure my writer’s block with a walk in the sunset, I suddenly became aware of a distant cello, soon joined by a violin in what sounded like a Beethoven sonata. When I followed the music, three people came into view at the Mon Plaisir. As in a dream, one of them, a charming brunette, welcomed me with a glass of port!
The duo continued playing until they could no longer read the sheet music; I quipped that this was now a case of the deaf leading the blind. They turned out to be the German solo celloist of the aforementioned orchestra and a visiting friend from the Concertgebouw, the lady being the former’s girlfriend. The experience relieved my writer’s block for a while.
Welcome to Bergen — if not in the flesh, then at least in spirit!
So beautiful!
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it.
Alas, this year only in spirit.
Thanks, Sirocco – that’s memory lane for me (for other readers; ask is a graduate of the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration – located in Bergen).
Some of the images from narrow, steep cobble stone streets look like they are from the ‘tour’ you took me and curly on last summer. Great memories.
Amazing it’s a year ago already since we met up. Here are some more (fresh) shots from the route we walked:
My regards to curly!
Thanks again. Regards forwarded.
This was last year:
(l-r: curly, ask, Sirocco)
Lovely. Thaks for sharing.
What a beautiful place to live — and a wonderful idea. Thanks for sharing this with us.
Since I’m at work I had to play the Grieg Adagio in my mind while I looked at your beautiful pictures. Thanks for the beautiful pictures. I hope some day I can visit in person.
What a beautiful way to start my day online. I described your pictures to my young Norwegian elkhound. She suggested we enjoy them with some fish-flavored biscuits.
Thank you so much for posting these photos.
One of these:
I’ve had two other elkhounds, and they love to eat so much, it’s hard to remember that they are so lithe and lovely when young. My Charlie is SO fast we’re thinking about agility training. But then it’s in the nineties here every day. I just can’t get her interested in swimming. She doesn’t believe it’s really snow, just in another form.
We’d love to move to Norway, these photos are inspiring, but I want to see the winter version.
Well, here is the Bergen waterfront in winter:
Winters are actually mild here in the south-west; more so than, say, New York or the US midwest. Even Oslo is warmer than New York in January by a solid margin.
But the fall is rainy in Bergen, for the same reason: the Golf Stream. I don’t mind that though — freezing is what I hate.