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!