Even more of our trip to Norway. This covers everything from leaving Voss for Bergen and the cruise from Bergen to Kristiansand.
Breakfast in Voss was quite nice, but in the background lurked an unexpected layer to the otherwise perfectly palatable experience. The whole time we ate they were playing eerily familiar piano music. At first I thought this might be recordings of previous live sessions recorded in that very same room (both of the pianos I noticed in the hotel had been stationed at different point in the evening the night before.) It wasn’t until we were nearly finished that I realized the music was actually piano arrangements of Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and The Black-Eyed Peas’ “I Gotta Feeling.” Something about that was unsettling.
The Train We Sort of Took to Bergen
After waiting a bit after our previous mountain adventure, we boarded the train, our first successful boarding of a train on this trip. Our seats were comfortable, the space for luggage was more than sufficient, and the scenery was fantastic. For about twelve minutes.
Suddenly we were told that we needed to get off of the train so everyone could be picked up by a bus that would take us to our destination due to some kind of construction. We wound up waiting with the crowd for 20 minutes until the bus finally appeared. This driver seemed a little less comfortable in his role, making for an occasionally turbulent ride, gaining the occasional ire of some poor motorist caught in our path. No one was hurt, at least physically, and we eventually found ourselves in the city of Bergen.
Laundry Day in Bergen
Our first day in Bergen was laundry day. While my father rested in the hotel, I found a nearby laundromat and wandered the streets while our clothes washed and dried, taking photos of everything that seemed mildly interesting, which was quite a lot. The I was oddly thrilled to find a game store, which had comics, video games, Lego, board games, board games, weeaboo junk, and enough space to make it a functional local game store for, well, the locals. There was a single Starter Kit box from the Magic: the Gathering Final Fantasy set that had just released. I was almost tempted, but I knew I would have the cardboard I already ordered waiting for me when we got back. But that’s a story for another time.
The city center is a huge tourist destination, filled with shops selling little wooden figures with hair glued onto them, standard tourism trinkets to slap onto your refrigerator, enough “gorpcore” (faux expedition gear with random flags, emblems, and other embroidered testaments to their absolute super definite legitimacy) to clothe the rest of the EU, and a bunch of outdoor seating for people who want to drink alcohol while slow-cooking in the summer sun.
I wandered through a store called “Normal” because with a name like that, I just couldn’t help it. It turned out this was some kind of maze, designed like an Ikea. There was only one way to go. No shortcuts. Just product. Almost entirely convenience store-ish product mixed with mostly cosmetics. Why are marshmallows next to the makeup? I don’t think even the locals are sure. I awkwardly slid through this place and escaped to wander the streets some more.
I carried our refreshed laundry back and our adventure to find food began. We tried walking a block to the nearby Irish pub, which turned out to be a poor example of one. For one, there was hardly any food (the omission of fish and chips on the menu seemed particularly insulting). Adding injury to insult, they were out of Guinness. So we looked around for other restaurants, only to find everything was booked. We eventually gave up and got a ride back to the hotel and had a fine meal there. If nothing else, I got my father to walk down the street in Bergen for a bit, and have photographic evidence that it happened.
I took another look around, shopping for some proper hand-carved trolls. While there were lots of suspicious goods available, I only found one store selling stuff that seemed like it had any real craft put into it.
The Peculiar Case of the Poorly Provided Port Place
The next day we checked out and grabbed a taxi to give us a general tour of the region, letting my father get a better look at the place as a whole. I took a few more shots of things, but generally just let the ride play out. At the end of the tour, we were dropped off where my ticket app told me the reception would be for our cruise. Something seemed immediately fishy about this boat situation. There was a reception desk, but none of the boats were the right size. Maybe they were to take us to the larger boat? I had no idea, but I asked what they thought. Eventually they came to the conclusion that the app had lied and that I should head to the larger port to the south. I looked for a taxi and found an empty one, meaning there was no driver there, which wasn’t particularly useful.
One Uber later and we were at the proper port and figured out all of the arrangements at the front desk. Amusingly we overheard someone who wanted to ride one of the smaller boats at the first port we went to, and it seemed their instructions had led them astray in the opposite direction. After some thrilling wheelchair pushing over horrible and really just not very friendly door thresholds and bumpy ramps, we successfully boarded the cruise ship with just 10 minutes to spare. By the time we got to the cabin, the boat was setting out, meaning the borrowed wheelchair would have to find its way back to port another day.
Struggling for Connection
Up until this point a of the trip I had gotten used to the idea that the Internet was just not particularly great. Google provides service through some local networks, which works well enough for maps and some video calls in the right environment, but the “hi-speed Internet” wifi that every hotel advertises is an absolute joke. Uploading a single image to a Discord channel is like trying to shove molasses through your phone. It’s hardly worth the time. But what they lack in speed they utterly disappoint for in stability. Your device won’t even believe the connection is real when you get capped down to 0.5 Mbps. The boat was no different for on-board wifi, but the cellular connection was suddenly, though intermittently, fantastic, allowing me to upload a few albums for later use and to have a nice long chat with my wife and kids back in the US.
Under the Sky So Blue
As we floated off on our way, my father went to sleep and I stayed up to began to watch the sun “set”, really just eager to see if it actually would fall beneath the horizon before popping back up into view, or if the glowing orb we must partly thank for our existence would leer at us the whole way around the North Sea.
There was quite a lot of photo taking before an after dinner. A truly excessive amount, in fact. Much like the first, much shorter cruise through the fjord to Gudvangen, every direction was just lousy with pretty things to see, to the point of being almost obnoxious. Eventually one gives up and just lets their own eyeballs just absorb the images for themselves, leaving the images to become memories rather than memory.
Shortly after the boat left Stavanger, I was writing up much of the text up to this point (the boat provided me with plenty of downtime). While writing, I heard a clang and then watched a red frisbee-like object fly past my window against the background of the setting sun, crashing into the water to get thrashed about in the wake of the massive cruise ship. The youthful screaming from above began instantly, piercing the thick windows of our cabin, and went on for minutes. I felt a pang of miserable empathy flow through me, imagining the parents having to hold the child back from trying to hurl themselves over after it, or trying in futility to explain that the item was now lost to the sea and will need to be replaced at some later time. I did not envy my invisible peers in parenthood. Don’t take out your toys on the boat, kids. Some of us learn the hard way.
I took out the tiny complimentary mini fridge wine bottle and toasted to the sun.
Soon after, the resident of the next cabin over suddenly appeared in their bay window, looking at me and yelling while dancing and waving around their own mini fridge wine sample. I decided to slink back from my window out of their view, leaving the sun to its parabolic path out of sight while I processed more photos from the trip so far. The room next door proceeded to produce some rather middling kinds of screams for unknown reasons. Not fun time screaming, but also not “I’m getting murdered, please help screaming.” Just inert, emotionless noise with no ascertainable purpose, but alright already, we all floated on anyway.
By the time I was ready to give up and try to sleep, the a haze of cloud cover was obscuring the sun, but based on the various times throughout the night I woke up, the blue glow of the sky never faded to anything remotely close to black.
The next day we awoke to find us approaching Denmark. After breakfast my father summoned the ambition to go to the top deck, getting some sea air. The seating area featured exclusively very low-to-the-ground couches, which was less than ideal, and while we waited for the majority of passengers to disembark for wherever else in Europe they were heading, we used the time to make our way back down to our room.
An hour before arriving in Kristiansand, we discovered we were being kicked out of our room so they could clean it. I must have missed an announcement, but given the quick turnaround they seem to have for these cruises, I understand why they’d want us out early. We hurriedly packed up our things and waited below for the ship to finally dock and for us to find our way off.
Finding the right spot to leave was oddly confusing, but eventually we go rerouted with a few other accessibility-curious folks to an elevator, bringing us down to the cargo bay. The staff were kind enough to taxi us down to the boat terminal. It wasn’t the most convenient place, but at least now we had our feet on the ground in Kristiansand, though now we were on our own again.
James Gets Through 