Bergen is beautiful and very busy when it isn’t raining. Our guide Gundega promised it would rain in Bergen and it did, about half the time we were there. We looked around the old town in the sunshine but when it was our time to take the funicular up to Mt. Floyen it looked like this.
In spite of the fog most of our group followed Gundega on a hike up the mountain
In Bergen our hotel Moxy, was very new.
Bergen old town is full of tourist and lots of shops & cute cafes.
Our favorite sight was the reconstructed hall in the fortress. Also, after a heavy rain the sun decided to appear so walking around the grounds of the once fortress was very nice.
Lillehammer
We had 2 nights but just one day in Lillehammer, lucky for us, we spent a few hours here in late March in 2019. The town was full of sun, mud & melting snow our previous visit. This time Lillehammer was cool, cloudy and sometimes raining, but a very bright green.
We spent most of our day in the Open Air museum, Maihaugen. We weren’t expecting much. We had a guided tour of the historic buildings. We were most interested in the school house because Dennis thinks his grandfather or great-grandfather might have been a school teacher in Norway.
Our guide played teacher. She lined us up, inspected our fingernails, and made us do some easy calisthenics before we could enter our classroom. In class she tested us on the Norwegian alphabet. We all failed.
The school master lived in an austere room attached to the one room schoolhouse. That living situation seemed like a good reason to emigrate to America
We climbed around summer farms and winter farms and learned about Norwegian farm social hierarchy. I never knew the dairy maid was a high status position; then I never gave much thought to dairy maids.
We didn’t t imagine we would spend hours more of our morning touring sample houses of the 20th century from 1915 to 2001. There was a Norwegian home for each decade. The homes were brought to the museum to show typical features of Norwegian homes of each decade. The exceptions were the 2001 “home of the future” designed by architects of the time to show what the future might look like. Norwegian Queen Sonja’s 1930’s home was furnished just as her upper-middle class family had lived in it during her childhood.
Some of our fascination with the decades of homes was nostalgia, remembering features and furnishings of our grandmothers or our youth. We were surprised to see that Norwegians were building prefab houses as early as the 1920’s, and 30s as well as after WWII to meet housing shortages.
There was also a large indoor museum at Maihaugen. We we spent quite a bit of time inside the museum looking at all sorts of things ancient sleighs, a collection of toys. Sigred Undset’s (author of Kristin Lavransdautter) childhood bedoom.
In the evening we went for a short hike around Lillehammer.
Towards the end of hike it started to rain. We ducked into a restaurant on a side street. It looked like local people going in since the entrance wasn’t at all obvious to us. No English menu posted outside but to our relief two words from us and we were given an English menu. We were tired, hungry, and getting wet so it was all good.
We were up the next morning and after breakfast on a bus headed to Sweden
