Bergen; Sunday, 29 October, 2006

Whilst it may have actually been light at 8:30 this morning, unlike the past few, I knew that it also meant that it would be dark long before 4, not that mattered, almost everything would be shut long before then!

Given the extra hour in bed I had an even larger breakfast, and witnessed several guests get the dawning sensation that they had missed out on an hour extra in bed as the "no it's ten, no it's not it's nine" conversations went on.

After a leisurely breakfast I left the hotel and wandered out to the Bryggen. Behind the main blocks are three small buildings, which were knocked together into one several hundred years ago to act as communal halls and administration offices for the Hanseatic merchants, the Schøtstuene. After a short stop to look around some of the souvenir shops at the front of the Bryggen, only because it was pouring down at this point, I wandered over to the Bergenhus to visit the Rosenkrantztarnet, the main defensive building in the fort, and in October only open for three hours on a Sunday. The tower, completely rebuilt to the original medieval layout after the destruction of the 1944 explosion, has several floors starting at fjord level in the Kitchens and Dungeons (where the toilets are conveniently located) and climbing up through the tower to the roof for, even on a now very wet day, stunning views over the city, and if they weren't shrouded in both the previous and next showers, the surrounding mountains.

From the fort it was a soggy 15 minute walk back across town to the University and the two main museums over there (the third museum, the maritime museum, closed for the day whilst I was still in the first museum!). The Natural histories collection houses the universities zoological and geological exhibits, including several very impressive skeletons of whales, and a scary number of stuffed animals (though on closer inspection some of the exhibits, which are all looking a little past their prime, appear to be wire and wood frames, so it may not have been as eco-systemically catastrophic as I had first feared.

Around the corner from the Natural History Collection is the Cultural History collection which has exhibits on the Vikings, church art, ethnography, Egyptian mummies and Henrik Isben (the famous Norwegian playwright who lived in Bergen for a while)

By the time I left the museum, just on Kicking out time at 4pm the light was starting to fade, and the rain had taken on monsoon qualities. I took a short, but very wet walk back to the hotel to dry off and see if the rain would let up.