I never know if it’s better to do day by day recaps or more of a general thing. Travel blogs that are monetized do lists like “the top 10 things to do in Bergen” or “7 Things to make your vacation in Bergen Ultimate!” I know those things have better SEO but when I’m looking at information and trying to research trips, what I love most is reading about someone’s trip, what did they actually do, how did they fit it into the days they had, that sort of thing. But what I don’t know is if I am the weird one for enjoying reading that sort of thing!

Part 1 here: how we got to Norway and then to Bergen.

I think I’ll continue my day by day for now, but I may be more general in Oslo later. *shrugs*.

We arrived via train around 5:15 pm and walked about 15-20 minutes to our AirBNB. It was raining, and I had the hardest time following my phone map (jet lag/brain fog?) but luckily not raining too hard. We finally found the place and the keys were in the lockbox as promised.

The AirBNB was cute, great location, with an amazing view. It seemed as described, and we were excited.

We were visiting Bergen during the Bergen International Festival, an international arts festival. We wanted to take advantage of a few things, so the first night we were headed to a free Hardanger Fiddle concert played by Benedicte Maurseth in the public square, Torgallmenningen, so we needed to head out to get there. It was a 10 to 15 minute walk and we were eager to see Bergen along the way without the worry of our luggage.

The outdoor space! There were some chairs set up and we managed to snag a pair after the rain started up again. Most people just pulled out their umbrellas, so we did the same. When in Bergen…

The concert was about 45 minutes long and we enjoyed it. All of the commentary was in Norwegian, and seemed to be interesting and relatively funny based on the audiences reactions. After that we headed for our dinner reservation at Bryggeloftet & Stuene, an old restaurant in the Bryggen area that was supposed to be delicious and traditional. I had made a reservation because I didn’t know if Sunday nights were busier since some other places were closed and I also knew there was an International Arts festival going on! The place was packed, so I’m glad I made the reservation. We got seated promptly, and I decided to order the mussels which were in a cream sauce and came with fries. Louie ordered the Wolffish with his choice of potatoes and he chose potatoes dauphinoise. (Lots of potatoes on the menu!) They ended up bringing out boiled potatoes by accident at first, so he ended up with double potatoes!

We thought we were surrounded by Norwegians as we heard a lot of languages we didn’t understand, but the server spoke to nearly everybody in English, so I suspect we were surrounded by Swedish people, Germans, etc. Everybody in Norway speaks English really well, with American accents for the most part.

After dinner we were exhausted so we didn’t wander too much and headed home to sleep.

A word about Norwegian beds: everywhere we went instead of one large comforter, quilt, or duvet covering the bed, there were two smaller duvets. No top sheet, but of course the duvet cover is washable. So we each got our own duvet, which was weird at first but we got used to.

Our place in Bergen was chilly that night but we couldn’t (in our jet lag/brain fog) figure out how to turn on the heat, and only managed to turn on the heated bathroom floor.

The next morning we got breakfast at a nearby coffee shop called BKB coffee. I had a cappuccino and a scone. Louie asked for the apple scone and the barista was so confused until we all realized that Louie meant “applesin” which isn’t apple at all but is orange! VERY FUNNY!

It was a lovely day so we went to the Floyen Funicular to ride up and see the city from above. There no line to speak up and before we knew it we were at the top. It was a wonderful view!

We walked around looking at the view and then headed down a path and saw some goats!

We walked around a bit, and took a short trail to a lake, and enjoyed the Norwegian “countryside” a bit.

I was still feeling tired/exhausted so we didn’t hike too far, but we decided to walk down rather than take the funicular. We finished our exploring at Floiyan, had a coffee and quick snack, and then headed down.

We took a short break back at the house to change and rest, and then headed out in search of fish soup. We ended up having our (first) bowl of fish soup at a tented restaurant by the harbor.

We had tickets for a cello recital that evening at Edvard Grieg’s House, and needed to get ourselves there: it involved a train and a 20 minute walk, not a huge deal, but we wanted to be on the early side to look around as well. For those of you who don’t know: Grieg is the most famous and accomplished Norwegian composer of classical music.

After our soup we walked around taking pictures, looking at stuff, etc., getting a coffee and dessert to pack for later, and finally catching the tram or train to the stop.

We managed the uphill walk to Grieg’s house: it seemed somehow hotter than I thought it would be and I was still struggling with what I assumed was jet lag, with the niggling feeling in the back of my head that this was something more, but when we got there, wow, it was gorgeous!

The concert was great. It was played by a cellist, Amalie Stalheim, and a pianist Christian Ihle Hadland. Amalie had won the Norwegian Soloist Prize recently and she was fantastic. Also likely very funny but who would know: this was another time when the performer spoke Norwegian and we just smiled and nodded, haha!

One thing I particularly enjoyed about the concert was the end: the audience loved the concert and clapped wildly for her to return. They don’t do standing ovations and instead everybody started clapping all together in unison. It was very exciting to be part of, and of course they came back out and played an encore.

We went back the way we came, down the hill to the train stop, and made it relatively easily back to the city. We had a little trouble getting tickets, but it turned out one of the machines was broken. And we even had time to eat the aforementioned dessert before the train came.

I should say: we wore masks at the concert and on the train, even thought nobody else was. I was feeling quite tired/exhausted/warm on the ride back and luckily managed to get a seat after a few stops: I wasn’t sure I would make it all the way leaning against the wall.

We were hungry so we stopped at a sausage stand, Trekroneren, and got a street sausage. Not something we normally eat, but we chose to eat very little meat for reasons that do allow us to eat meat on occasion. This was reindeer sausage with lingonberry jam, mustard, and fried onions, which was how the employee suggested I try it.

Then it was time to say good bye to another day, even if the light was still with us. I was feeling not great, so Louie ran over to the nearby 7-11 to get a few drinks/sodas and a quick lunch to split. We did figure out how to turn on the heat as well: the evenings were pretty cold, down into the high 30s/low 40s. I also figured I’d run a load of laundry: there was a combination washer/dryer, which was pretty unusual to us, but we figured out how to use it. It took about 3-4 hours and didn’t finish until late at night, and sang a song then that woke me up, but in the morning when I checked the laundry was clean and dry!

The next morning we went to the supermarket first. We bought some things we needed and enjoyed browsing the aisles for all of the things that were different from here. After that we went for breakfast at a nearby restaurant called Godt Brød, meaning literally, Good Bread. We ordered coffees and scones and the barista suggested we get brown cheese on our scones. We had heard of brown cheese but hadn’t tried it yet so we enthusiastically agreed.

After our breakfast, we headed towards Bryggen and then to the Bergenhus Festning, the Fortress.

We decided to buy tickets for the Rosenkrantz Tower, which was a tower that kept getting added on to. You went down into the dungeon first (which made us really realize how awful being in a dungeon would be, if we didn’t already realize that).

The bathrooms were built into the dungeon area.

Then we started climbing up the stairs to higher rooms for various royalty.

The King had had his own bathroom!

And from the top there was a lovely view!

After the Tower we just walked around the Fortress a bit. We came across a museum about the Resistance and popped in. It was free, and seemed like a lovely museum, but it was really hot inside and I just couldn’t read anymore, so we didn’t stay too long.

We decided lunch would be more fish soup! Rick Steves recommended we try Søstrene Hagelin so we did. It was good, different than the previous soup, more chowdery and full of dough balls of fish. They also sold a lot of “fish cakes” so we tried a few of those as well.

And then we walked around a bit more, getting a coffee at Cafe Opera, before going to the Bryggen Museum. The Bryggen Museum was very interesting, about the history of Bergen and how people lived and lots of archeological finds. It’s also so interesting to think of how in Europe you are literally on top of all the places people have lived for hundreds and hundreds of years, and it just keeps getting higher and higher.

(Of course, we have the same here, it’s just different because we prefer to pretend nobody lived in the States before the white people “discovered it”. )

After the Museum it was time to face some facts. I wasn’t feeling well, and we had dinner reservations for a Michelin-star restarant, Lysverket, and that would mean sitting unmasked in a restaurant for 2-3 hours and…we took COVID tests.

Here’s where I hesitate, how much to tell you? I know that some of you will think we were wrong every step of the way, that if you got COVID on your trip to Norway for two weeks you would do everything perfectly and know exactly what to do. But I will tell you, nothing is black and white.

We took the tests. I was positive, Louie was negative. We were in shock for a bit, and then started trying to figure out what to do.

1. We canceled our dinner reservation. This was a no-brainer, but absolutely devastating!
2. We were supposed to leave the next day on a nonrefundable ticket. So our choices were: cancel, buy it again (when, it was purchased weeks in advance, so who even knows what is available) and try to find a place to stay somewhere in the city during a big festival. Or not. Just mask up, stay away from people.
3. Norway doesn’t care. Their official COVID information is: stay home if you don’t feel well. Don’t worry about testing, we don’t do that anymore. Effective February 2022, they stopped worrying about it.
4. The US Embassy website in Norway tells you to visit Norway’s health page to find out about COVID testing. The links they give are broken. So there was no real information about what to do, and we felt absolutely on our own.

So, we had Royal Kebab for dinner, got takeout and ate in a nearby park. We decided that our masks would protect others from us, as well as distancing, and we would just do our best to avoid people and be outside as much as possible if we felt up for it (we assumed that Louie would be getting it as well.) You can judge me, but you weren’t there, in a foreign country, away from all of your cold medicine and your box of extra food and your grocery delivery, having spent thousands on your trip and wanting to enjoy it after years of the pandemic.

Now, I realized that all of the weird symptoms I’d had, the extreme tiredness, the constant headaches, the fever, the chills, the sore throat, the runny nose, that was probably NOT jet lag and was actually COVID. So according to the idea that you get the latest omicron 2-3 days after being exposed, I likely got exposed the day before the trip, or possibly on the plane. Where masks are not required and few people wore them, even though WE DID.

I feel weird putting this out there on the internet, but I want to be truthful with you, and we did nothing illegal or wrong. Morally questionable, except we just didn’t see any other way that wasn’t horrendously expensive and would absolutely ruin the entire trip. If I sound defensive, it’s because I am!

So the next morning, we packed up, we got breakfast (outside at Good Bread again) and then went to board our boat to Balestrand, our next stop. I felt…okay. Stressed out beyond belief (would we ever be allowed to fly back home, remember at this time you needed a negative COVID test to return home) and worried about getting sicker, worried about Louie getting sicker, and frankly, feeling like we were in a lose-lose situation. I kept my mask on inside the entire trip and only removed it outside to eat or drink, or a quick picture, away from people (it was very windy outside so we weren’t concerned.)

Remember, I wear my mask to protect you!

So that’s Bergen. We were incredibly lucky with the weather: it was fairly warm and hardly rained at all, and incredibly unlucky to get COVID.

Sometimes I feel like my life is harder than it needs to be, but most of the time I feel pretty lucky. I think of how lucky I was to meet Louie when I did: both of us were recently out of long term relationships and absolutely nobody around us thought we would stick as a couple, yet nearly 9 years later, here we are.

Which brings us to Norway: because of Louie’s hard work and crazy life choices, such as pursuing a PhD while working full time, and after COVID travel was pretty much going again, he got asked to present at a conference in Oslo, so that meant I was going to, because of course! And if you’ve been reading the blog before, you know I made a plan for our trip which involved going about a week early to travel some other places in Norway first.

Between Rick Steves, Fodor’s, and Trip Advisor, I made a pretty good travel plan with the time we had. I prepared the itinerary, purchased tickets and tours in advance, and made documents of activities to do and good restaurants in each city or town we were staying. I was prepared!

This never stops people from asking questions a day or two beforehand as if I’ve never heard of the country before. “You should go to Bergen.” “You should make sure to see the fjords.” Like, sometimes I swear everybody thinks I am a complete idiot. Is it the smile? Is it that I’m a woman? Do they treat everybody they meet as if they are complete idiots? Are there seriously people who plan trips to a foreign country and do nothing beyond buying the plane ticket and wait for this person to tell them, the day or days before, what to do? But I digress!

I am a planner. I don’t always do well with changes. COVID taught me to be more flexible and to expect the worse, but I still prefer when things work as planned. You ask, why am I mentioning this, didn’t I have a nice trip?

Anyway, I think I’ll divide this blog into 4-5 posts. This is post one, and there will be one for Bergen, one for Balestrand, and then one for our return to Oslo, which may be turned into 2. So that’s the plan: stay tuned but also don’t stay that tuned, because going through pictures is tough, so many!

The day before we were to set out we were both still working, and I even picked up an extra gig to help out a friend who was isolating with COVID in their family. We wanted to check in for our flight but couldn’t, and this caused us some consternation: it didn’t say why we couldn’t and we were worried that something had gone wrong with something involving COVID somehow. Anyway, after an hour on hold with American, we learned that likely everything was fine and we could just check in at the airport.

It turned out the problem was that we were starting with American, but the second 2 flights were with Finnair, a partner, and Finnair didn’t let American customers check in online. No big deal. We got to the airport, got our boarding passes, seats, etc. Flew to Chicago, and had a long layover: had to change terminals, go through security, etc, so it was nice to have the time. We had lunch there, and facetimed family, and then had to get new boarding passes for our next flight (Finnair has some control issues) and we ended up with “comfort seats” which meant we would have slightly more leg room on our long haul flight…amazing!

In any case, our long haul flight was fine. We tried to sleep after they served dinner…I probably got 4 hours of sleep, which was pretty impressive. I had a neck pillow which helped tremendously.

We landed in Helsinki, and went through passport control, which means they stamped our passports and asked questions about why we were there. I was fairly incoherent and couldn’t remember at that point, but I’m sure the passport guys are used to jet lag and tired passengers. We had a short layover in Helsinki, and I was feeling lousy and nauseated from the travel (or was it), headache and dehydrated. We finally boarded our third flight, to Oslo, and I slept some more. The landing was tough and it was the first time to my recollection, that I almost threw up. In any case, we left Oslo airport without further incident (and no customs that we could tell unless we missed something super important) and caught a Flytoget train to Oslo S, the Central Train Station.

The Flytoget is the express airport train. In retrospect, for this journey we could have saved about $20 and taken a regular train since we weren’t in a hurry, but I’m not perfect in my planning. We go to the station and then found our first hotel for the night nearby: CityBox Oslo. It was early afternoon and before official check in but thankfully we were able to check in right away, which was great!

We knew we needed to keep moving, so we unpacked, cleaned up and then hit the streets, walking all over. It was a warm sunny day, and everybody seemed to be out and about. We grabbed lunch at a nearby restaurant first, pizza, which was a funny choice for Norway but it was easy and I thought it would sit well for me.

After we walked all over the place, we tried to decide what to do for dinner, and we settled on having a drink and a snack at a very old restaurant called Stortorvets Gjæstgiveri located relatively near our hotel. We had a lovely time there and kept ordering snack after snack until we no longer needed dinner. We went back to the hotel after that and I believe I was asleep by 8 pm (20:00 as the locals would say).

I woke up at some point in the middle of the night and noticed that while it was a little darker, it wasn’t that dark. It never really gets dark in Norway over the summer: the sun does set in Oslo, around 10:30 to 11, but it doesn’t go very far.

The next morning we had a train to catch for Bergen! We enjoyed a breakfast buffet at a nearby restaurant, Spor av Nord. It was somewhat attached to the hotel and offered a discount for hotel guests. We had coffee, orange juice, cheese, bread, smoked salmon, eggs, waffles, and more. Then we walked back to the Train Station and caught our train to Bergen. It would be a 7 hour journey, but everybody said it was a beautiful ride as well, and it was nice just to relax, since I was feeling exhausted, headachey, and still a little queasy here and there.

We packed food: caviar in a tube and crackers and Kvikk Lunsj, for the journey. It was a nice trip, and watching the Norwegian countryside as we traveled along was almost magical. We got to the middle of the trip, up in the mountains and were surprised to see that the landscape was changing to snow!

After a while, we struck up a conversation with the couple on the train across from us, who were British from London, and that was nice. And finally, we arrived in Bergen. It was raining a bit and was about 5 pm.

That’s where I’ll leave this travel blog recap for now. I may not be doing day by day in the future, I’m not sure. It seemed to make sense to start out, but may not make sense in the future, but I’ll decide later. Thanks for reading and let me know your thoughts in the comments! Have you visited Scandinavia before?

We made it back home two nights ago! We both dropped right into work and such (laundry, house cleaning) but I thought I’d pop in.

If you are an instagram follower of mine you’ve been getting to see all of the wonderful pictures. Norway is gorgeous. It was a wonderful trip, with one major exception.

The major exception is that we both caught COVID on the trip (or likely, before the trip, in my case). So we fuddled through life the best we could, with poor information. And at the end, we had to change our flight to come back a few days later in order to ensure negative tests or a proof of recovery documentation for both of us, only to have the US change the testing requirement to mean we could have stayed with our original plans. Nonetheless the extra days were nice to make up for the sick ones.

So, 6 things things that were awesome about Norway:

1. In the summer it never gets dark! The sun goes down around 10:30 to 11 pm but it doesn’t go very far, and then it’s back up by 4 am.
2. Public transportation. In Oslo we used an app that you could buy tickets through as well as plan your route to wherever you were going. It was amazing to just step out on the street, walk a few blocks and hop on the bus or tram you needed.
3. There was a delicious bakery around the corner from our AirBNB in Oslo that we ate at too many times to count. Good cappuccinos as well as pastries and bread.
4. The people were wonderful and helpful. Everybody speaks English (they learn from a young age) and even though I felt guilty that I didn’t speak much Norwegian (really, any, more than a phrase or two) nobody seemed to be too bothered by this.
5. The fjords really are gorgeous, and the mountains. The train from Oslo to Bergen was more beautiful than we expected.
6. Boat rides: if you go to Norway, you MUST take a boat ride.

3 Things that aren’t quite as awesome about Norway:

1. Everything, especially food, is incredibly expensive. If you get a sandwich at a restaurant, it’s $25 to $30. Even the grocery store is more expensive that you’d expect.
2. It’s very far away. We had to take three flights, which on the way back meant going through security three times. There weren’t any reasonably priced options that didn’t have three connections.
3. We had to leave! They wouldn’t just give us an apartment and jobs and let us stay there. We may have to look into that further.

So that’s the teaser post. I’ll write a bit more about in the next week or two about each location we visited (and of course share more photos): Bergen, Balestrand, and Oslo (where we spent over a week and really started to feel like locals, haha.) If you have an opportunity to visit Norway, I recommend you take it!