Cris brings record warm 17th of May to Bergen

Flags brighten every street

My lovely next-door neighbor, Cris, came to Bergen to live in her apartment, celebrate Constitution Day, and break our winter weather. Thank you, Cris! We had a record warm 17th, with thousands of wool bunads overheating the celebrants. I had bought a wool top and skirt from Oleana for the occasion (it looked good ;-) ) and took the sweater OFF for the afternoon. Such a beautiful surprise.

We started the day with cannons firing at 7 am. Cris and I took Timmi out for his morning walk at 7:45, and the streets were beginning to fill with bunad-wearing folks carrying breakfasts to get-togethers all over the middle of town. Cars were parked all down the street. Later in the day, cars were parked in places I was surprised they could even drive onto! Cris scrambled eggs and I fixed lattes, added to fresh whole-grain bread from Godt Brød bakery and some strawberries, with conversation, and before we knew it, we were late to get to "my tree" to watch the two main parades.

Cris, me (in my Oleana outfit) and Roger

Anette and her older daughter (review my post from 2013)

I always stand at the corner of the National Theater under a giant tree. The view is perfect because it is right at a corner of the route and we stand 6 feet above street level on the lawn. It's also perfect because the two parades meet right around there. The one parade is led by the Firefighers' marching band and the other by the Police marching band. One year, they had a face-off right in front of us! But this year, we got to see each individually. "We" included Roger, a friend from the Makerspace, who had actually never watched the parades in town. What? But he had always watched parades around his home outside of the center of town, which basically were school kids and marching bands. Downtown, we have over an hours' worth of clubs, schools, politicians, kids doing cartwheels and bouncing on motocross bikes, graduating seniors handing out their "Russ cards" to kids clamoring for them on the sidewalk, floats and fancy cars, and lots and lots of cheering from the crowd.


Roger headed home for a traditional meal of cream porridge (rømmegrøt) with dried leg of mutton (this doesn't translate as well as it tastes), while I took Timmi out for his lunchtime walk. Abandoning the poor neglected dog at home again, Cris and I walked toward the Viking ship, picking up something to eat from a booth. I had the traditional 17th of May hot dog, while Cris got the spring rolls and fried rice. Can't say we're not international here! We wandered over to Hallaisen and stood in line for homemade Vietnamese coffee ice cream (worth the wait).

Then we came back home for a rest before going to Theatro restaurant for our dinner reservation. Darn if they didn't have half of the restaurant turned into a bar with a DJ! It was loud, and the waitress told us that even though we weren't the first to ask to have the volume turned down, they couldn't do that. They also didn't have the rømmegrøt I was looking forward to. But we had scampi salad and dessert, which were yummy. Then we had to get home pretty quickly, since the ice cream from earlier reminded me that I should not eat milk without taking lactase. Oops. It is so nice to live right in the middle of all the action so you can run home, though.

Hooray for Cris bringing summer weather!