Culture Night and City Saturday in Bergen

Hi Blog! I have been out of touch for a while. Here's a mash-up of the last two weekends in Bergen, Norway. Last Saturday, the 8th, was City Saturday, and the place was hopping! I forgot my camera, but took a couple of pictures with my phone. They had the first-ever Beer Fest! That reminded me of Washington state. My friend BowlingJoe just blogged about a beer festival with 27 craft brewers and 3500 attendees. Bergen's was smaller, with only 7 brewers, but what a surprise! Who knew there were any microbreweries in western Norway? I hope it is repeated again next year.

I bought four tastes, and spent a couple of hours people-watching while tasting. I took a food break outside at the Food Fest, ordering a pancake with jam and sour cream. Okay, BowlingJoe, it isn't usual beer-related food, but it looked good! Along the harbor, the veteran boats were out to be toured. During the day, Sunday, a couple of women were sewing knit tubes onto the light poles along the harbor. Why were they doing that? They said that this was part of an international crafting week.

Nice segue into THIS weekend. It was Culture Night on Friday night, the 14th. All the museums, and there are lots of them, in Bergen were open and free. There were musical and art events all over town. I picked 7 things to do out of the 19 pages I printed from the website. I started with a guided walk in my own neighborhood - Nordnes. This is where the segue comes in - a statue was wearing leg warmers! Coincidence? Not!

The tour started pretty much on my street - Skottegaten. Skotte - Scot - why did that never occur to me? This is where the Scots lived during the Hanseatic era. Here's a picture of a 'Bergen House'. The roofs have that swooping shape. And they're wooden.

Here's the oldest house in Bergen. Check out the construction. How about the teensy window?

My next tour was the School Museum (having already missed #2 on my list, an art exhibit called 'Desire' in the Stenersen Museum). Another new fact - compulsory education only came when the church needed you to read in order to be confirmed. The School Museum is combined with the Holberg Museum, since Holberg was the Cathedral School's most outstanding student. There was one of those cool projector-table displays where you can turn pages that aren't real, and a movie even played on one page. Holberg wrote a story about a man falling into a hole (under Fløyen) and finding another sun and planets down there. That was the movie.

Next, it was up to the newly renovated Natural History Museum for a flashlight tour. I was there at the wrong time (so much for relying on the Internet for information!) I walked around tour-less for a while. How cool is it to look overhead at gigantic whale skeletons in the dark? Then they started the tour. But the first group was to be families and children that spoke Norwegian. They wanted us English-speakers to wait another 15 minutes (but we had to ask them to tell us what they announced about English-speakers over again in English). I took off for Rosenkrantz Tower.

   

I think Rosenkrantz Tower is a great building. For Culture Night, there was an Early Music program. That's my 50 second video. Again, I was there at the wrong time, but fortunately for me, I was a half-hour early. The place was overflowing by the time the performance began. Notice the floor-sitters in the background. The performers were really surprised. I heard that their usual audience was 7 people or so. Being free and well-advertised makes a difference! They were Jostein Gundersen from Bergen (recorder), Poul Høxbro of the Netherlands, and Susanne Ansorg of Switzerland (both on fiddles), I believe.

Rosenkrantz Tower was built in 3 pieces, that fit together like a Chinese puzzle. First was around 1270, when it was King Magnus the Lawmender's keep. The concert was in his bedroom. Right next door is the queen's bathroom, which is basically a toilet that hangs outside of the wall. A few year's ago, somebody decided to use it! Ick! After a long period of being closed for cleanup, it is now open again, but with a plexiglass cover.
 
By this time of night, I was too tired for my last two choices. A great night, though!