Bergen - 25th February 2012

Janet's asked me to do a sensible blog before we leave Bergen. The internet signal is quite good here but it may go off tomorrow as we sail into the crinkly bits of Norway.

Did I mention we're on the Captains table? We'd wondered why it was the only shaded table on the seating plan and it turns out that it's the one used by the Captain for his special guests. That's not us of course. He uses it on second sitting and we're on first but we do get a couple of crew members and free wine and liqueurs on formal nights. Anyway, last night, one free glass of wine led to another and after dinner we went for another drink and listened to a singer who rocked, mainly due to the force 11 gale raging outside. We finished up at Observatory, which is the highest point at the front of the ship, just to see how much moved in a gale, The answer is quite a lot. If you are ever planning on having a similar evening can I recommend that you don't end it with a hot chocolate nightcap topped with lashings of real cream.

Due to the bad weather we were late into Bergen and it was 2.30 before we were on the quayside. The plan was to take the funicular railway to the top of the tall hill/low mountain which overlooks city. We had seen the magnificent view last summer and we now wanted to see what it looked like carpeted with snow. The sun was out when we left the ship but by the time we had joined the queue for the railway it was starting to rain and the mist was coming down over the tall hill/low mountain. By that time we had also finally noticed that there wasn't any snow and so we decided to abandon the queue and head for the Kunstmuseum which surprisingly turned out to be full of old paintings.

The gallery had a few paintings by “famous” artists although most of them were not their best works, The Picasso's were from his “I'll knock your nude portrait off before lunch and then we can spend some quality time together” period. What was interesting however were the numerous works by Norwegian artists from the last couple of centuries. They loosely followed the fashions of the time but in a gloomier style. It was the darker side of impressionism or cubism and so on.

We left the gallery to find it was sunny but by the time we were half way back to the ship it was raining again. In the morning we had been to an on-board talk on Bergen and the lecturer had said that if you round up the number of days it rains a year you get to 400. No wonder their paintings are a bit gloomy.

Dave C