Bergen

The weather is more overcast today although still warm. We are at Bergen which is much bigger and busier than our previous ports of call. We also have company with a Viking cruise ship also here.

We deliberately had no excursions planned so that we could just spend the day together and probably have a really nice lunch somewhere (we’d been saving up!). I booked us a lunchtime concert of Edvard Grieg’s music which also gave us access to the various museums. We had plenty of time so we wandered through the city towards our destination.

The museums are collectively known as KODE – as we got close I thought I’d better check which one the concert was in. On closer inspection I discovered to my horror that the concert was actually at Grieg’s house, Troldhaugen which is about 15km from the city centre! By this time it was too late to make the journey so we had given it a miss. Fortunately we could use the tickets for the museums so it didn’t all go to waste.

The first museum , Rasmus Meyer, had an Edvard Munch exhibition – sadly it didn’t include “The Scream” which is in the National Museum in Oslo. But some of the paintings were clearly in the same style…

After that we went to another of the Kode museums where the featured artist was Lotte Konow Lund. Her work was completely different and not to everyone’s taste. I liked some of it

Next stop was lunch. I’d chosen a restaurant called Pingvinen which allegedly served wholesome Norwegian food. We weren’t disappointed.

Denis declared the mushy peas to be better than those on the ship but still not as good as his own!

By the time we had finished lunch the weather had deteriorated so we headed straight back to the ship. We had only one more day before bridge started again and we wanted to make sure we were prepared.

In the evening we went to a show – “Disco Fever “ and a ‘sounds of the 70s’ sing along session. Both great fun