20230617 Bergen

After a fitful night caused, I suspect, by too much coffee at grandmas house we got up at 4:38am for some baguette toast and strawberries and walked to Sagene (pronounced Sag-na) again to catch Bus 54 to Oslo S.

We were early enough the station was mostly empty so we went to the kiosk to buy our tickets. The machine charged my credit card $114 for two tickets to Bergen and didn't give us anything. The station was empty of Vy attendants but there was a man dressed in a uniform of a different transportation company and Ja went over to talk to him. His first comment was:

"Sorry I can't help you."

Followed by:

"Yeah you should never use those machines."

Ja called the Vy customer service number and only got a recorded message expressing their thanks he had called followed by a period of silence before the line disconnected.

We got on the train with the intent of just buying another pair of tickets from the ticket agent only to discover a middle aged woman and two teenage girls in our seats. When we mentioned they were in our seats the woman confidently told us they had reservations for seat 37, 38, and 41; the same seat numbers I had on the official reservations in my hand. Unwilling to argue about it we spent a frantic 20min looking for free seats in the full car and eventually had to take seats separately. Amanda found a seat next to a woman sympathetic to our plight and I took the last free seat in the carriage; with the three people who had stolen our reserved seats.

As we pulled out of the station Ja messaged Amanda that he finally got through to someone at Vy and they wanted me to send them a copy of my bank statement, credit card, and location and code of the bad kiosk so I spent the first half hour of our trip attempting to log into my bank account using Amanda's computer. The problem is I use a password manager so I don't know what my bank password is and the encrypted database with my password was on my computer at home. I managed to get them the information but it required a dramatic hacking effort to download and decrypt this file from my computer in Monterey.

I setup Amanda's phone as a hot spot and used my phone to do an encrypted file transfer from my home computer. Then I setup an encrypted file server on my phone, registered Amanda's computer as a valid client, and downloaded the encrypted database. Finally I installed a password manager on her computer to get my passwords. The whole procedure was stressful because I wasn't sure how long I would have an internet connection.

While I was frantically working on this the ticket agent came through and we told him about our reservations, the broken kiosk, and how we had to change seats because they were full. He let us buy another pair of tickets. Later when he got back to where Amanda was sitting she told him the entire story and he came back to look at the reservations of the people who had stolen our seats.

"Oh, this is a mess. Can I see your reservations? You're in the wrong car, you'll have to move down."

The woman shot us a dirty look as they packed up their things and left the carriage and Amanda and I were left with four seats between the two of us. Now settled, Amanda glued herself to the window looking for birds. The term 'duck lust' was bandied about but I wasn't sure who brought it up. At one point she screamed out loud in the quiet train car,

"THAT'S A LOON! WOO HOO!"

My only notes from the train trip was that the wheat fields were blue.

We were sitting at the end of the car near the cage where you can put your luggage. Someone put their backpack on the shelf with a loosely tied sleeping bag on top and this fell off the shelf onto the floor, almost, but not quite blocking the automatic door and I watched people spend the next hour stepping over it every time they came through the carriage. Eventually the owner of the bag returned and put it back up onto the shelf but it fell off again a few minutes later and I got up to prop it up out of the way.

The train climbed up into the mountains visiting in turn, Flå, Nesbyen, Gol, Ål, Finse, Myrdal, Mjølfjell, Voss, Dale, and Vaksdal. The Haugestol line is underground about 50% of the time so the windows would be dark and the train would emerge from the tunnel and we would see a flash of beautiful waterfalls crashing under the tracks or over our heads, dazzling snow fields, and high mountain lakes and then the view would be obscured by trees or we would enter a tunnel again. We spent a lot of fruitless effort trying to capture the outside scenery only to have the train enter another tunnel a moment before the camera started recording.

The train car was freezing and I'd neglected to bring my jacket because Bergen was supposed to be warm. I dug through our luggage and put on all my shirts, a pair of pants, and I squeezed into Amanda's puffy vest. The coldest I felt during the entire visit was on this train ride to Bergen.

Along the way we passed the station where Ja had planned on taking us on a multi-day bike ride down from the mountains through a slot canyon to the sea. The high altitude landscape held only barren rock and snow. The bike ride sounded awesome but there was still too much snow.

When we arrived in Bergen it was 90 degrees and swarming with tourists attending a music festival (bergenfest). Our plan was to rent a car and drive to Runde but because of the festival the price of the rental went up from $50/day to $400/day. We spent some time looking for other ways to get to Ålesund. There was a train but it would take several days. There were flights but they all went back to Oslo and then back out to the west coast. Our last option was the bus, which went to Ålesund daily over a 10 hour trip with 133 stops.

By the time we decided the bus was our best option and walked down to the bus station to buy tickets the staffed kiosk was closed and there were no ticket machines. The online app refused to accept our credit cards. I thought maybe if I had a Norweigan phone number they would accept my card and we visited another Narvessen to buy a SIM card but we were told that it would take 24 hours to validate the number before I could use it. Finally we discovered if you pay for tickets with a credit card using paypal as a middleman they would accept the payment.

With the tickets sorted we rented a room in the cheapest hotel in Bergen, dropped off our luggage, picked up our swimming gear, took a towel from the bathroom, and went out to look for a place to jump into the North sea. The town was swarming with music festival goers. We found several spots where bathers were gathered on concrete pads near the water but Amanda didn't want to stop so we continued wandering until we found ourselves at the end of the town and the last concrete pad filled with bathers. The bay beyond was filled with express ferries and private boats.

I wrapped a towel around my waist and changed into my swimming trunks only to discover I'd lost so much weight they just slipped off my body. I pinned them closed with a safety pin but this popped open as soon as I jumped into the water and I had to climb the ladder with one hand.

The express ferries drove alarmingly fast past the point and it was difficult to tell how deep it was through the turbid water. I didn't want to bang my knee on a barnacle encrusted rock.

On the way back to our hotel room, we passed a donut place, a rarity in Norway, and stopped in. They only had a 8-10 donuts on display and we bought the nutella donut which turned out to be a pastry containing an entire jar of nutella. It was so much nutella it was difficult to eat.

The old town by the harbor is full of steep and narrow streets and was packed with festival goers. The tourists were mostly British and I began to notice a phenotype among the crowds of British men. These individuals all walked as if their spines were fused or it was their first day walking and they all had the same stupid haircut, hats, and sunglasses. I tried to explain this important discovery to Amanda and as we walked I pointed out specimens.

Back in our oppressively hot and loud hotel room we decided to sort out the rest of our trip. We reserved the car rental from Ålesund and bought our tickets for the flight back to Oslo in 3 days, crossing our fingers there would be no more unforseen delays. This kept us busy until 10pm and left us both exhausted. We had the window open because it was oppressively hot and there was no air conditioning. Loud cars blaring music idled in the street below us and a pair of gulls screeched about their nearby nest. I was worried we would never get to sleep with so much racket but it was all surprisingly quiet when we shut the window.

We were on the third floor of the cheapest hotel in Bergen and this was most evident in our bathroom. There was a missing tile at the base of the tub with a piece of cardboard covering the hole and a short swinging glass door that didn't really divert water but nearly broke when I accidentally bumped it with my knee and it swung into the corner of the sink. It didn't matter all that much, we just needed a place to sleep and temporarily store our luggage.