Day 4 25/8/08 - Norway

Bergen -> Oslo -> London

Highlight

• The weather started to turn bad, it was cloudy windy and raining. We didn’t even get some brief periods of sunshine.
• Brygen lived up to its reputation. Lots of lovely coloured crooked houses.
• Explored the few surviving winding streets and visited the quirky but touristy shops.
• Then walked along the foreshore to <> Tower, hall and castle.
• Tried to visit <> church but it ws closed, so back toe the fish market, which was now in full swing. I was still too full from breakfast, and as it wasn’t time to stock up yet, we decided to split up, so Danny and Cathy could go up to Funicular.
• Started to browse a few shops. Pretty soon though, we decided that we couldn’t afford anything, so only did some brief window shopping before stopping.
• Went to Baker Brun and Gord Brod to try the skillingbolle (cinnamon ball). The Gord Brod one was better in my opinion, although both had their good points.
• Ran out of things to do, so just wandered the streets, looked in <> church, went to the Botanical Gardens.
• Finally went to stock up at the supermarket and the fish market. Got to try everything at the fish market before we bought. The whale meat didn’t taste too bad, but definitely didn’t taste nice enough to be killing all those whales for, so I didn’t buy any.
• Got on the very crowded bus to the airport, then some excitement happened.
• It turned out that SAS had overbooked their flight, and offered us to be bumped off for a €300 travel voucher each. We decided that our time wasn’t worth that much so we took it, and spent time in Oslo and landed at Heathrow.
• Everything actually went smoothly. The planes were not crowded and we were given pretty good seats. We were about 2 hours delayed for our trouble, but of course as soon as we got to Heathrow, everything went wrong. We had to taxi for abges before we could land, they couldn’t connect to our plane so we had to wait about 15 minutes for some stairs, there were lots of people at customs (which we would’ve avoided if we were early as they were all from the last plane from some Arab country, so everything there got questioned for extra long. Those customs officers are definitely prejudiced), there were 6 people working only, we got shoved in the wrong line.
• For a flight that was suppose to arrive at 9:20, we got out of there at 11pm, so once again, UK inefficiencies ruins another holiday.

Food

• Incity breakfast:
  • bread with 7 cold cuts, cheese, herring, salad, pate, tuna, smoked salmon and sardine
  • muesli and rice puffs with grapes
  • apple juice
• skillingbolle (cinnamon bun) x2
• skillingbolle with custard
• skollenbolle (coconut and custard)
• taste test: smoked fish, gravalaz, wild and farmed salmon, whale meat, clavier, smoked moose, smoked reindeer
• apple juice