Sooooo Much Travelling! pt 2
Trip Start
Jan 08, 2010
1
25
45
Trip End
Sep 27, 2010
Where I stayed
P-Hotel, Bergen
Gardemoen Airport Hotel, Oslo
Thistle Hotel, Heathrow
London, England, United Kingdom
Monday, June 14, 2010
The hotel was nice and comfy and in a great position, the only drawback was the breakfast. There are many great things about Scandenavia, but one thing we haven't warmed to is the idea of sandwiches for breakfast. We have managed to avoid them for over 5 months, but they finally got us in the end. The breakfast provided at the hotel was a bag hung on our door containing a couple of juice boxes and a sandwich each. If I'm going to have bread for breakfast I want it to be toasted and with jam or honey, I really don't want cheese or ham, seems weird to us! But then our Swedish friends thought it was odd to use honey for anything but sweetening tea, so I guess we're all weird to someone else.
Bergen is a stunningly gorgeously amazingly beautiful town so the next day we took a bus to a nearby mountain (the city is wedged between mountains on one side and fjords on the other) and took a cable car to the top. The mountain was called Ulriken and at the top there were some nice walking trails around the mountains. We didn't realise this so weren't really dressed appropriately and were a bit intimidated by all the people in snazzy lycra pants and backpacks. But we went wandering in our jeans and sneakers anyway and had a great time doing it. There were lakes on top of the mountains! Bizarre!
We did a lot of walking around the city that day as well which was lucky because it was the last sunny day we got. Bergen is meant to be a very rainy city so I think we were lucky to get any sun. On the first rainy day we went to the Museum of Decorative Art which was full of fantastic design and had an exhibiton of chairs, furniture and some textiles and one of old silverwork. Both were excellent and even Pete said it was the best place we'd been so far.
The next day we went to the Leprosy Museum for some reason. It was housed in an old leprosy hospital and was really disgusting, though very educational. It made our skin itch and crawl to see the images, wax figures and even a real leper's foot on display! Apparently Norway was a hot spot for leprosy until relatively recently (the last patient of that hospital died in the 70's) so there was a lot of research done from there. Bergen especially had a lot of lepers so some of the top researchers did some of their work from there. There was one guy who was convinced that leprosy was hereditry and another who thought it was contagious. Their research methods got rather interesting with the hereditry guy injecting himself, a nurse and several other people with infected blood to try to prove the other guy wrong. The other guy injected already infected patients with infected blood to prove some other point and some legal action had to be taken to stop them.
After that we vistied Rosenkrantz Tower which was part of Bergenhus Fort. It is really well restored and preserved and was a king's residence and prison. It was a bizarre building with heaps of extensions and alterations throughout the years, so the walls were packed with history. It was filled with narrow stairways and passages which were really creepy. It was an amazing building and it would have been good to have more time there (we stupidly got there 20 minutes before closing and left the next day).
The train ride back to Oslo was good and after those 7 hours we got on another train to the airport (which was incredibly expensive!) and then took a shuttle bus to the airport hotel. The airport was quite nice but was out in the middle of nowhere, away from everything including the airport. This would have been fine except that once we got there they informed us that it would cost us the equivalent of $40 to get back to the airport the next day on the shuttle bus! Argh! Then we went down for dinner in the restaurant (remember we were out in the middle of woopwoop so no other options) and they told us they only had a buffet dinner which was $50 a plate! No wonder the room was a reasonable price! The buffet was mostly salads (blaaa) so I filled up on boiled potatoes and Pete had several pieces of crumbed fish...so $100 for fish and potatoes.....hmmm, not happy. Kinda funny really, espeacially as it was our 1 year wedding anniversary! After that we went up and watched Australia get shamefuly flogged by Germany, a fun evening all round :)
The plane today to London was quick and uneventful but as we flew in to land we had fun watching the cars driving on the correct side of the road and felt right at home. We are now in Heathrow at another airport hotel and it is a big contrast between this and the last. The airport shuttle was relatively cheap, it is near several restaurants and we can speak English to people! It is such a relief to be able to be chatty and polite to service people instead of just saying the bear minimum. It is great to be able to read signs again and not have to start every conversation with ''do you speak English?''. We ended up staying in the hotel for dinner even though we had other choices and had another buffet which was totally different from the last one. Firstly we got to choose it instead of several other things and it was full of hearty English food. There were heaps of vegies and baked potatoes and Pete filled up at the carvery and for once we knew what everything was! England feels like home!
So we're off to Vancouver to less comfortable surroundings and will keep you posted as much as possible.
Comments
Now that is really, really funny... someone who thinks that England is notable for good food (and good food choices!) - even at the airport... lol
I don't think Emelie agrees! Myf and Peter you really have been privileged to spend time in such a superbly beautiful place. The natural environment is stunning and the man made is fascinating and beautiful as well!! I want to go!