Norway / Bergen Is Surreal
Late October, I decided to visit Sandra in the ever-so-beautiful Norway! Now, for those who remember, I visited Sandra before in 2009 for Christmas at her farm in the countryside (Risor, Norway). This time, I visited her in her study town - Bergen! She has a beautiful apartment right next to the world heritage site - Bruggen. This was my last European stop before hopping over the pond back to America.
Thoughts? Norwegian is like strange English and German put together. Many words are similar (since both languages are Germanic rooted anyways) and I realized that I can speak a little Norwegian if I put a weird intonation on certain words. I can also easily read it. "Bergen" - in my American accent it Ber-Gen. k? In Norwegian, "BERH-GHAN." Dig it?
We explored the fish market where I ate whale for the first time. The guy serving it literally didn't give me an option of eating his meat on a knife that he offered me - so, I ate the whale. It reminded me of the texture of salmon. Sandra was basically using me to get free fish so we looked around as if we were going to actually buy something so I could get her free samples as a tourist. haha.
We also took a funicular up the mountain that went over Bergen and explored. It was raining (as I learned over the five days I was there, it rains a shitload...) and my first gush of freezing air of the season, so that was fun.. The area has a ton of weird Norwegian humour - "Watch out for the witch" signs and "The trolls are out for Christian blood" signs. There was also a warning to watch out of baby dinosaurs. Apparently all the mythical things live on this mountain above Bergen. Or so the signs said. I also realized Norwegians (as we already know are fucking beautiful people) are incredibly fit. Holy shit! People were constantly running up and down the mountain. Jesus people - calm yourselves down. You cray cray and making me feel fat. As I ate chocolate..walking down..
The highlight of the trip was definitely going to see the fjords. We got mad lucky and Sandra's roommate allowed us to borrow his family's car. The trip to the fjords are ridiculously expensive - much more than any student like me has to her name. So, we had the car and embarked on our journey through western Norway. The area is filled with tunnels through mountains (which made listening to the radio annoying and led us to listening to the one CD in the car, Fleetwood Mac, on repeat) and waterfalls randomly streaming along the road. But seriously, this place was like a fairytale even with the rain. Randomly, along the trip, we crossed for maybe 30 minute through a village that was flooded in snow and was a temporary Winter Wonderland. Really random. Down the road, it magically disappeared.
Anyways, the grass was so green along the journey, the fog in the sky created an unnatural ambiance, it was really - like a fairy tale. Our destination was a little village recommended by one of Sandra's fjord friends. (That is what I am going to call fjord villagers - fjord friends, lol). It is called Undredal (use that weird intonation I mentioned above, UN-DRE, DHAL). The little wooden houses, the green green grass, there is nothing like the view of a Norwegian village overlooking a Norwegian fjord. Surreal is the only word I can manage to wrack my brain to describe the natural beauty. So we'll leave it at that. SURREAL.
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The second highlight was finding village goats. Sandra took the time to make a bridge through the mud to cross a big puddle. After we carefully crossed the bridge, 100 goats came running down the hill and we ran back, right into the puddle. After I realized there was an electric fence, I went and snapped some photos of the darlings.
The end of my trip was me running to the store and buying a kilo of cheese (which seems to unusually happen a lot? o_O). Also, I was able to rekindle my undying loving for Karl Pilkington by discovering of the Ricky Gervais Show - so yes, THIS WAS A SUCCESSFUL TRIP!
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