Bergen, Norway

We landed in Bergen yesterday after a short two-hour flight from Iceland.  Unfortunately it was raining but luckily Bergen has some really nice museums.  The KODE art museum had an interesting exhibition on Edvard Munch, Norway's most famous painter.

Serious art.

Even in the rain, Bergen is a really beautiful town.

A music pavilion in the park near our hotel.

This morning it wasn't raining (yay!). We had an ambitious agenda that immediately ground to a halt because the King and Queen of Norway were in town.  There were barricades all throughout the town center, and their ship's arrival in port was announced with great fanfare and cannon blasts.  Of course we stopped to watch the procession -- it's not every day you get within spitting distance of royalty.

Queen Sonja (white scarf), King Harald V, followed by Crown Prince & Princess Haakon and Mette-Marit

The town of Bergen pulled out all the stops with lots of people dressed in period costume, playing folk music, dancing, etc.

The royal procession tied up the town center's traffic for hours.

Luckily for us the museums were still open during all the pomp and circumstance.  We joined a very informative walking tour that took us through the Old Wharf buildings that formerly belonged to the Hanseatic League, a group of German merchant traders who had a base here in Bergen from the 1300's to the 1700's.  Because of the historic buildings and structures still in place today, the town is listed as a UNESCO world heritage site.

An "illuminating" tour

Since it wasn't raining, we decided to take the funicular up Mount Fløyen.  There was a low cloud that eventually cleared just enough for us to get a view of the harbor from above.

Back down in town we had dinner and beers out on the quay followed by a whisky for Kevin at the Grand Terminus hotel bar, which had a whisky menu as long as a book.  Skål!