Beautiful Bergen …

I’m so lucky that work permits me to travel now and then. Sometimes I go far away to other continents and sometimes I travel in Norway – like yesterday when I visited Bergen. Bergen is definitively one of the mos beautiful cities in the world. It’s situated on the coast surrounded by mountains and the climate provides lots of water for the wild life so the mountainsides are this time of year covered in lots of shades of green.
I lived in Bergen for 12 years (1986 – 1998) and loved every minute of it! The people there are very friendly and they are in many ways different from most other Norwegians. The Norwegian poet Ole Paus describe Bergen in one of his songs (freely translated):
“Bergen is Norway’s largest village and the worlds smallest ‘country’. Bergen is not a city but a condition of my soul …”. He was clearly taken by the beauty of the city and with the great people who live there.

This is were I lived my first 5 years in Bergen. My room is the one on the top floor with the rounded balcony. If you click on the picture to see the larger version, you will see that the pattern in the rail looks like a Swastika. This has led to tons of rumors and unconfirmed stories about the building. When I posted the picture on Flickr I got a comment very quickly stating that this was the Gestapo head quarters in Bergen during World War 2. I checked and Wikipedia states that the Gestapo head quarters were somewhere else.
It was a great place to stay though and I had some very good times there 🙂

Cafe Opera was very close to my room in Christian Michelsens gate and used to be one of my favorite places to go back in the days.

A typical street in the center of Bergen. When you look down most streets in Bergen you will find a mountain in the other end of the street – it’s just beautiful.
The next three pictures are also typical for central Bergen. They are “smau” or narrow alleys with small tree houses snuggling together. The last of these three pictures was taken from my hotel room.



The last picture in this post is from “Vågen”. In the picture you can see the pride of the city a real landmark; the three masted sail ship “Statsraad Lehmkuhl“. In front there’s another old ship and in the background – more mountains.

That’s it for now. I’ll go to Bergen at least once more this summer so don’t be surprised to find more pictures later posts 🙂