Norway Day 3

We met our cousins at their hotel, near the center of downtown. It was fixin' to storm mightily. I like this photo because it shows the view beyond the cousins. At one point I was doing an internal double-take because I was talking to my cousins with the Bergen Fish Market in the background. It got better.

They took us on a bus ride and then a walk in the neighborhood, Sandviken, where my family lived in the late 1800s. It's a part of town where their fellow tradesmen in barrel making and butchery lived and worked.

These buildings are where the ships brought animals from the countryside to be butchered.

From these warehouses the meat would be carted around that point in the background of the photo above and over to Central Bergen.

My family lived up the road from the warehouses, in a series of apartments close to their work. On the second floor, at the balcony, over what is now a kebab shop is where some of my family lived, while others lived in the building across the street. I remember visiting the yellow place in the 1970s, when a friend of the family still lived there.

In the present, we walked down the cobblestone street past these places. It was so pretty and relatively untouched.

I took the shot above to show what it looked like looking back up from the warehouses toward the kebab shop. At this point we had to take refuge from the rain under a construction worker's scaffolding and tarp. It was raining in all directions.

We took the bus back to town to see the site of the old meat market. It's fairly famous as a landmark, and my family for many years had a butcher stall there. After my great grandfather died, my great grandmother continued to run the business until the 1960s. Pretty remarkable.

The building was refurbished (and is still under construction). We went in and had some coffee at the Starbucks to warm up. Here's the view from inside the Kjøttbasaren:

We were soaked through from our walk in the rain earlier, so we parted ways with our cousins and went home to take a shower and get into some dry clothes.

For dinner we stopped at Pingvinen. Had some vegetarian lapskaus and fish and yummy cheeses. They were also playing a lot of good music (ex: Cream's Disraeli Gears, all of it, in album order).

Then we found ourselves back at Appolon, and realized that they were doing rock pub quiz. Bunch of grey haired white guys hunched over cafe tables with pieces of paper? Definitely Pub quiz.

After pub quiz ended (it was all in Norwegian), the dj played a song that mrguy played on. I explained to the dj that mrguy was on that record, and it turns out that it was one of his favorite bands.

So ends another epic day in Norway.