Contrary to what the weather guys said, it did not rain today (actually it did a little tonight). We are having amazing luck with the weather and appreciate it. The first thing we did, and the highlight of the day, was the walking tour of Bergen. We bought a 48 hour Bergen Card which gets us into all the museums and lets us ride the bus, light rail etc. Bergen has about 250,000 people and after you walk around a bit, it feels smaller and smaller. The woman who gave the tour (in English thank you very much) was great. Bergen really got going around 1100, about the time everything else seemed to get started here in Norway. Bergen started fishing. For centuries they traded dried fish for grain. They specialized in dried fish. Cod fish was (and maybe still is), the fish of choice. Dried fish was valuable to the world because it can be stored for years (during shipment, on long ocean voyages, etc, etc). Bergen was also the capital of Norway for centuries. Around the late 1300's German businessmen came to town and stayed at first for the summer, and then all year round. The got special provisions from the Norwegian government to exclusive trading rights in the fishing industry and this kicked off a 3-400 year run of German controlled trade in Bergen. German boys (no girls) were shipped to Bergen at 13-15 years of age and put to work. If you see a postcard or hat or something from Bergen, it will more than likely be the 10 or 11 tenement houses right on the waterfront. These tenements were long houses that each housed about 100 German men who ran businesses in Bergen. Each had a central kitchen toward the back (run by boys), a communal room where they could hold meetings and socialize. On the back of each tenement was the "store front" where commerce took place. The boys were tested when they arrived to see if they were tough enough to live there doing hard work in dark damp conditions (Bergen winter weather), and they were sent home if not. They stayed there for 10 or 20 years and then returned home at middle age to take normal lives back home in Germany.

The Norwegians eventually nationalized all of this and kept a lot of the Germans to run the businesses in town. The feeling among Norwegians is that it was an okay arrangement because it increased commerce with the outside world, even if they did not control it.

The other historical theme is fires. Seems like they had fires that wiped out some part of the town every 20 to 30 years and they have a whole museum dedicated to fire. The big fire in 1702 wiped most of the city out, and the last big fire was in 1955. After this last fire, the old tenements were almost bulldozed and modern buildings put in but after poking around in the ashes, they realized that there were several cities buried under the ground and they decided to restore the city and rebuild it very carefully, put a couple museums in to show off all the stuff they dug up and maybe charge some kroners for tourists to see them. Great tour.

We then went to the Rosenkrantz Tower which has had enough rich and/or famous people or kings rebuild it that it is hard to tell which part was built when. But we climbed to the top and got some great pictures. One exhibit here was about all the intricate laws that were in place back on the 11-1200's. They were very organized and very fair.

We stopped by the Theta Museum which is basically one room that was restored to the way it was during World War II and served as a place for the Norwegian Resistance to report to the Allies the comings and goings of the Germans in Bergen, which the Germans used as a port to supply their war effort with ships, planes, fuel, ammunition and soldiers. They used radio signals from this small room to transmit over the pond to England what was moving through. There were 13 young men (19-22) running this and 9 of them lived until the end of the war. There is a weird relationship here with Germany, partly because of the whole 400 year of running things thing, and partly old wounds from WWII. They don't talk about it much.

We tried to hit the Leprosy Museum but it was closed. The small museums here only seem to be open a few hours a day, a few days a week.

So off to the art museum, or one of them. We only had 45 minutes to rip through the museum and we got through the entire thing, sort of drive-by art appreciation.

We walked all over town to find a place to eat and finally ended up back on the wharf.

The great news is we finally found an ATM that took our card and gave us money. No more digging those coke bottles out of the garbage cans..