After ten minutes of marveling at it (and a much nicer ten minutes watching it retreat back up the mountain as we went downhill), I was back asleep. Apparently, Alisa wasn't quite so lucky and got a bit less beauty sleep.
We arrived at the station in Bergen, Norway, at 6:30am. I had a stomachache, and our hostel reception desk didn't open until 9am, so we got our tickets for the next few days from the counter and sat and read at a coffee shop.
Our only day in Bergen, today was a shopping adventure, as well as this awesome fort. We visited Rosencratz's Tower (an awesome wind-y maze of a thing), spied on little children who were being cute, and threatened to push each other off the tall retaining wall.
After that morning, we had a luscious, sumptuous lunch of mussels. The bowls were huge, and our shells filled up a bucket (and then some).
We rolled ourselves out into the sunshine (yes! it happens!) and back to the hostel for an afternoon of repacking for our harried next few days and recovering from our red-eye train (which had nothing to do with sleeping and everything to do with reading).
We went out again at 8pm, trying to find some food and to go up the funicular to catch the sunset.
It's a good thing the sun sets late, because between the bookstore and getting dinner, it was 10pm when we got up the mountain.
And wow was it spectacular! We watched for an hour as it dipped below the tree-lined horizon across the bay. I took a picture for a boys' choir, then an Italian guy took a picture of us. Afterward, we started chatting with a different Italian and his escort, a member of the board of tourism.
We compared travels, gushed about Norway, and learned a bit from each of them. By the time we were headed back down the mountain, Alisa had developed a little crush on the Italian. Sorry, Erik, new country, new boys!
And we saw the mayor. The tourist board officer, she pointed him out to us before we walked a few blocks together towards our hostel.
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