We have just been to Voss for one of my birthday presents. It was great fun.
On the first day we went to a big gorge which was giant but very hard to see. There were big holes in the rock ( “made by boulders” as my mum later told me) and the water was very strong. Once we had seen the view we took another path up the hill next to it. We spotted a few mushrooms on the way but we didn’t think they were edible. On the way down a horse rider passed us on a fabulous black horse.
In my previous post I mentioned our trip to Flåm. I have now posted some pictures here, mainly documenting the train journey up to Myrdal and the bike ride back down to Flåm. The latter involves a descent of nearly 1000m in 20km, with a significant part (ca. 400 m happening over 21 switchbacks in the first few km). Great fun for relatively little effort. Also included are some pictures of the amazing scenery that we travelled through around Stalheimen on the way to Flåm.
It’s time to talk about the weather. We have had rather a lot of it recently and in a place like Bergen, one of the wettest cities in the world it is hard not to obsess about it. Before we moved people often asked how we were going to cope with all the rain, my answer was that it rains a lot but most of it comes in big downpours, with bright patches in between. This has definitely been true until the beginning of September, in fact july and august were actually very pleasant and since we moved to Laksevåg we have had many dinners out on the deck behind the house enjoying the evening sun!
Although very overgrown, the garden with our new house has already produced a lot of nice fruit for us. Starting with redcurrants and some gooseberries at the beginning of August, and piles and piles of plums over the past two weeks. So we have been busy making jam, compote and… best of all plum pie! You can ask Esther for the recipe.
We’ve been living in our new house for about a month now and we’ve settled in great. The house is in very nicely decorated and needed almost nothin done before we started unpacking our stuff. For those who won’t be able to come and inspect the house any time soon the girls have made a video-tour which can be seen below. Please ignore the mess, spot the odd socks and work out who messed up Saskia’s bluetack. Plumpie for the first entry with three correct answers.
From the outside Norway has the image of being a safe place to be, very open to foreigners and scoring very high in the happiness league tables. A lot of this has been confirmed since our arrival here. People have been amazingly friendly, helpfull and generous. Of course after living here for three months now we have had to modify some of our preconceptions a bit. It is clear that this country, like any other has it’s problems. We have personally witnessed the sad lives of the drug-addicts in the park opposite our appartment, all out in the open for everyone to see. Walking around in Bergen it is clear that a lot of people from across the world see Norway as a better place to live than their “own home-countries”. On the surface this doesn’t seem to cause any problems and in some sense the Norwegians seem to embrace the foreigners (the girl’s language school is a good example of this). (more…)
Here’s a little video of some whales that were spotted yesterday in the byfjorden just outside Bergen.
A few weeks ago Esther joined the local Athletics club who train on a beautifull track in a dip between the houses only a few minutes away from our new house. We were just in time to register for the summer camp in the first week of the holidays, hoping that the kids would be entertained and would have an opportunity to meet some of the local kids. They certainly seemed to have enjoyed themselves as you can see in these pictures.
After three and a half months in Norway this seems a good moment to look back at what we have achieved and report on some of our experiences so far. Apart from actually getting here, the major achievement has been to buy a house (see previous post). We have now managed to organise a mortgage and insurance and we are set to move in in 3 weeks time. We also bought a new car, sold the old one back in the UK and have managed to tick a number of smaller items off our to do list. (more…)
You would think that buying a house is stressful enough at the best of times. In our case we had a few additional complications to make it even more stressfull. (more…)
Writings from Norway 