Bergen is like Seattle only more so

Bergen is like Seattle only more so

Flying into Bergen

Bergen is like Seattle in the sense that there are mountains and water everywhere, but not like Seattle in the sense that the beer costs something like $15/per glass and there was only one Starbucks that I saw after walking around the city for hours.  Ok, technically several of those hours were spent walking up a mountain, so no Starbucks there, but still… despite its global branding, Starbucks hasn’t made much of a dent in the Scandinavian market as near as I can tell.  I will interpret this to mean that even when it comes to globalized corporate visibility, Americans tend to think we are more important than we really are.

This looks a lot like the Pacific Northwest to me

But before I get derailed by a rant about global capitalism, let me explain why I ended up in Bergen.

I headed to Bergen to meet a guy named Jon about possibly racing with him in June on his sailboat. The Internet is a marvelous thing and one site that exists is called Find a Crew, which is an international website for sailors who have boats and are looking for crew and for people who want to be crew.  Jon wanted crew and I wanted to be crew and the dates for what he needed fit perfectly with my free time.

The race Jon is registered to do the Bergen to Shetland to Bergen race, a 194 nautical mile race (I think one way, so almost 400 nautical miles) across the North Sea.  This seemed like a good idea to me.

Jon said he and his crew were enthusiastic amateurs, that they had done this race last year and enjoyed it very much, and he was looking to put together a crew for this year as well.  I told him what my sailing experience was and he invited me to come sail with them on a short day race to see if it might work out for both of us.  The race was on a Thursday, which was a national Norwegian holiday.  Norway celebrates Ascension Day despite the fact they are not particularly religious as a people.

Hence my trip to Norway to couchsurf/sail with a complete stranger I met on the Internet. 

I figured the worst that could happen is that I booked a flight to Bergen, he decided he didn’t need me to race after all, and I spent a couple days seeing a really cool city. 

Of course, I was super worried that he would think I was a bad sailor or that I was not experienced enough and possibly test my sailing skills in some way and I would fail the test or do something incredibly stupid.  I figured to the degree I could practice on the plane to Norway, I should do this.  The only thing I could think to practice on the plane that was sailing related was tying bowlines, which I did with my camera cord. 

Then I closed my eyes and thought about how to gybe a spinnaker from the bow since it involves thinking backwards and given my issues with all directional skills could be an issue if for some reason I was assigned the bow position.  However, this just made me sleepy so I went back to the bowlines. 

 Upon arrival, I took the bus into the city and spent the day wandering around, which was only made slightly tiring by the fact I had a backpack filled with all the warm clothing I brought and my computer which I justified bringing because if the sailing thing didn’t work out, I’d need to occupy my time somehow. 

Close to the fish market but I forgot to take a picture of that.

Sort of strange design... part of the World Heritage site they are rebuilding using "authentic tools"

I had been in Bergen once before, 14 years ago to be exact, and my only remaining memory of the city was trying to find rock climbing on the mountain right by the city center.   

Looking up towards the mountain

On that trip we wandered around the mountain but never found the climbing.  I decided it would make sense to repeat that experience, except instead of lugging climbing gear I just lugged my sailing gear and computer up the mountain.   

I found one moss-covered route, but nothing else.

After coming off the mountain, I found a really cool bookstore/coffee shop and read while I waited for a call from Jon and hoped he wasn’t going to decide I was too much trouble and just ignore me, which I always assume as a starting point for all interactions with others.

I don't think they were for sale

Also, Jon had foreshadowed the possible lack of a race in his last email. The boat’s engine had been acting up and a screw that held the alternator on had fallen off.  The race on Thursday was contingent upon the motor working again and the alternator being affixed properly. I’ve sailed enough to know sailing is always contingent on everything working and since things break all the time, sometimes you just don’t get to sail. 

However, despite the caveats and fears, it seemed as if everything was going to work out.

I met Jon and his girlfriend Monica that evening and got to find out a bit more about them and the race.  They are both doctors that work at the medical school in Bergen.  Jon is originally from Washington State but came to Bergen for University and never went home.  Monica is from Bergen.  She also plays the cello semi-professionally (or perhaps professionally since she was very modest) in different musical venues around town and so is both brilliant and multi-talented.  One of the reasons they are looking for crew, it turns out, is that she is spending the week of the Bergen-Shetland race at a music school playing and performing, which indicates a lean towards the professional.  

After some pizza we went out to Jon’s house in a suburb of Bergen close to where Edward Grieg used to have a house evidently.  Edward Grieg is one of Bergen’s more famous people.  I’m not sure if that is a commentary on fame in Norway or not. 

Along the way to Jon’s house I kept getting excited every time I saw a Tesla until Jon informed me that there were more Tesla’s sold in Bergen than pretty much anywhere else in the world.  Norwegians have good taste in cars and evidently excellent tax breaks for electric ones.  This initiated a discussion of the carbon footprint for a Tesla versus a regular car once you factor in how your energy is created.  Norway, it turns out, consumes primarily hydroelectric energy, which is fine except when they have to import energy fueled by coal, which is not.  Still, given that much of their electricity is hydro, they are doing better than most.  We will ignore their vast oil reserves for the moment.  Being they are also a democratic socialist state, with free medical care and college tuition among other things, they are using their oil money for the good of the people more generally.

Anyway, I tried not to be excited every time I saw a Tesla after that. 

Given Jon is a medical doctor in a socialist country and from the U.S., I also spent some amount of time asking questions about comparative medical systems.  It might come as no surprise that he is for the Norwegian way.   

In terms of sailing, he grew up sailing in Washington and bought this boat about 3 years ago.  He and his crew do the weekly races and the local regattas.  The race we did was around an island and I can’t be more specific than that because there are tons of islands here and I didn’t at any point know where we were on land or at sea.  It was called the Huftarøy Rundt so if I had to guess, I’d guess the island’s name was Huftarøy.  Call it process of deduction.

After pizza and getting food for the boat and stuff, while it still seemed early, that was just a factor of how far north we were.  I had been up since 4:00 am to get the train and the plane and the bus to Bergen and after meeting and talking with Monica and Jon and getting everything organized, it wasn’t until 11:30 that I finally went to bed, and it was still light outside.

The next morning after breakfast, Monica went to get her brother Bjorn, which is probably not spelled that way, but I could only remember his name if I thought of the Baby Bjorn products, so that is how I am spelling it.  I went with Jon to pick up another of his crew whose name I cannot spell or pronounce.  I learned while trying to pronounce his name that evidently, like in Sweden, there are regional dialects that do different things to pronunciation.  I’d imagine it is like speaking with a Southern accent, but for Swedish and Norwegian.

Then we went on a really windy trip to a marina. Pretty much everyone but the U.S. uses roundabouts for intersections instead of signage. Another factor in American exceptionalism is our grid structure for cities.  This has a lot to do with car culture and a lack of a significant medieval experience, I know.  However, it contributes to my sense of disorientation since you never really know when you are getting off the roundabout.

Jon’s Crown 39 named Kelso is docked at this very beautiful marina whose location I could not ever find again on my own.  People from Washington will recognize the name of the boat – which also turns out to be where Jon is from. 

Kelso, not the city

The marina

When we arrived at the marina, rigging the boat didn’t take much time. The motor was key because we had to motor out to the start, which was about 30 minutes away past marvelous scenery of trees and granite.  Fortunately, it favored us with starting and moving the boat forwards.  At this point there was no wind so having the motor was essential.

It is in Norwegian

Not too much wind

 

There ended up being five of us for the crew that day and while I am used to a hierarchical sailing structure with strict, if sometimes implied, rules about who can do what and who can touch what, this was a much more fluid and relaxed way to race.  Also, most of it was happening in Norwegian so I didn’t necessarily know what was going on.  I figured if they wanted me to do something they would say it loudly in Norwegian or tell me in English.  They were super accommodating of my Norwegian language deficiency. 

We could not have asked for a more beautiful day and the race itself included somewhere around 20-30 boats which is more than I’ve ever seen in a Hawaii race with the exception of the Lahaina return.  Our start was not optimal because we had timed our approach a bit badly and some of our tacks took a long time because we had not yet figured out the best system and the grinding was difficult.   

This was the start before ours....

That being said, the wind was light but steady and we were holding our own until we rounded the back of the Island and hit the windless part.  The first part of the fleet seemed to have gotten through this part while there was wind while the rest of us quickly fell behind. 

Before the wind died

We even were able to hike a bit

 At some point coffee was made and we ate sandwiches.   

There was lots of helpful and informative information provided to me about Norway and so I learned about the salmon farms (we passed some very close) 

Fish farm from the plane -- we got close enough to see them jumping

and that Bergen is called the city surrounded by 7 mountains because there are 7 different mountains you can climb and you can even do them all in a single go, which 20,000 Bergenites do every year in this one celebratory hike.  They are a very fit people.   

I won’t go into the details of the race but basically aside from getting stuck without wind, it was a great day of sailing and super nice people who were incredibly accommodating and friendly and would talk in English when they figured I needed to know what was going on.  Fortunately, I did not break anything, fall overboard, or do anything super wrong.  Also, nobody made fun of my bowline knots or said the tails were too long or short or the wrong direction, even though they were probably all of these things.  Still, I’m glad I practiced those.

I don’t actually know how we did in the race, though we did beat at least one boat and so didn’t come in last.   All the boats come from all over and just disperse afterwards and while there was a party somewhere and evidently they were serving soup and sausage there, we didn’t go to it.  Also, there were still lots of boats to finish and then corrected time to figure out so it was going to take many more hours. Jon’s boat has a pretty good rating because it is mostly a cruiser and not a racer, but that being said, there were lots of boats a really long way in front of us. 

Our crew dispersed with handshakes all around.  It would appear that Norwegians, like Swedes are not into hugging, which makes me incredibly happy and relieved. In fact, the only hug I’ve received so far is from a German – go figure they would be the emotionally expressive culture around here.

Monica took her brother home and went home to prepare for work.  Jon took me to the hotel I had booked, mostly because I figured I needed an exit strategy if things went horribly wrong, but we made plans to meet up later to hear some music.  I think he was being a super nice host that wanted me to see a more complete picture of Bergen, which I appreciate immensely.  The rest of the crew went home to continue celebrating Ascension Day in whatever ways you celebrate that.

By the time I had showered I was so hungry that my decision-making abilities were impaired.  I left the hotel and went into the first place selling food I could find.  I tried to order a chicken kebab by pointing at the picture of a chicken kebab on their wall menu.  Instead I got ½ a deep fried chicken and french fries.  Since I was really hungry and not too picky about what I eat, I had deep fried chicken for dinner. 

Jon and I met in the city center and went to one of the venues part of the International music festival that just so happened to be going on in Bergen that week.   Things were said in Norwegian that ultimately meant we got in for free, but I was just following along wide eyed and helpless and full of my deep fried chicken.  We did buy $15 beers.  Jon says that the high cost of beers does not function as a deterrent to drinking, which is an interesting lesson for something, I’m not sure what.    

We listened to the bands until the last one, which was just so fantastic that dancing had to be done.  So the night ended in a truly global experience dancing to a Danish/Mali band in Bergen, Norway.

As I walked back to the hotel at 11:30 the sun was setting I just couldn’t think how a day could get better than this. 

Plus I was deemed sufficiently satisfactory as a sailor that it looks like I’m heading back to Bergen later in June to race the Bergen-Shetland race. 

Now I just have to worry about what to wear.