I was up at four again, and went down to the lounge to do travel notes, read up on Bergen, and spend a bit of time watching CNN with the volume turned down low. Important news: the PAN candidate won the Mexican presidential election, and a bookstore in Virginia accidentally put the fourth Harry Potter book out a week early.
I went back to the room at six and began waking everyone up. We packed up the last few things, took the luggage down to the lobby, and checked out about a quarter to seven. We were told that the breakfast room was open, which we thought gained us some time, but it was almost entirely eaten up by a tour group of seniors who clogged the buffet lines. We made Nutella (in Norway, Sjokonott) sandwiches for the kids and packed them away in Ziplocs, since they weren't going to have time to eat a full breakfast, and at seven-fifteen we left for the train station.
We arrived, found our platform, and waited for the train to pull in. N agonized over whether to board early or late, when to seek out the conductor to try to get our seats switched to nonsmoking. I was pessimistic, and had prepared the kids to sit in a smoky atmosphere all the way, with occasional breathing breaks in the corridors.
The train was late, and the announcements promised more information soon, but never delivered. While we waited, we told the kids stories of great rail disasters of ours. There was the time in China, travelling from Lanzhou to Xining, when we were assigned seats in car 11. We walked down the train, past cars 9, 10, 12...? Car 11 was not there. "Oh, it's broken, sit wherever you want," the conductor said when we located him. Of course, the train was sold out, and it was only because an employee travelling free of charge squeezed over that we could manage to get a bit of rest for the four-hour ride.
I should not have told that story, because when the train arrived, we walked down looking for car 447, past 444, 445, 446... and that was the end of the train. I heard cries of dismay from other English-speaking tourists who had also booked late. "We better get on 446," N said. "No, everyone is doing that," I said. "I'll find the conductor."
When I did, he didn't quite say "It's broken, sit wherever you want," but it amounted to about the same thing. I ran back, grabbed our luggage, and we hustled over to the 444/445 doorway. N noticed four seats together in 445, and we went down and sat in them, expected to be booted out at any minute. But the train started, and though people came past us from 446 trolling for seats, none of them held tickets for ours.
"Well, at least it's nonsmoking," A said, and she was right. What's more, when smokers from other parts of the train came down looking for the smoking cars, there were none -- 447 was to have been the only one. I hadn't thought about all the occasional smokers rotating through. We were apprehensive at every stop, but no one ever claimed our seats -- who could have reserved them? -- and eventually we relaxed.
The first part of the trip was forested and hilly, though we were clearly passing through habited country. Gradually the hills got higher, and we passed along lakes, rivers parallelling the track, and through tunnels, emerging along the sides of deep valleys dotted with cheerful houses. As we climbed, the trees grew sparser, and at some point the remnants of snow fields started to appear. Through an exceptionally long tunnel, and then the snow began to dominate.
Through this, the kids watched when something particularly striking appeared, or they read, did crosswords, played with small toys, or napped. There was nothing on the trip that they had not basically seen north of Superior or in the Canadian Rockies, but it was pleasant nonetheless. At the highest point, the ground was nearly all covered with snow, and the streams were white with rushing water. Many of the passengers got off at Myrdal, clearly intending to take the Norway in a Nutshell tour that was part of our conference expedition later in the week. It wasn't until after that that the snacks trolley came through, having been prevented earlier from moving by the unlucky 447ers sitting in the vestibules. We were fine with our purloined sandwiches, dried fruit and nuts brought from home, and bottle of Oslo tap water.
The green reappeared, and we skirted a long, narrow fjord before plunging through more tunnels and past a great suspension bridge before making the final descent into Bergen. We arrived at about ten minutes to three, twenty minutes late. The kids started complaining in anticipation of a long walk, but we walked out the right door of the station and the Grand Hotel Terminus, true to its name, was right across the street.
These were fancier digs than Norrona. At one point this hotel was the stop of choice for Victorian English; then it became a Lutheran temperance hotel for a few decades, before being refurbished to try to regain past glory. It still seemed somewhat faded, but had enough glass, brass, and dark wood to seriously impress the kids. Even more impressive was the upright piano sitting in the corridor past the conference registration, clearly a sign of more practice opportunities.
We got our room keys, checked in to receive our conference packets (and to meet the organizers, who had been only e-mail correspondents up to this point), greeted our co-author Andrzej (who Z had been asking about since we arrived in Norway) and went up to our sixth-floor room by elevator. The room was almost twice the size of the one at the Norrona, with a couple of extra chairs, a sofa whose seat did a sort of spinning trick to become a bed, a folding bed for Z, and a bathroom with a real tub. It overlooked the side of the train station; we could see the northernmost platform. We were paying the conference rate of NOK 900 plus an extra hundred for the children; normally this room would have cost three to five hundred more than that.
N quickly unpacked into the wire-frame baskets in the closet, and we put together a daypack and went out to see a bit of the town. We had been told that it rained more than 200 days in a typical year, and had packed Gore-Tex parkas as well as umbrellas. I had been dissuaded by N, not easily, from bringing our waterproof Vasque boots. But it was sunny, and a perfect twenty degrees outside.
We walked through a short pedestrian stretch, along narrow sidewalks lining roads with periodic cars, and in about five minutes found ourselves at the centre of town, where a broad pedestrian plaza busy with people met the harbour and a fish market with many covered stalls. On closer inspection they proved to be rather touristy, offering premade sandwiches, bottles of caviar packed for export, and lots of English signs. But there was lots of raw seafood as well, though I didn't look too closely, lacking a kitchen.
The minimal lunch had left the kids hungry, so we were looking for a snack, and popped into a bakery. All they had were a couple of loaves of multigrain bread and the same skillingsboler, the spiral rolls we had eaten in Oslo. These were even worse -- "bread machine dough," N said contemptuously. (We eat machine-made bread every weekday, but are under no illusions about it being anything but a major compromise.) This may have convinced the kids to give up on bakeries until we changed countries.
We walked back to the hotel, showered, and relaxed for a bit before joining the other conference attendees in the lobby for a group walk to the opening reception. On our way we walked through the fish market area; the stalls, active only an hour before, had been completely dismantled and moved away, and the stone floor washed. The reception was held in Schotstuene (there's a slash through that o -- as is my custom, I'm leaving all diacritical marks and special characters out of these notes, you can look up the proper spellings in a guidebook if you insist on them), a historic assembly hall just north of the harbour where the Hanseatic merchant workers who controlled the harbour trade here for several hundred years would meet. "Hall" is perhaps an exaggeration; it was two low-ceilinged dark rooms. In typical European conference fashion, there was a stuffy speech by some local dignitary before we got to dig into the modest buffet, which contained -- can you guess? -- shrimp, smoked salmon, gravlax, and crayfish. Oh, and some sliced meats, bread, and fruit. "It's probably good that we're soon going to be sick of things that are so expensive back home," N said philosophically. There was also German Riesling to drink -- a good thing, because given the price of alcohol in Scandinavia (half a litre of beer was about NOK 50) I wasn't going to have any unless it was given to me.
We sat at wooden tables, chatted with a few attendees, but mostly kept the kids furnished with food. There was another speech, a little more lively, by one of the regular museum guides, and shortly afterwards things broke up. It was only about seven, and one of the organizers suggested that we walk up into the residential section that rose steeply just to the north, where he lived, because there were playgrounds for the kids.
We were glad for his advice, because not only were there play structures dotted here and there on bits of land, but the narrow lanes, switchbacks, stairways, and wooden-front houses were most interesting. It seemed an altogether family-friendly neighbourhood even though it was just minutes from the touristic centre of town. We reached a fairly large park with a kinetic water sculpture and some teeter-totters and spring toys to amuse the kids, and with difficulty extracted them fifteen minutes later, working our way east and gradually down the hill again to regain the hotel and call it a night.