Museum Hopper

Jason and I dashed (literally ran) into the Bryggen Museum to avoid the downpour!  The Bryggen Museum is right next to the UNESCO Heritage Site row houses.  It is about the history of the row houses and the Bergen area. The bottom floor is the permanent exhibit.  Like most major towns, Bergen had a number of major fires.  Each time, the town rebuilt on top of the remains of the previous one, so Bergen today is ~6 feet higher than the earlier settlements.  Given this, the Bergen museum, encloses some of the earlier foundations which the rebuilds had covered.  They also had a number of artifacts that had been discovered like shoes and tools.   The upper floor was an exhibit focused on "Great Fire of 1916."  It started as when a few storage workers lit a candle to see in the dark, but unfortunately, it caught spark on the goods in the warehouse.  The Bergen city government took advantage of this horrible misfortune to redesign Bergen into t...

Jason and I visited this tower while we were in Bergen over our Norwegian cruise.  I have to say I was extremely disappointed.  This is the first "C" I have given out in a while!   First of all, it was not cheap to get in (then again what in Norway is cheap?), so we figured why not?  The description stated there was a look out, so we thought we could see the building and get a view of the city at the same time.   The rooms in the tower were close to empty, but did have descriptions on the wall as to what each room's purpose was.  The rooms were quite stark (since this was from the 1500s) with plain walls and wooden floors.  We did not even take any pictures! Much to our surprise, we did not have a viewing platform!  All of the windows were closed; most of which were leaded glass and obscured anything outside. Overall, it was just a pretty big disappointment.    Time in tower: 40 minutes Times visited: 1 Overall: C