World Cruise Day 139/152 Viking Homelands, Bergen Norway - If it's Bergen, it must be raining

Cruise day: 139/152

Ports days: 69
Sea days: 70
Countries: 23
Continents: 5
Ports: 51

Hello from Bergen, Norway.  It's 49F and raining.  Bergen is the #4 city in the world for rainy days.  It rains 240 days each year in Bergen. They only get about 88-inches of rain annually, so it doesn't rain a lot, but it does rain two out of every three days each year and today was one of those days.

See how nice and clear this photo is?

See how hazy this one is? Why?  Rain - it started pouring.

Bergen marks a big day for this trip as it means that on this journey, The Viking Star has visited its homeport of Bergen, Norway as well as its birthplace, Fincantieri's Marghera shipyard in Italy, between Fusina and Venice.  Well, we didn't actually sail to the shipyard, but we were in Fusina, so that's close enough. 

We decided to brave it and go out after the mid-morning deluge - the rain wasn't alone, it arrived with brisk winds that assisted the rain in traveling both vertically and horizontally - we waited it out

We ignored the big CITY CENTER --> sign and headed left from the ship.  There wasn't a lot to see.

We doubled back and then headed to the right from the ship, as the sign suggested, toward the city center.

Who knew we'd wind up in NYC?  There was a fair that was getting set up on the waterfront and this is one of the attractions.

Some of the famous Bryggen - the narrow, colorful houses in Bergen

Do they look straight?  No?  That's because they aren't straight.  There are odd angles all over the place.  The houses covered in sheeting are being refurbished.

There are alleys with small shops

Are you looking at me?

Bergen is shaped a little like a horseshoe around the bay.  We walked from the ship to the end of the bay and around to the other side.

There is a bustling fish market on the opposite side of the bay with just about any fresh seafood you can think of.

You can see the Viking Star in the distance on the left - that ship just nosing out in front of the Star is the Bergen Tank - a bunkering vessel that was bringing us a load of fuel

I never would have thought about coming to Bergen for Cajun & Creole food

If you look in the upper right, you can see the track for the Fløibanen funicular - a train that takes you up the hill - we watched and never saw one running

We walked around, avoiding raindrops, and took in the sights.

Rosenkrantztårnet - a 13th-century tower and one-time home to King Eric Magnusson - is now a museum

I took this photo of our Viking Star in Zadar, Croatia - look a little behind the anchor box - see those two circles with the "X" in them?

This is a close-up of those marks - it is a safety measure that indicates where propellers (or side thrusters) are located below the waterline so folks can stay clear

This is what confused me in Bergen - I saw this spray-painted on the sidewalk.  Try as I might, I could not find any propellers anywhere around there.  Weird.

We made our way back to the ship where the new passengers were starting to arrive.  It was nice to be able to skip past that line-up since we already had our stateroom keys and are all checked in.  The updated count is that we will sail with 599 passengers, meaning that there were more last-minute cancellations.  That's OK with us.  The number is changing and we'll see if we can get an accurate count once we sail tomorrow night.

We were told that for the first day, all passengers, even ones that have been on the ship, will be required to mask up when moving around the ship.  Once all the COVID test results are back in, the mask requirement will be lifted.  The daily temperature scans seem to have also disappeared.  I think that I forgot to mention way back in early April that the daily four-question health survey went away.  We will still have to do the daily saliva test.  The biggest change is that the World Cafe has reverted back to self-service.  We started the World Cruise that way but only one day into the cruise, the World Cafe flipped and staff had to serve the food to all guests.  We're OK with the change but I know that some folks would rather keep the old model where staff dished out the food.  You can't please everyone.

We went up to the Explorer's Bar and had some lemon drop martinis as we met some of the new passengers.  It will be fun seeing the 38 of us that are continuing as well as meeting new people for the next 14 days.

We popped over to the World Cafe for dinner.  It was reasonably empty.  I think that's a combination of people opting for The Restaurant, Manfredi's, and The Chef's Table for their first night or simply folks ordering room service to remain isolated until the PCR test results come in.  Either way, we enjoyed our dinner.  We opted to have the pizza chef whip us up a custom pie and it was awesome.

We have an 8:30AM excursion tomorrow, so we decided to call it an early evening.  We will be taking the included Panoramic Bergen tour tomorrow and will decide whether we want to explore more on our own after that.

Tomorrow, we're back to no masks on the ship and that will be nice.  If anyone came on the ship with COVID, the PCR test today will catch that and we assume they'll be isolated.  Of course, ten-day isolation has a much bigger impact on a 14-day cruise, so we'll see how Viking handles that if it comes up.

Until tomorrow.