Bergen 1.0 and Back Again

As much of today's time was spent on a train/bus/train/bus, I'm going to merge yesterday's and today's posts together. Yesterday ended up being the most (and only) sunny day in Norway, and boy did I spend it right!  I spent most of the day hiking up Mount Floyen near Bergen.  The view was wonderful - the trail was quite steep, so I just kept going up and up until the whole city lay spread out before me.

I continued on up the mountain, and came to a brilliant lake, Skomakerdiket.  The sun was warm and a nice breeze kept the mosquitoes at bay, so I sunned myself on a rock for a while until clouds began rolling in later in the afternoon.  At that point, I figured I should head down lest I be caught in a shower on the mountain.  I got back to town at about 4:00, and decided that I was tired of subsisting on sautéed garlic and rice.  After looking through my finances, it seemed I had a little too much Norwegian cash, so I decided to treat myself to some Norwegian-style pizza.  It was pretty good, and between pieces I read a little more Kant.

I'm not sure I'm buying the Kantian Kool-aid.  He starts out his analysis by claiming that our understanding of time and space exists a priori, declaring that without an inherent mental model of how time and space work, we would not be able to discern the passage of time or the spatial relationships of objects we see.  I'm not really sure what justification he has for arguing this.  Presumably, we experience the phenomenon of time merely as it is, and have attributed that experience to an internal model of time that is derived from experience.  I would imagine we do the same with space.  In the same way we noticed a specific difference between the sky and the grass, and declared that difference as "color", I would imagine we noticed a different distinction between the two and declared that difference as "distance" (a manifestation of space).

But that's just my intuition.

Anyway, following dinner, I wandered around Bergen.  It's nice enough, and enjoyable to walk through.  It's not Denmark, though.  I think that I may visit Norway (Norwegia?) in the future, but primarily for physical activity - I haven't found its culture all that engaging.

The next day, I hopped back on a train to Oslo, which had to switch to a bus, then back to a train, then back to a bus, all to deal with infrastructure problems.  Oslo Central Station is currently under construction, so all inter-city trains are bus-first.  It's a rather sorry state of affairs, though to their credit they are doing a fairly good job of making sure everything runs on time.

After arriving back in Oslo, I desperately needed to do some laundry, so I spent most of the afternoon taking care of that.  As an aside, it's worth mentioning that simple tasks such as laundry become rocket science once a foreign language is involved.

Despite not having the budget to do so, I noticed that I had 250 Norwegian kr that I needed to spend before leaving the country, so I resigned myself to eating out again.  Apparently, Oslo is famous for its Indian food (I told you I saw a lot of Indians!), so I tracked down a good restaurant nearby and had a tasty dinner of chicken curry.  Afterwards, I headed down to the walking district for some Norwegian ice cream, leaving about 50 kr for purchasing a large breakfast tomorrow.

I'll be more careful about withdrawing Swedish cash, so I don't run into the same problem at the end of the Swedish leg of the trip.  I didn't have to worry about it with Denmark, because I'm spending a night or two in Copenhagen before I fly out, so that will give me a chance to spend any leftover Danish kr.  That's about all I have to report from the last two days, and I need to get to bed for an early bus/train out of Oslo tomorrow.  My final impression of Norway is that it was an interesting and worthwhile experience, but it didn't capture my heart the way Denmark did.

Brian out.