The GCW Tour, the Frozen Cruise: Norway, Part Two

On our second day in Norway we moved on to Stavanger. It's not quite as snazzy as Bergen, but it's still awfully nice -- especially the section called Gamle Stavanger (i.e., Old Stavanger).

Gamle Stavanger is 173 little white houses that were built on the waterfront in the 1800s after a) the previous working class section of Stavanger burned down,* and b) someone figured out that there was a world-wide market for salted herring, and so needed workers to process the fish and pack them into barrels. The herring industry lasted for about eighty years, at which point it was replaced by the sardine industry which lasted for about sixty more. Apparently, packing sardines was a family affair: the men washed and smoked the fish, the kids decapitated them, and the women packed them into cans. The sardine market pretty much died out in the seventies, but Gamle Stavanger is protected by the city as a historical landmark. The homes are privately owned, but the owners aren't allowed to change them.

Beyond the old neighborhood, Stavanger is Norway's fourth largest city, and while it was built on fishing, at this point it's the petroleum center of Norway as most of the companies responsible for pumping the oil out of the North Sea are headquartered in Stavanger. There's also the Petroleum Museum, which we peeked inside but didn't tour as none of us were especially interested.

But we did see a few of the tourist sites...

These swords commemorate the unification of Norway under a single king. At the time, Norway was a collection of smaller kingdoms, and one of those small kings wanted to marry one of the local princesses who was holding out for the leader of a big nation. So he spent a decade conquering his competitors and unifying the country, at which point she agreed to marry him. 

We also saw the "iron age farm," that sits on the university campus. Parts of it were restored back in the seventies so folks could see what it was like to live in Norway a thousand years ago. I can saw pretty confidently that I'm glad I wasn't living in Norway a thousand years ago...

It wasn't an official part of the tour, but we did learn two unusual facts. First, Al Gore seems to have small feet. Around the port are bronze castings of various Nobel winners' feet, including Al's. Second, it would seem English is the universal language for coffee house cliches. Unlike most countries I've visited, signs in Norway seem to be printed only in Norwegian -- except for these words of wisdom from one of the coffee shops we passed (but for the record, I disagree with their assessment)...

Finally, here are some other random sights from Stavanger...