Ausflug 38

June 27th: Stavanger, Norway

We had decided to do Stavanger on our own, so we ambled off the ship around 9:00 a.m., picked up a tourist map on the way out, and meandered the streets and byways around the waterfront area for a couple hours. That area is a shopping district, but many of the stores are boutiques set in traditional buildings and the whole area was rather quaint.

We paused at the playground outside the Petroleum Museum to try out some of the playground equipment, and then zig-zagged back past St. Peter's Church (locked up tight), and the Stavanger Cathedral (church service in progress!). I was surprised to find two separate outdoor markets, a farmers market with a concentration of flowers up near the Cathedral, and the tourist-oriented outdoor market just down the hill next to the harbor. We felt the city, and particularly the "old town" commercial section in the narrow streets on the peninsula above the dock, was quite pleasant for walking and shopping.

But the one disturbing feature to me was the regular occurrence of begging teenage girls. We encountered six in all, and every one had olive-toned skin and dark hair and used a paper cup with change in it as a begging tool. The careful spacing of these girls in the most popular tourist areas was, I am sure, no accident, and I detest the fact that someone was organizing and coercing these young women into begging. Hey Norwegian police, could you look into this and give those young girls an alternative, please?

Continuing our walk, we circled a very pretty little lake with a fountain in the middle and old, historic-looking houses around the shoreline, and then found the Stavanger bus and train station. There we saw an old but perfectly preserved steam locomotive and found nice, informative brochures on traveling in Norway. The young lady at the counter said that for an additional fee bicycles were allowed on some but not all trains, up to a limit of 5 on some of the regional trains. So bicycle tours would in fact be feasible.

Returning to the ship for lunch, I took a quick nap but then hied myself off for the afternoon, starting with the Maritime Museum just down the street from where we were docked. That was a quirky but very nice museum detailing the shipping and fishing industries. The shipbuilding industry waxed during the Great Age of Sail from 1830-1870, but then declined as iron and finally steel-hulled ships became the norm.

The fishing industry also waxed and waned but fishing continues at some level right up to the current day although it employs far fewer people than it used to. The strong point of the first floor of the museum was a plethora of ship models in the ubiquitous glass cases, but they also had a small lounge area from one of the ships built at Stavanger, as well as various bits and pieces of tackle, freight containers, and so forth.

The upper floors, however, contained full-scale reconstructions of the offices of a shipping company, including a kitchen! Other rooms represented a sail-making loft, a typical sundries store (I think!), and all of it equipped with beautiful antiques! Unfortunately, I am "mature" enough that I own and use antiques, and that almost got me in trouble. In the sundries shop there was a rack of perfectly fine black-and-white postcards featuring sailing ships common in Stavanger in the old days. It was only as I was reaching our to grab a couple and looking around for a checkout counter to pay for them, that it suddenly hit me that they were part of the display, for heaven's sake, and NOT really for sale. How embarrassing.

After perusing the Maritime Museum, I set off down the main street in the old, preserved section of Stavanger, called "Gammler Stavanger". Although a sardine-canning museum is right in the middle, most of the historically-preserved houses, ranging in size from a small fisherman's cottage to full-sized single family homes, are still private residences. Despite the fact that the buildings in the commercial "old town" part of Stavanger were various colours, almost all of these houses were painted a pure blank white.

The residents appeared to compete, however, in who could grow the most flowers in baskets, window boxes, and vases scattered around the front of each house! The result was VERY pleasant to walk along the cobblestone streets, which appeared to be closed to traffic during the day.

Continuing straight along the waterfront I passed the new Concert Hall and saw an old ship moored down at the end (which we later saw steaming out to see so it wasn't a museum piece!). At the end I curled back to town on the next street and ran into a History of Printing museum which I toured for almost an hour. It was just one large room, but the basic stages of printer from Gutenberg to the Linotype machine, to modern printing was represented by the original machines.

The young man staffing the museum offered to let me see the museum for free and even a complimentary cup of coffee, but I payed. We also talked about the main museum up past the Stavanger Cathedral which is evidently quite extensive, and two other "rich people's houses" as he put it, that were part of the museum system. So if you come to Stavanger, consider seeing some or all of those museums if you have the time.