Stavanger, Norway
The next stop was a short one - we docked at 7am and took off at 12:30 - which is a shame, since this was one of the nicer stops on this cruise. The town is called Stavanger - and I know that you likely just read that and you made it rhyme with ‘scavenger’… but it’s actually ‘sta-VONG-er’ or something close to that.
We had a walking tour that started in the historic wooden buildings, literally across the street from the dock, and they were lovely.
They’re residential homes now, as they were when they were built a couple hundred years ago, but then they were basically slums for dock workers. Now they are sought after and sell for around $800K.
Reminder that you can click any image and it will open fully on your screen without needing to scroll to see it all
What’s that thing outside the second-storey window? How about a closeup shot…
It’s a ‘gossip mirror’
Ladies of the house weren’t supposed to look out the Harbourside windows, lest they be subjected to foul language and the goings-on of the harbour workers. So they looked out the windows on the opposite side. But the streets are narrow and there’s not much to see unless you open the window and stick your head out - which was rude (and COLD in the winter!) so they had these mirrors that allowed them to sit behind their curtains out of view, and still be able to see down both sides of the street so that they could get all the dishy dirt on their neighbours.
From there, we headed down to the harbour again.
Interestingly, when the pavement opens up into a plaza, they install raised metal guides for blind people to navigate across the plaza and end up on the street they want. The dashes have insets in them of various sizes and the placement of them has some meaning as well, kinda like Morse code.
In the shopping district, we went down the “colourful road” which is mostly 80’s nostalgia boutiques and restaurants. It’s said that the colour scheme was inspired by the 80s cop show, ‘Miami Vice’
The shopping district is home to more lovely old buildings
I know it looks like a ghost town, but nothing in Norway opens before 10am and our tour was at 8:30. We had the place to ourselves!
The tour ended at the petroleum museum -
I’ll admit that it was really well done…
…but we bailed out before the tour was finished. Rain was coming quickly and we wanted to see more of the town before it got nasty.
We found some more lovely old wooden buildings, including one that seems to be kicked back having a rest.
Here’s a shot of some recycle bins
We’ve seen these around Norway and I never really gave them much thought… but they’re interesting because they have solar panels on the back that compress the recycling so they don’t have to be emptied as often. That’s nice, but that’s not the interesting thing. That comes when they get emptied.
Notice that they’re heavy and bolted down to those metal plates. How do they get emptied, then?
See those metal tabs with the hole at the top? That’s how… a truck comes by with a crane and hooks that hole via a remote control… Kinda like one of those claw games at a bar. Then the ENTIRE THING pulls up out of the ground, sidewalk and all, and empties into the truck. It was an unexpected “wait,,, what?” show right outside our balcony.
When we got back to the ship, Rob headed back on board and I headed up the hill to find a neat glass building I’d seen as we sailed in. I thought it might be an arts centre or museum or something.
Turns out, it’s a bank. Yawn.
On the way up there, though, I found this odd little building at the University of Stavanger
At that point, the wind had become icy and strong, so I got back on board as well.
Our cabin had a pretty good view of the old residential section… this is our cabin:
And this was our view:
Dinner was prime rib and Yorkshire pudding - not bad - but the culinary hit of the day was the rum baba cake on the buffet at lunch.
And that was it for the day. The weather got nasty just as we were heading out and we had our first bit of rough seas once we hit open water. The ship moved around a bit, but considering that we’re high up and near the front of the ship, it was surprisingly stable. No worries.