Me in front of the old wooden warehouses of the Bryggen area of Bergen

TRAVEL guides never seem capable of capturing the real feel for a place that one intends to visit, and it was no different with Bergen, Norway, which I visited over the weekend.
I bought two books on Norway before my trip, but neither really prepared me for the stunning beauty of Bergen and the quiet friendliness of Norwegians. Yet before I could be pleasantly surprised by that Nordic country I had to endure delayed British trains which caused me and many others to nearly miss our flight from Stansted airport to Bergen.
I woke up at 6 a.m. on Friday in order to catch my 7:30 a.m. train to Leicester, where I was to change to another train that would, theoretically at least, get me to Stansted in two hours, in time for my 12:05 p.m. flight. Alas, that was not to be. Instead, just minutes before our arrival at Stansted our conductor announced that the train would be ending its journey in Cambridge because of technical problems. We were told to switch to another train on another platform. We ran to the next train and got on it in time. Then we realized we would have to switch again to yet another train. Luckily it was to be our last train, as it was going straight to Stansted.
Seated next to a group of young Norwegians who had spent the week in London, we all worriedly kept muttering to ourselves that we were going to miss our flight. At Stansted we ran up the long ramp to the check-in desk, with only minutes to spare.
“Are you Norwegian?” the young Norwegian guy who had been seated next to me asked me as we waited to check-in.
“No,” I replied.
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THAT was the short answer to a question that I could have answered at length had I not been out of breath from running up that ramp. You see, my American mother is of Norwegian descent on her father’s side. The Storksons migrated from Bergen in the early 1900s to North Dakota in the United States, and some of them later moved south to Illinois and then Missouri, where my mother grew up.
My great-grandfather, Stork Storkson, was one of many Norwegians who made the trip across the Atlantic in search of a better life, and I had always wanted to visit Bergen to see for myself what sort of place he had left behind.
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“So you are Norwegian? So are we,” said the slogan of budget airline Norwegian Airlines on the headrest in front of me. It seemed like an odd and semi-rhetorical way of stating the obviously patriotic fact that we were indeed flying on a Norwegian airline.
Since I was hungry I purchased a sandwich and soft drink for 60 kroner, or around $10. Yes, ten dollars! Norway, I had been warned, is extremely expensive, which is why the two young female students sitting next to me declined to buy anything onboard.
After telling me where to buy Norwegian music, since Bergen is the music capital of Norway, they both squealed with delight when the pilot told us that the weather was going to be good in Bergen when we landed.
There is an old joke that the weather never changes in Bergen, which is to say that it is constantly raining. Luckily for me it didn’t rain at all when I was there, and the city is always a few degrees warmer than the capital Oslo because it is on the North Sea and near the Gulf Stream, which moderates temperatures.
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