Day Nine: Ålesund
Aug. 1st, 2008 04:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tiger_spotOur legs were tired out (and it was raining), so we decided to spend today mostly museum-going. C & C went off to the aquarium, and the rest of us bought 3-museum passes at the tourist office. We were in fact the first people to purchase the 3-museum passes, and nobody at the museums quite knew what to do with us.
Our first stop was the Ålesund museum, which includes exhibits about the history of the town (lots of fishing and trading; burnt down in 1904; rebuilt in Art Deco style in, by law, stone this time), models of boats, replicas of old offices (photographer, dentist, barber, and hatmaker's window), a lifeboat that crossed the Atlantic, some stuffed seals, and assorted WWII relics including a great many radios.
Stop 2 was the fishing museum, where you can learn more than you ever wanted to know about cod liver oil extraction, how to make a barrel, all kinds of scary things about fish drying and shipping procedures (they don't throw out the fish that goes bad, they just label it "sour"), and what a lot of salt cod in one small ex-warehouse smells like.
Then we went back to the ship for lunch. Mom was tired and stayed in with her book while Dad, Andrés, and I went to try to work out the buses to get to the third museum, which was about 5 km out of town. We failed. So we tried to walk, only to discover that about halfway there the road becomes a freeway along which foot traffic is not allowed, so, dejected and weary, we staggered back to the ship on our bloody stumps. (Actually, Dad and Andrés went and got postcards. I was pretty much in bloody-stump territory, though.) It may have been for the best, though; looking through the brochures later, it was unclear whether one part of the museum was even open that day, and the other would have closed at 3:00, which is about when we were trying to get out there.
The evening's entertainment was The Wonders of Charles Bach, a decent little magic show.
Our first stop was the Ålesund museum, which includes exhibits about the history of the town (lots of fishing and trading; burnt down in 1904; rebuilt in Art Deco style in, by law, stone this time), models of boats, replicas of old offices (photographer, dentist, barber, and hatmaker's window), a lifeboat that crossed the Atlantic, some stuffed seals, and assorted WWII relics including a great many radios.
Stop 2 was the fishing museum, where you can learn more than you ever wanted to know about cod liver oil extraction, how to make a barrel, all kinds of scary things about fish drying and shipping procedures (they don't throw out the fish that goes bad, they just label it "sour"), and what a lot of salt cod in one small ex-warehouse smells like.
Then we went back to the ship for lunch. Mom was tired and stayed in with her book while Dad, Andrés, and I went to try to work out the buses to get to the third museum, which was about 5 km out of town. We failed. So we tried to walk, only to discover that about halfway there the road becomes a freeway along which foot traffic is not allowed, so, dejected and weary, we staggered back to the ship on our bloody stumps. (Actually, Dad and Andrés went and got postcards. I was pretty much in bloody-stump territory, though.) It may have been for the best, though; looking through the brochures later, it was unclear whether one part of the museum was even open that day, and the other would have closed at 3:00, which is about when we were trying to get out there.
The evening's entertainment was The Wonders of Charles Bach, a decent little magic show.
