A Summer Saturday in Bergen....

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27 June 2021 - Askøy

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It was strange to get on the bus to town yesterday and have the plastic tape barrier blocking the first few seats near the driver gone. It was almost as if things were back to normal. Of course they never will be, really, but we can pretend for the next generation for whom it will just be normal. And riding town in the early afternoon it was mostly that younger generation riding along with me - kids out to meet their friends in town. My plan, on the other hand, was to find a coffee shop or a park and finish reading this week’s Economist magazine. Solitude in a crowd as it were. Keeping up with the 24 hour news cycle is exhausting for anyone, so I mostly just ignore it. The Economist gives me a nice weekly summary of the important political events. And when I say “important”, I mean those events that matter in the drafting or implementation of policy or international agreements. The politics of personal destruction, as practiced especially in the US, one does not find in these pages. Well, they do have a penchant for snarkily vilifying dictators, but such criticism is more understandable.

Having a bit of a cough from the grass pollen this time of year I resisted the temptation to occupy the newly available seats near the driver. In this undervaccinated country people can still get a bit spooked. To the reader decades hence, I should probably say that this was the tail end of the first global coronavirus pandemic. The sun was shining brightly though, and everyone seemed to be in a good mood. I was hoping that some of this glee would rub off on me - the reason I often go in to town is to be around people and feed off of their energy a bit. Feed as read by magazine on the bus.

Being that it’s Saturday and midafternoon, the bus doesn’t sync up with the boat quite right. On a weekday morning or evening the boat from Kleppestø to Bergen sentrum runs every half hour - fifteen minutes there and fifteen minutes back - but on Saturday afternoons it’s only every hour. Now I could have rode the bus all the way in, but riding the boat is, for me, a highlight of any trip to town. It’s a catamaran which speeds across the top of the water and holds several hundred passengers. Unless the weather is really bad I generally stand outside on the back of the boat enjoying the fresh air and the views across the Byfjord. Sunshine is not a thing to waste in Bergen, so plenty of craft were out on the water from serious sailors, to party yachts full of people and decked out with balloons, to the cruise ships plying the coast. The Fjordline was on its way south to Stavanger while a Hurtigruten was pulling into port from the north.

Disembarking on the Strandkai I immediately noticed how packed the town was - people seemed to be filling the streets. I was struck by the strange mixture of excitement and irritation that all these other people would be filling up the cafés I had intended to find a place to sit in. My fears were unwarranted though, as walking in the Dromedar on Torgallmenningen there were plenty of tables available. And there behind the bar was my teammate Alvaro. As he fashioned my latte we chatted about the lack of a season so far (corona rules being in the way) and his arm injury which has led him to miss practice. Actually he’s out for the season, which is bad news. A number of the Bergen Wet Sox have seen injury this year and it’s left our roster a little thin. Alvaro’s first comment was, however, “are you going to Peter’s?” Since I stay away from Facebook these days I was completely in the dark about the party that evening our teammate was throwing.

A word about about Peter. He’s Alora and Brittan’s age. When he started last season I took an immediate liking to him because his academic background was similar to my own. This party was to celebrate his successful completion of a master’s thesis in mathematics. Peter is also a spectacularly good baseball player and I’ve become a better player learning from him.

I enjoyed my latte and my Economist as the coffee shop filled up. This issue featured a section looking at the human caused extinction event currently playing out and what’s being done to mitigate it. Not a lot of good news here. People get so worked up about climate change, but once a species is gone it’s gone forever. Yes, I know Jurassic Park, de-extinction and all that seem very real, but that’s a huge and very unsure effort to recreate animals we should be worried about saving now. Looking out on our very own Byfjord, where are the seals, otters, whales, wild salmon, and a thousand other species that were here just a century or two ago? As the café started filling up I decided to walk out to Nordnes Park and pickup reading there.

I hadn’t made it a block when I heard my name being called out and turned to see Cedric carrying his 3 year old daughter toward me. He opened with the same greeting as Alvaro, “are you going to Peter’s?” This seemed to be forewritten for my day, so I might as well accept it. They were going the same direction I was, so we walked together for a while and chatted about cuisine and language and kids. His daughter definitely didn’t want to speak English, and was cutely shy. Hopefully she’ll get to cheer her dad on at some games later this summer.