This post is dedicated to the Lazy Chef café outside Forest Hill station.
Randi and I used to go for brunch at the weekend, but the last few times she’s been in Scotland.
The staff clearly believe we’ve broken up because they no longer ask how she’s doing.

We went to Norway! It was a relatively last-minute decision to spend a long Easter weekend in Bergen, but it’s such a quick hop from London that it seemed irresistible once we’d thought of it. It wouldn’t be your first choice to escape a rainy British bank holiday, since Bergen (or “Bergen?”, as the playful sign outside the airport puts it) is even more famous for rain, but as it turned out we got lucky with plenty of sun and only tiny smatterings of rain.

As a politics nerd, the joke about Scandinavian countries is that they’re all little social democratic utopias which those on the left will always reach for as the league-table-topping exemplar of what we should do. (“In Finland, all children learn quantum physics through outdoor play! In Denmark, prisoners produce award-winning plays about restorative justice! In Sweden, there are more weekend days than weekdays!”) Of course, all of these places are not mystical fantasy lands but actual real places which you can always just go and visit. But with all that said, things do seem pretty great in Norway. The country’s rich, everyone seems to be out jogging all the time, and the walls of the tram tunnels have been decorated with brightly-coloured party lights seemingly just for the hell of it. Let’s all move to Norway!

We joined a walking tour on Saturday morning to get acquainted with our new home, and benefitted from a great guide who had moved from southern Italy to Norway during a quarter-life crisis and massively confused her parents in the process. A lot of the tour focused on Bryggen – the area of Bergen where colourful warehouses owned by the medieval Hanseatic League sit up against the harbour – and it felt like a good sequel to all of the prime Hanseatic League content from our walking tour of Gotland in Sweden last year.

For more recent Bergen history, we also visited the (free!) Bergenhus Fortress Museum which focuses on the city’s local resistance movement against Nazi occupation between 1940 and 1945. It’s obviously very moving to see the faces of ordinary people who were arrested and sent to camps, and you wonder – in a place as relatively small as this – how many local visitors would still be able to recognise family members in these photographs.

The most accessible mountain in Bergen is Fløyen, which can be reached via a couple of different walking routes starting just behind the city centre. There’s also a funicular, which runs frequently, although the first time we just chose to walk through the fairytale-esque mossy green forest. Near the top sits some kind of nursery/daycare centre, which seems excessively idyllic, while the summit itself is a busy and popular gathering place with your standard café, playground and troll garden. (There are lot of trolls in Norway.)

We waited until Monday to do our proper hike from Fløyen: the 13km Vidden Trail, which runs along the mountain plateau to neighbouring Mount Ulriken. We weren’t 100% sure whether we were going to be able to do this, since it’s only ‘recommended’ to tourists between May and October, and our walking tour guide (who self-described as absolutely not a hiker) wasn’t encouraging. Fortunately, we got talking to a solo Norwegian tourist from Oslo at dinner one night and he confirmed that all of the ice on the route had indeed melted, leaving only snow, and that it was perfectly manageable in hiking boots. Thank you, random Norwegian man!

After some debate, we also chose to walk from Fløyen to Ulriken rather than the other way around. This meant going slightly more uphill than downhill, but to be honest – on a sunny day with no wind! – it didn’t make a great deal of difference as there isn’t a lot of elevation change either way. As always, the hike proved to be the highlight of the whole trip, even though towards the end I was grumbling about the combination of snow and rocks which result in some very, very tired legs. It’s worth noting that although Bergen itself is full of English-speaking tourists, we passed almost no-one on the Vidden Trail speaking English. Instead, they all seemed to be Scandinavians making everything look absurdly easy: jogging up and down rockfaces without a care in the world. We got to Ulriken in a perfectly reasonable time, but I don’t normally feel like I’m part of the absolute slowest group on a hike!

From Ulriken we took the cable car back down to Bergen and headed to a Thai restaurant for a much-needed warm dinner. In general, as you’d expect, eating out in Norway is incredibly expensive – with variable results – but the three places which really made me happy were:

1. Fjellskaal, an amazing fish restaurant by the harbour where everything tasted delicious. I had the smoked salmon starter and the salty pickled herring Spekesild for main, but Randi’s soup was also incredible. This was also where the helpful Norwegian hiker encouraged us to pursue our Vidden dreams.
2. Trekroneren, the internationally-renowned Bergen hot dog stand. One prime reason to move to Bergen is so that I can complete my exhaustive journey through the menu.
3. The Godt Brød bakery chain, which is everywhere, meaning that tasty cardamom buns are also everywhere.

We also spent a fair amount of time just chilling in our delightful Airbnb, which was within easy walking distance of everything and made impressively efficient use of all available space. Bizarrely, I stumbled across a channel devoted exclusively to classic episodes of Robot Wars, so I had the unexpected joy of reliving great childhood moments like Panic Attack flipping Matilda, competitors messing up the pinball challenge, and a hyped-up crowd chanting PIT PIT PIT. We also used this opportunity to finish Season 2 of the The Bear, which was great, so now Randi and I are in the unusual situation of being fully up-to-date and just waiting for the next season to come out like everybody else!

On our last day we had time for one final, beautiful walk from Mount Fløyen – much more gentle, no rocks or snow this time – before grabbing a hot chocolate from Fjåk and realising that, oh no, they actually have a huge range of different hot chocolate options and we’ll just have to come back to Norway again to try more. And then, sadly, it was time to come back home. Bergen was such a perfect Easter break and just what we both needed during a busy time at work. In short: highly recommended if you’re looking for astounding views and tasty fish.

Finally, I popped over to Carolyn’s yesterday for Austin’s Peppa Pig-themed birthday party – happy birthday Austin! – which was really lovely. On the way I listened to a lot of silly AI-generated music courtesy of Suno, which is finally a generative AI tool which seems actually useful to me personally. And yes, I define “actually useful” as the ability to instantly produce catchy tunes on very niche topics – like some 90s Europop about the evils of Daylight Savings Time, a Broadway ode to the Waterlink Way or an upbeat rap anthem for our Ops team at work – because deep down all I’ve ever wanted is to live inside that musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer…

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