Bergen, Norway: Hanseatic League, Music, & Lighthearted Lutherans

 

It became too suddenly the last day of our family cruise... becoming time for our goodbyes to Bill & Mark as they left the boat to fly back to Minnesota via Iceland.  This has been great time for the six of us... especially for Mark. He was the beginning & driving inspiration for us all!

Thank you, Markoos [a playful family nickname]!

 

  

 

 In Bergen, we visited a Lutheran church with a lively happy vibe & rainbow luminosity...

...with stalls walling-in the pews with gates... a rather severe mix of values, it seems to me, if still handsome.

 

But, I did love such mix as the sweetly crafted angels hanging around the alter. 

  

 Might I have I found this year's holiday card?

 

 Mark became a naturally close mimic... 

 

 

 

A gazebo decorates a park like a band-shell...  

 

 

 However, Edvard Grieg is the nation's musical hero.

A composer I have appreciated & loved since high school when I bought a vinyl album of the neglected Broadway show The Song Of Norway. 

Bergen is one of the cities of the Hanseatic League, a medieval trade association between the ports of the Baltic & North Seas between the 13th & 17th centuries, rising to economic & political power.

  We took this as another of the history lessons as part of our cruise. These buildings are being refurbished yet again... being wood, they have burned & been rebuilt several times over the centuries. 

 

These are the houses whose gables are seen in the photos I made from the boat as we came into the port which were historically the businesses & homes of the Hanseatic merchants. One is now a museum & another is a demonstration of the architectural conservation of the neighborhood, but most are shops for the tourist trade...  business continues to be newly lively, even as the herring trade is no longer so vital. 

 

 This was my single shopping spree of the cruise. I'd been looking for a gift for Momo, and found a scarf of strong color based on a fragment of salvaged door frame, in one of these antique buildings. 

 

 ... It's rich & sassy-soft like her... 

 She's been busily working on the complicated changes happening in our two studios as the GRB Bells business gradually changes location.

 

  

 We, as well as Alice & John, stayed on in Bergen, with separate plans & hotels, but desiring a dinner double-date to debrief & take our farewells. 

We elder siblings celebrated a year & half's successful strategic planning for this cruise. We shared a sweet evening!

 

Midday the four of us boarded the slick, fun & functional funicular going up the mountain, which we'd  seen from the port... 

 The translucent tube left from a cleft in the rock climbing smoothly into the sky.

Bringing us into a panorama around the boat. A fitting place for a farewell to Viking Saturn... We appreciate your finesse! 

 

   This view shows the tower yet higher up... that being the hike Stephen & Bill made the day before.

 

 We took a bit of the walk up toward along the trail beginning their hike, discovering beds of very lush moss pillows even more verdant than I've seen our own Northwest forests... this being a more "eastern northern European northwest" version. 

 

Norway is obviously another adventure needing larger future than our time to even begin to explore this taste of now... much less digest it.

 

 

 A rich version of land after a sea adventure... 

 

Stephen & I, had yet another day before following Alice & John because we wanted to visit Troldhaugen, Edvard Grieg's home. [See a future post...]

 ***

 Now I'll share another bit of infrastructure in the city park which impressed me... these simple finials gracing hundreds of feet of quiet, elegantly handsome garden railing.       

Scotland, Northern Islands...

 

It seems useful [most of all to me!] to review this map of our ship's route as I continue to grok all the parts piled-up into my still muddled memories of this entire piece of travel.  As I push to finish blogging about it before we leave on the next trip I wonder idly about the sense & more-so of any sensibility of moving around the planet at our current pace. We have become a little manic in using the time we have left with stamina & health enough to survive into a proper dotage. I'm looking forward to a more creative spell of working & creating visually as well as verbally. I want to draw as well as playing with words. That's my better dream of "retirement"... It will come...

I remember from grade school, the apocryphal story about Robert the Bruce taking a lesson on fighting for the Scottish independence... from a persistent spider who kept patiently rebuilding its web.  This sculpture celebrates the laurels of such patience.

 

 

We sailed north to stop on the Orkney Islands, deeper into the historical mix of the cultures of the North Sea: Vikings, Norse, Scottish... touching Britannia. Looking at the map one sees the zig-zag which, after cruising down the east coast to Edinburgh & Aberdeen, we go back even farther north to Shetland Island before ending the cruise in Bergen, Norway... full-to-exploding with history to begin digesting.  

 

 So, since they are also close in my photo file, I share a photo from one of our tour bus stops to meet some of those gentle Shetland ponies... but I also enjoyed the herds of sheep as being more useful for their wool, which I would have enjoyed, shopping for the flat hat I'm wanting... if we'd had more time. [Ah... that complaint again about the rushed cruise schedule!] 

Look at the serenity of that view toward the sea!

Such a house seems part of a romantically desolate novel

 

We found a great museum in Shetland with rich exhibits of objects fascinating to my interest in kitchen

& more specially in jewelry. A good collection of a basic pin called a fibula, which is a beautifully simple design, also inviting complicated decoration. It predates Rome where it was functional with togas & became essential with Scottish kilts. It is a concept I long hoped to use as inspiration for a GRB design, but I've satisfied myself by having an enameled antique Victorian version which I've happily worn, sometimes to clasp a tie. 

I enjoyed seeing the Celtic concepts I have so long used in my own ways.

There was even an ancient bell!

Mark did indeed get to see the Scottish castles which were his initial request to see, but we'd seen numerous better ones before braving the Fringe Festival crowds below our steep climb up to the walls of Edinburgh Castle on the hot day we were there. Eventually our need for lunch & a beer enticed the the three of us brothers to cool-off in a happy pub upstairs above the street. 

***

As I've been doing, I enjoy sharing bits of functional detail which would be casually overlooked but which captivate my eyes, like this handsome cast concrete balustrade...  

Or a more utilitarian pipe railing with cast iron finials, made more remarkable for being boldly colored...
Then a mat designed for traction as we returned to the boat...

Cruise To Norway... a romance of 30 years...

Stephen & I woke quite early together deciding to make a little private adventure of the morning as we cruised into & up the fjord into the home port of the Viking line... & of our ship named Saturn...

We went up to the top deck to the Explorer's Lounge...

  

 

 

The glassed space soaring into panoramic views all 'round.  

Yet offering intimate space for us... 

 

He photographed me...

I  photographed him... 

 

 Our moods contained bits of a secret: we had become 'engaged' just a week before we flew off to London at the beginning of this trip; that is, we'd obtained the marriage license from Pierce County... but we'd not found time to get married! This "no big deal" had taken on at least a bit of the deal we'd wished to circumvent! 

 

Long ago, during the years when I was making wedding rings... I would be amused by the couple's statements of keeping their plans simple, while my experience could predict complications.

  

That is why I can legitimately tell stories about wedding rings becoming operas!    

 

Ultimately, our story became more a sort of a good rehearsal... another valuable teach/learning inside our loving. Still we began to note certain changes of surprisingly subtle nuance... little by yet smaller.  Approaching the fine level of becoming Sacramental, perhaps...

 

Reckoning after the travel, we realized the license had a deadline... our days were numbered.  

 

Stephen has a friend, Bill Hulseman, whose vocation is to help develop & design ritual for such occasions. I appreciated meeting him to further think about the event. Since our friends, another gay couple, for whose wedding we were the witnesses, were unavailable to attend & complete some reciprocal symmetry, we chose two other deep friends: Taylor, our dear Vashon Island neighbor & co-confidant; as well as GRB Bells' upcoming proprietor & best friend, Monica Street, joined our rather spontaneous process... at the exact hour of the autumnal equinox... balancing the celebration on our balcony, with its backdrop of Commencement Bay & our Mother Mountain Tahoma... witness to our vows. (The state requires two witnesses.) As the ink dried on the documents, we toasted with champagne... plus a cake which Bill had made for us... we can certainly wholeheartedly recommend his skills in his vocational choice! 

 We are gaily legitimately married as a gay couple! 

  

Now... the conundrum of the limited kinks of English. My feminist fairly bristles in anticipation of the ambiguities of current permutations... Radical Faeries have long played inventively with campy genderfuck verbiage... that's also long been gay bar-talk. My pragmatist curtsies while asking my inner dyke to dance. 

We are initially trying on being husbands. [My chance, as a proud sissy, to be butch?]
More will evolve, I trust... 

 

 

But I began this post on that upper deck cruising into a Norwegian fjord... 

My first time to this country. 

I am declaring my love for who I call... my sweetman.

Full of visions we can share into beyond...

We fit. So I share one of my appreciations of another, more mundane piece of infrastructure on our ship... craftsmanship in a lattice of local wood, fitted to seafaring geometry... satisfaction!

Viking British Isles Cruise - Stones, Carvings, Tapestry, history...

The British Isles have such deep history... as evidenced by the The Ring Of Brodgar on Orkney Island, about which I made shots of the signage as a way to take notes for this far bit of 'later', when I won't & don't remember such details like that the word 'henge' means a 'circular enclosure'. So here in four images of the signage is a fair bit of such history... should you wish to explore further along with me. (apologies for the fuzzy photo... trying to remedy...)

 

 If not, pass on by... 

 

 

 

Alice, John & Mark enjoyed this walk with Stephen & me... even as I was lagging getting back on the bus. I was busy enjoying the flexible rubber matting laid down to encourage sod to replace the inevitable wear of many feet in the soil. As a gardener I'm always fascinated by such infrastructure, & I'd never seen any construct quite like this...

(if I showed you this before, that was a teaser... here is context...as are photos below) 

 

In contrast to the wide expanse open air of Brodbar's ancient sacred stone site, St Patrick's Cathedral in Kirkwall was a rather somber Romanesque structure -- shadowy, with few windows to add light or color. One can further see that sensibility in the very sturdy seating -- handsome, if lacking much suggestion of comfort.

Some floor level-stone mullions hint at old openings toward light, now bricked-in & offering only vertical space in those memories for yet another carved stone memorial slab.

Of which there were several in similar style

I found the lettering on this stone carving in Saint Patrick's Cathedral to be "familiar" --  it being quite similar to my own style of calligraphy... my This Is It bell design from the website grbbells.com

  is an example.

There were several such memorial slabs, each of which had "scull & crossbones" images at their bases which sometimes gave me a smile...

 

 But none has a smile quite like Bro-Mark! 

 While I have long believed the Barnett name to be German, I saw it in several contexts on this trip...

As we exited a side door I realized there was a more lyrical  period in the church's decorative history in addition to the severe interior...  

I watched from our stateroom's deck as we set sail again while passing a stately manor of some kind... giving me a quiet glimpse into yet another past.  

Plus a utilitarian bookend in the form of a lighthouse. A sweet parade as we headed out to sea 

  

  

Our ship had elevators, which were often busy... so we often used the handsome stairway, with its leather wrapped hand railing... handy for rough seas I suppose, but happily we never experienced that. 

 

I continue to be entranced by the large, extremely high resolution photographs of details from the Bayeaux Tapestry which spans the large walls of the ship's stairway. The landings were big enough to host the cruise's resident historian as she lead a group of us who were interested to go along on her 'progressive lecture' while walking us down the four or five flights while she explained the various stories of the ancient fabric which is obviously not a tapestry but is embroidery of wool tread on a hundreds of yards of linen canvas... sewn only a few years after the the battle of 1066 known as the Norman Invasion, probably by nuns at Canterbury, but commissioned by the French Cathedral then being built at Bayeaux.

 

Since returning home I've researched deeper this story, which is a thousand-year-long saga in itself! Current news stories, published during the last two decades of nation-to-nation negotiations tell that  permission has been granted to allow the piece to be moved from France, where it has lived for much of its life rolled up in a churchy chest. Thus it needs a great deal of curatorial attention. The plan is that it will return to England for that restoration & a temporary period of display before being returned to its permanent display being built in Bayeaux. That our ship's designer used these images so aesthetically & effectively is another example of Viking's creative finesse at education through art. 

 

One could study the stitchery of this fragile piece of textile as it would look if I were seeing it through my jewelry studio lens's magnification.

 

 

Another connection can be appreciated by these two photos:

The ship's interior & exterior 

 

But this photo I made from our deck of the boat's wake has the true flavor of the ship's best gift to me...