We took a taxi to the ferry terminal in Bergen…it was just a bit too far to want to walk with suitcases, on cobblestones. It was, finally, a beautiful day! The Hardangarfjordexpressen (express boat) zipped us up to Rosendal in a couple of hours.
We were met by our friends Roald and Jorunn Toskedal. Sheila “met” Roald about twenty years ago, through an online bulletin-board about Scandinavian folk music and dance. They carried on an extensive email correspondence for some years. Sheila has visited them once before, very briefly, so we are looking forward to getting to know them better.
They have a lovely home right down on the fjord. Roald and his father built much of it themselves, and there’s a great view:
Aftern lunch, we went to the Stone Park, where Lars got the chance to hold forth on the various exhibits of local rocks.
With Lars along, what would usually be about a 30-minute walk turned into an hour-and-a-half of geology instruction on how each of these stones came into being. The park is beautifully laid out, and the featured rocks numbered unobtrusively and named on a brochure, so there aren’t any signs to distract from the nature all around. The rocks have all been cut and polished on one or more sides, with part of the rock left in its natural state. It was all quite interesting!
After strolling through all those beautifully presented ancient rocks, we came to aloooonnnggg, low wall sketching the known history of our planetary system, starting with accretion of space debris into larger and larger masses (planets) around our Sun. To our surprise, written in Nynorsk. We would never have guessed that Nynorsk would be so suited to such descriptions!! So, another 30+ minutes of discussion about the major events presented. With hindsight, we regret that Lars did not take pics of the Nynorsk descriptions. For those not already “in the know”, Nynorsk is an increasingly popular and widely used language derived from the many older dialects of Norwegian, commonly found in remote fjords. Decades ago, Nynorsk was known as Landsmål (country language, widely considered well-suited only for conversations among farmers). SO, yes, the old is well on its way to becoming the new. FYI, Nynorsk has many similarities with Icelandic, which is a direct derivative of Old Norsk (the common, educated Norwegian from the late 800s).
Then we came home, and spent a relaxing evening out on the porch with wine, cheese and conversation around a free-standing ceramic fireplace:
And so to bed.
No comments:
Post a Comment