Stavanger and Lysefjord

July 28 - Weather: Cloudy, hi temp in mid 60s

Stavanger on a Sunday morning was very quiet compared to the bustling city of Bergen yesterday.  We walked around for several hours and saw some locals walking their dogs, but mostly saw people from the ship, We visited St. Swithun's Cathedral, which is about 900 years old.  Their brochure said the population of Stevanger declined with the Black Death epidemic in the late 14th century and that it was several hundred years before the town recovered.  Today the population of the city is about 120,000, but when the surrounding area is added, the total is around 400,000.   The main industry is petroleum and the unemployment rate is about 2%, so the area is very prosperous.  The architecture is a combination of pretty old buildings and ugly modern ones.  After trivia today, we stayed in our window seats in the Crow's Nest and drank wine while we cruised through Lysefjord.  We had more than 2 hours of beautiful scenery.  At times it rained very hard, but there were patches of sun.  Salmon farming is big in the fjord.  There is a popular tourist spot on top of a rock, 1,982 feet above the water, called Preikestolen or Preacher's Pulpit.  The people on top were barely visible when we zoomed in with the camera.  There's a photo we took below, and also one from Wikimedia that shows the crowds of people that go to this spot (they wave at cruise ships).  We had an interesting dinner tonight with a professor who taught medicine at both MIT and Harvard.  He was from China and told us that his father had worked in Chiang Kai-shek's government.  We redeemed ourselves in Name That Tune tonight because the questions were based on music from the 50s (Everly Brothers, Platters, Perry Como, Patti Page, etc.) We didn't win but came close.  The North Sea was pretty rough last night - stuff was flying from the shelves in the bathroom.

At Sea

July 29 - Weather: Mostly cloudy, hi temp in upper 60s

Today was a relaxing sea day.  Candee gets off the ship in Amsterdam tomorrow, so we asked a bar attendant in the Crow's Nest to take a photo of our trivia team.  We had a lot of laughs together.  Tonight we went to cheer on our Name That Tune friend Rick in the finale of Dancing with the Stars at Sea.  He came in third, but they were all good.  One of the contestants was a 70 year old woman in a bright blue wig who did the samba.  A nineteen year old boy won doing the jive.  He was traveling with his grandparents and is one of the few young passengers on the ship.

© Jay 2020