The Possum Bistro

Having groggily disembarked from the night train from Oslo the previous night, we were greeted at 7am in Bergen by frigid winds and unyielding, frosty breezes.

Early this morning on the train, I was conversing with this cheerful, animated guy from Portland, Oregon, who was with his daughter on what I would term shuttle-riding: apparently, he has this competition with his friend to see who can rack up the most number of countries visited in a single trip - at the time of writing, he was at 24, his friend at 30.

Note: Shuttle-Riding is derived from the terms shuttle (as understood in shuttle diplomacy) and riding (on trains) - it is an entirely original hybrid.

According to the Official Shuttle-Riding Handbook, airports don't count, and neither do transfers and connecting flights. When I asked him where he had traveled to so far, in the back of my mind I was thinking that Prague would make me very envious - and that was the first word out of his mouth!

Out of all the post-Communist states, Prague surely has to be the most popular - and hyped-up. Just about every traveler/backpacker I met on the tour placed the Czech capital at the top of their "To Go" list. Budapest would come in a close second - I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that both faced Soviet repression in their revolutions: 1956 in Hungary and 1968 in Prague. Nostalgie for a forgotten past, perhaps?

Right behind our hostel was Mount Ulriken, so we went for a 2000-feet climb for some exercise on that same day...
...and the panoramic view was well worth the rocky, exhausting ascent! We did feel a tad emasculated when some females were practically pacing their way upwards steadily without even stopping for a drink - one of them, however, had to stop for a while. We figured she was also a backpacker - having seen quite a few of them around in Bergen already - but it turns out, she's a local and had been living in Bergen all her life - and that she hadn't been climbing the mountains as much as she should have!

While exploring the hostel and its surroundings, we found out that the name of the mountain opposite Mount Ulriken is Lovstakken - the exact word at the back of my Esprit jacket which I bought in Singapore! How's that for a weird coincidence?

Bergen - cosy, unpretentious and oh-so-dazzling!

You surely can't miss the gnomes in Norway!

Eerily reminiscent of The Matrix, or Gattaca (underrated but wholly enjoyable classic) - human breeding in cells. The helix in the middle of the piece alludes to that of DNA.

Apparently, this artist likes to juxtapose scenes of love with that of filth - Proposal in the Cowshed.
The famous Edvard Munch painting: The Three Stages of Woman - of anticipation, of joie de vivre, of mourning and melancholy.

Now, if only they could paste this on public buses here!

Sunday afternoon in Bergen: napping, parading, hanging out.

Goodbye, Bergen!