Day 14–Ålesund, Norway

Pronunciation: ō’-luh-sund. Yeah, I wouldn’t have figured that out either. Another yucky looking day.

View from the balcony, day 14

Neesh was feeling lots better today. Turns out she had the exact same 8 hour bug that I did early on. So we were up early and decided to go into the city for a bit before our noon tour. This is a nifty little city, and the buildings reminded Neesh of Germany.

Cobblestones galore

We did a little browsing, but had to head back and hoped we had time after to do some more poking about. Today’s tour was Mt. Aksla, which is a hill that overlooks town, and an aquarium. First, the aquarium, though while small, was very diverse with North Atlantic fish and plants, some of them very bizarre.

One well hidden fish

Yeah, well you’re ugly too

 
In the bizarro world

The highlight was a diver coming down feeding some pretty good sized (and snappy) fish, but I only got video of it. The only non-native attraction was some penguins that a place in Spain had too many of. They really, really smell bad.

“I can walk like a penguin”

Then it was off to the viewpoint. Not too shabby.

The view from Mt. Aksla

View from a side path

This is a statue of a famous mountaineer who’s maps, 100 years old maybe, are still in use.

I wanna be a famous monutaineer, too!

From there it was a brief tour of the architecture of the city, including monuments of the starting and ending points pf where the great fire of 1904(?) left 10,000 people homeless. We saw some pictures, and it was pretty horrific. From there, back to the shops, and another expensive round of drinks. $25 for a beer and a rum and coke. Alcohol is heavily taxed here.