Nomads i Norden 2: On to Ålesund—Hurtigruten, Day Two

The ship was late setting off from Bergen, due to some routine maintenance that they hadn’t managed to get done during the day, so we gave up waiting for the moment of departure and went to bed. She slipped out of port at some point, and we woke a couple of times when she pulled in somewhere or other to offload cargo or passengers.
When we finally awoke for real, we were headed into one of the two stretches of open ocean, with no buffering islands between us and the North Sea. Walking down the halls was a bit more challenging, but we made it into the dining room for the breakfast buffet. During breakfast, we pulled into Torvik, and could watch cargo being offloaded.
After breakfast, we explored the ship, both inside and out. “Out” was rather more interesting, photographically:

Odin’s scouts were keeping an eye on things:

Look! Signs of human habitation!

Lars in a typical pose:

Here are our first two pictures of MS FINNMARKEN.

We disembarked to take a walk around Ålesund. The town burned almost completely in the early 1900s, and was rebuilt in Art Deco (Jungend) style. Often the buildings are painted in solid colors, others are white with various decorative features. No, the pinkish building is NOT leaning! Just incomplete angular correction incamera lense.

Several have detailed decorative panels.

With 2 cameras going, we took kind of a lot of pictures…

¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤A bit of safety information, useful should a Hurtigruten boat wander off course and bang a hole in its bottom, say by hitting one of the many, many submarine hilltops lurking outside the approved navigation channel. First each person dons a bright orange thermal suit, then a flotation device, then a bunch of them board one of these orange, covered lifeboats. Ideally, one has had enough foresight to dress warmly before putting on the orange thermal suit – the practical advantage of remembering to dress warmly will be immediately obvious given that the water is only slightly warmer than ice water.

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Next to where our boat docked, a museum was building a reconstruction of an 1800s Norwegian commercial boat. No original boat has survived. Once finished this boat will be used to reconstruct the sailing technology of that bygone era.