Previously: Euro Pilgrimage ’85, Ch. 12: Omaha Beach to the Manneken-Pis and Little Mermaid.
In retrospect, the itinerary I sketched out for the waning days of the inaugural Euro pilgrimage in 1985 was the precise sort of frenetic exercise everyone consistently warned me against.
• Monday 22 July: Depart Copenhagen (evening); overnight train to Oslo
• Tuesday 23 July: Arrive in Oslo, morning; a whole day in the city
• Wednesday 24 July: Early morning train (6.5 hours) from Oslo to Bergen; evening in Bergen
• Thursday 25 July: Bergen to Oslo (afternoon/evening train), then an overnight train to Stockholm
• Friday 26 July: Arrive in Stockholm, morning; check into a hostel that doesn’t open until 16.00; wander the streets in a state of delirium
Idiotic. Ah, youth. The budget was tightening, time was dwindling, distances were lengthening, and pricey Scandinavia was a whirlwind ― with all of it by design.
I might have chosen instead to find one relatively affordable place and stayed there for a week, as in Sligo, but who could know? I might not ever pass that way again. Youthful reserves of adrenaline were a boon, to an extent. Still, it was exhausting.
My passport was stamped by 16 countries in 1985. Of these, only Iceland, Turkey and Norway have not been the subject of multiple return visits. Specifically, I’ve no logical reason for Norway’s omission. Spic-and-span urban areas, spectacular mountains, fjords and forests were refreshing in spite of high prices. When a return trip occurs, I might actually be able to afford it.
The first Norwegian epiphany came immediately upon exiting the train in Oslo and changing money. Hunger propelled immediate foraging, revealing an all-you-can eat breakfast buffet at the station restaurant for the equivalent of $8 – a bit of a splurge for daybreak, although rendered far more practical by my always handy plastic freezer bag, ready to be surreptitiously filled with meats and cheeses enough to last the whole day.
While industriously filling my plate (and bag) for the third time, I noticed the staid ceramic pots lined up on a shelf. Innocently imagining they were filled with jams or jellies, I scooped out a spoonful of … rectangular silvery-gray-pungent-vinegary fish parts.
I had the acquaintance of pickled herring, a delicacy that managed somehow to elude me in Copenhagen. Time to put up or shut up, because why travel all the way from Hoosierland to Norway without tasting the difference?
During the trip I’d encountered graphic examples of the sort of American I was determined never to be, like the sad-eyed Texan in Salzburg who refused to drink the Augustiner beer garden’s amazing beer because it wasn’t Miller Lite (just let that level of idiocy sink in). In Copenhagen, a young couple from New York bitterly complained to me about the high price of a Big Mac at a downtown McDonald’s.
Incredulous, I tried to explain to them about the tasty and affordable fare at the Vista Self-Service Restaurant, but they simply wouldn’t listen. Their abject terror was as obvious as my earnest confusion: Why travel at all if it means consuming the same McDonald’s and Miller Lite as you did at home? To me, Dante couldn’t have concocted a more horrifying level of Purgatorio.
I dutifully piled the pickled herring onto flat, dense, nutty and heavily buttered rye bread even as every default, corn-fed Indiana olfactory receptor sounded a red alert ― “BEWARE, Midwesterner; ocean products not fully processed into paste like Filet O’Fish sandwiches…does not compute…WARNING!”
Of course I was hooked at first bite on the piquant, fishy deliciousness of pickled herring, a flavor that was ingrained in my tongue for two whole years, until a belated arrival in Amsterdam in 1987 and an encounter with raw herring filets and chopped onion, followed by smoked mussels in Yugoslavia, then marinated herring in a variety of sauces back in Copenhagen during later trips … and so very much more.
Related reading:Edibles & Potables: “I got food, but I’m not a foodie” (the 2025 remix).
The helpful attendant at the tourist desk said that Oslo’s hostels were completely filled. The fallback room I booked at a pension cost a staggering $17 a night, but at least there was plenty of salami stowed in the second-helping bag.
Norwegians refer to Oslo as being situated at the north end of a fjord, although in geological terms, the water doesn’t match the terminology; a fjord is a long, narrow inlet with steep sides or cliffs created by glacial erosion. Oslo has none of these, and we might call it an elongated bay, without the adjacent sheer precipices, though possessing rolling hills and a promontory or three. Either way, it’s a tremendously scenic place for a capital city.
Forty subsequent years of North Sea oil wealth has altered Oslo’s skyline for the newer, taller and glassier.
My dated recollection is of a stunningly quiet street grid not unlike a small town’s, clean and laid back with remorseless efficiency, amid another gorgeous sunny and temperate summer’s day.
A harbor walkabout was followed by a visit to the Kon-Tiki museum. Appropriately enough, the legendary Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl (1914-2002) was the son of a master brewer. Heyerdahl became world famous in 1947 for sailing a raft (Kon-Tiki) from Peru to Polynesia, testing his hypothesis that ancient peoples could travel long distances across the ocean using the materials and technology they had at hand (his hypothesis was correct; they might have, but latter-day DNA evidence disproves it).
I strolled to the area around the National Theater, where an electric railway equipped with quaint wooden cars (at least in 1985) trundled through the sparse suburbs to the north, eventually entering the woods and depositing me several miles outside Oslo at the Tryvannstårnet, or Tryvanns Tower.
An elevator ride to the top of this tower enabled a truly stupendous view of Oslo and environs (the facility was closed in 2004, but an investor purchased it in 2025 with a vow to refurbish).
In 1985 Oslo’s metropolitan population was around 660,000 (it has doubled since), but when viewed from the top of the Tryvannstårnet, the inhabited areas appeared to be completely swallowed up by green forest and blue water, wilderness seemingly beginning only a few yards past the last street sign.
Darkness was a long way off even in late afternoon. Back downtown, I scraped together a few Kroner for two bottles of standard Ringnes lager at a state-owned retail shop, packing them to Frogner Park for an al fresco dinner of breakfast leftovers while gazing at Gustav Vigeland’s vast “sculpture arrangement” of more than 200 statues in bronze and granite, illustrating the vicissitudes of the human condition. The key piece is the 46-ft tall Monolith, depicting more than a hundred writhing, striving and climbing humans figures evidently grasping for salvation.
Vigeland was controversial figure. He unashamedly leaned fascist, and died in 1943 during Germany’s wartime occupation of Norway, years that have handed us the word “quisling” (“trumpling” in current American vernacular) as a synonym for traitorous behavior ― although Norway’s resistance movement was effective, embracing armed operations as well as civil disobedience.
I detected a noticeable totalitarian stylistic bent to Vigeland’s sculptures in Frogner Park, although it was awfully hard to find fault with my favorite, “Man Attacked by Babies,” where a man appears to be fighting off an assault by flying infants (see it at Atlas Obscura).
Wednesday began early with a seat on the train from Oslo to Bergen, a primary reason for my decision to visit Norway (and not because I’m a choo choo buff). Rather, the 308-mile Oslo-Bergen rail line is a scenic and engineering marvel. Construction began in 1875 and took 34 years to complete.
Imagine the track-laying difficulties inherent to mountainous terrain, then add the length and severity of the Norwegian winter. There are 182 tunnels of varying lengths, and countless snow fences and sheds. At its highest point, the train is 4,000 feet above fjord level, and at places the water can be seen, dizzyingly placid straight, down the chasm and just outside the rail car’s window.
The terminus is Bergen, a venerable port squeezed into flat ground between mountains by a more stereotypical fjord. In Bryggen, Bergen’s old harbor quarter and a UNESCO world heritage site, fish markets pungently punctuate the air and cruise ships depart for epic coastline jaunts. The room in a private home booked for me by the tourist office proved to be conveniently located between station and harbor, right on my path to an early dinner.
I had to hurry.
The highly recommended midday seafood buffet at the Enhjørningen (“Unicorn Restaurant”) ended at 16.00, and this meal was so important that I planned on using my rarely deployed debit card to pay the staggering $16 it would set me back.
I made it on time, and the spread was like nothing I’d ever seen: Cod, halibut, salmon, shrimp, crab and herring ― fried, baked, broiled, pickled and probably raw ― accompanied with exotic sauces, potatoes, berry-laden salads and strange northern vegetables prepared in a myriad of ways, probably 25 dishes in all.
If I’m exaggerating, it isn’t by much. It was an unforgettable, epochal feast. Afterwards, barely able to move, I walked to the university area in search of a piano recital touted at the tourist office. It was about to begin, although I’d been misled, and the recital wasn’t free of charge. However, the door and windows were open, and there was a bench nearby. I breathed easier. Seafood buffets notwithstanding, it still was possible to listen on a budget.
The cheap plastic travel alarm was jarring in its morning report. Say what? Was I still in Norway, and had I consumed half an ocean’s bounty of seafood the night before, prior to falling asleep on a bench during an early evening piano recital? There were groggy grunts of affirmation on both counts, and the fleeting recognition that this uncomfortable sensation might well be attributed to my first-ever hangover from food, as opposed to drink.
It was morning on Thursday, and time already to pack. Roughly seven hours remained in Bergen. The train back to Oslo (and a switch to Stockholm via couchette) would be leaving at 3:30 p.m., but there was a key item of unfinished beer business yet to be addressed. Owing to my lifelong, debilitating telephonophobia (yes, it’s real), I’d again be bluffing at the last possible moment.
I intensely dislike making “cold” phone calls, to the point of incurring quasi-panic attacks. It’s gotten better with age, but never entirely gone away. I had an appointment in Bergen, and a phone number to call. I couldn’t, so there’d be a short walk to the Hansa brewery to try my luck.
A part-time job at New Albany’s long defunct Scoreboard Liquors represented my only tenuous connection to the business of beer in 1985. Luckily, the store’s owner was trying his best to listen and learn; intrigued by the higher mark-ups of “premium” products, Jim cautiously indulged my comparatively superior knowledge of the imported beer category by allowing me to stock some of them.
Naturally it’s easy to know a lot when no one else knows anything, and this is how the legendary “import door” in the walk-in cooler came to be. It was my first claim to local beer fame.
At the time, the only Norwegian beers available in Indiana were Ringnes and Aaas (ohrss), but at some point in 1984 another contestant arrived: Hansa, brewed in a place called Bergen, its cartons festooned with postcard images of gabled, mountainous, fjord-driven beauty. As a European history buff, I knew the name Hansa derived from the Hanseatic League.
The Hanseatic League was a commercial and defensive confederation of merchant guilds and their market towns. It dominated Baltic maritime trade (c. 1400-1800) along the coast of Northern Europe. It stretched from the Baltic to the North Sea and inland during the Late Middle Ages and early modern period (c. 13th to 17th centuries). The League was created to protect economic interests and diplomatic privileges in the cities and countries and along the trade routes the merchants visited.
In retrospect, Hansa as a beer was considerably more prosaic, merely another golden lager. Appropriately given its name, the imported version traveled long seaborne distances aboard increasingly vast container ships, as intended to quench a weird and steadily growing American thirst for something slightly different from the norm.
Yet Hansa tasted crisp and fresher than usual for an import, striking me as being above average in all respects. I added it to Scoreboard’s beer list, and naturally consumed most of it myself; there was an employee discount, but even so, at regular intervals I paid them for the privilege of working there.
At a long-forgotten pre-trip juncture, the geography finally clicked. I’d be visiting Norway if possible for the famous train ride to Bergen, so why not let Hansa know how much I enjoyed its beer and request a personally guided tour? I’d printed snazzy business cards, identifying me as a “beverage counselor” at Scoreboard Liquors in New Albany, Indiana; I dropped one into the envelope and mailed my missive.
To my utter astonishment, a few weeks later I received a polite reply from a man in Hansa’s export department. He thanked us for carrying the brewery’s beer, and asked me to call him upon arrival in Bergen. Months passed. The travel adventure began. I carried the confirmation letter thousands of miles across the sea and through Europe. At any of my stops, I might have mailed him, but never found the time.
Conversely, I might have asked the nice people at my Oslo accommodation for help in phoning Knut (or was it Lars, or Thor?) But no. My proclivities for procrastination virtually preordained a mile’s walk to the upscale Bergen neighborhood known as Kalfaret, nestled just below Mount Fløyen, where the guard at the shack by the Hansa brewing acreage main gate, who didn’t speak English, seemed amused.
(Most Hansa and Bergen photo credits: Bergen City Encyclopedia.)
Soon a casually dressed man emerged, looked at the letter, grimaced, and told me in perfect British English that my export contact was on holiday. He expressed puzzlement that his colleague would arrange to meet me, but then leave town. Thoroughly embarrassed, candor was my only recourse.
I apologized profusely and conceded having never actually spoken with anyone. Lacking legitimate credentials or very much else in the way of a clue, and looking pathetic in the process, it would have been immediately obvious to this man that I was a beer biz “nobody,” and yet (Gunnar, Rolf or Leif) displayed remarkable graciousness. He could spare an hour to show me the brewery, after which I could drink a couple of beers on him.
By the time I left Hansa, it had been two hours. I’ve always deeply appreciated my guide’s equanimity and sense of humor. Whomever you are or were, thank you. I’ve never forgotten your kindness.
The Hansa brewery was founded in the 1890s and bore the cobbled-together appearance I’d soon come to associate with most breweries of its approximate vintage. Successive reorganizations and additions produced layers of recent industrial history for peeling back, although the most memorable portion of our walk-through came outside in a garden, where a log cabin stood.
In fact, this was a representative farmhouse brewery, relocated from the countryside to the brewery’s backyard to serve as a reminder that Norway’s brewing history was rural. Farm owners were obliged by law to provide a stipulated amount of homebrew to their laborers, under penalty of fines or even imprisonment.
It was a novice’s valuable early lesson: brewing and agriculture historically are intertwined. A quarter-century later, the craft brewing world would become enamored of kveik, or certain utterly venerable and unique strains of Norwegian farmhouse brewing yeast. White Labs sells more than one type for home and commercial use. I knew nothing of this in 1985; however, the notion of beer functioning as partial pay packet oddly mirrored my own package store remuneration.
As it turned out, Hansa’s first century in Kalfaret would be its last.
A few years after my visit, production moved to a new facility in a nearby industrial park. In 1997, seeking to stave off absorption by voracious multinationals scouring the post-Communist world for booty, Hansa merged with Borg, a like-sized Norwegian brewery. The merger appears to have succeeded. They’re still together and autonomous today, having embraced minority stakes on the part of similarly situated Swedish and Danish partners.
I always wondered what became of the historic Hansa brewery acreage where I set foot in 1985. Over time, most of the grounds save for the brewery’s very core have been sold off for mixed-use redevelopment into housing, retail and light industrial. A rump of company office space was retained, and a small museum of brewing history in Bergen added.
By 2007, this smaller space had been folded into a newer-age brewing and hospitality facility.
(Beer) has been brewed at Kalfaret again. This is now done in Waldemars Microbrewery, which Hansa Bryggeri has installed in Kalfaret Brygghus, a restaurant combined with banquet facilities operated in the old brewery premises by Holmedals Kantineservice. Waldemars Microbrewery, which is named after the company’s founder, brews specialty beers such as bottom-fermented lagers, ales and wheat beers and top-fermented stouts. A microbrewery is a mini-brewery where production is carried out according to artisanal traditions and is not very automated or industrialized.
You are reminded that when the redevelopment value of a property exceeds the return according to its current use, the laws of (capitalist) gravity are almost inexorable. Bergen does not have room to sprawl, which increases the value of infill with respect to existing infrastructure.
By late 2019, the microbrewery (now called Kalfaret Brygghus) had run its course; it was being operated by De Bergenske, a family-owned local group of hotels, restaurants and event venues. De Bergenske departed, and the remainder of the property was sold: “Kalfaret Brewery is now closed and will become part of the Christiania High School.”
My final view of Bergen prior to boarding the train back to Oslo was something I’d missed previously. It was Hansa’s huge “Welcome to Bergen: (Hansa) For Every Thirst” sign facing the platforms. My last bits of Norwegian currency bought a valedictory sandwich, and I began thinking about my early Friday arrival in Stockholm.
The longest journey is the journey inward.
— Dag Hammarskjöld
Growing up in rural Indiana, the primary reason I knew Dag Hammarskjöld was seeing his face on a postage stamp. As a child I was an avid stamp collector, enraptured by those cloth grab bags stuffed with bulk cancelled stamps for a buck ninety eight, and certain it would improbably yield an upside down airplane worth thousands of dollars.
Apart from panning for philatelic gold, it remained that geography and history were personal fascinations. Stories about other places thrilled me, and imagining where those stamps had traveled provided hours of amusement. Hammarskjöld, a Swedish diplomat, was the second General Secretary of the United Nations. He died in an African plane crash in 1961, subsequently to be honored by commemorative stamps issued by dozens of countries, which in turn helped fill those cloth sacks.
How the stamps left their envelopes and came to be packed this way always mystified me, but we must concede that stamps were not how most Hoosiers learned about Sweden.
Rather, for predominantly clueless, corn-fed Midwestern American heterosexual males like me coming of age during the decade of the 1970s, the most gripping (pun fully intended) stereotype imaginable was the Highly Sexed Swedish Blonde. At the dawn of the VHS generation, the connection with Scandinavia came from pornographic videos branded Swedish Erotica, as filmed entirely in California.
Just don’t ask me how I know this.
(The only memorable aspect of wretched Old Milwaukee beer was the label’s exploitative Swedish Bikini Team ads, but these didn’t appear until the early 1990s.)
Ironically, during my very first afternoon in Stockholm, I was wandering aimlessly near the perimeters of an island, quite a few of which combine to make up the city, when it occurred to me to descend from street level to water’s edge for a postcard photo of the Gamla Stan (old town), visible across the channel.
Exuding cherubic innocence, with Pentax K-1000 in hand and banal touristic intent, I turned a corner and promptly stumbled across two archetypal young Swedish blondes, lying atop the pebbles on puffy blankets, blissfully absorbing the bright July sunshine.
But of course they were topless. Struck dumb by a lifetime of swirling stereotypes, I bolted.
Nothing voyeuristic at all, ladies; please excuse me, as I have a streetcar to catch, all the better to flee in even greater haste, my beet-red complexion providing illumination well beyond the sun’s wattage, without so much as a “hello,” “goodbye,” or “can you direct me to the nearest G-rated meatball cart?”
In retrospect, I’m not sure they even caught a glimpse of me. Welcome to my life as a young adult experiencing arrested development.
And yet in spite of our best efforts at culture, it usually comes back to sex and money.
As an outsider, you might feel they (Swedes) live in a country full of contradictions. Sweden is a country with a very high standard of living that happily mixes high-tech capitalism and a socialistic type of welfare program. It is a neutral country with compulsory military service and strongly promotes world peace, yet, at the same time, it is number one in the world when it comes to per capita arms exports and is on the top five list for per capita donation of economic aid to the developing world. Further contradiction is evidence by the fact that the Swede Alfred Nobel first invented dynamite and other useful devices for warfare, then instigated the world’s most prestigious award for promoting peace. A more recent contradiction involves prostitution. Specifically, it is not a crime to SELL sex in Sweden, but it is illegal to BUY sex.
— Elisabet Olesiny, Adventure Guide to Sweden (2005)
In truth, my presence in Sweden was far too brief to register much about national characteristics, or to retain more than a smidgen of what I witnessed. Unfortunately, I was zombie. Indomitable youthful enthusiasm had at long last yielded to all-encompassing fatigue. I’d taken three very long overnight train rides in seven days. Arrival in Stockholm came only a week after leaving Brussels. The constant soundtrack in my head switched from pop melodies to monochromatic drumming in the incessant rhythmic cadence of a clickety-clack train track.
I feared becoming an otherwise impenetrable Ingmar Bergman film in black and white. Moreover, constant motion affected personal hygiene. While I bathed almost every day, my filthy clothes hadn’t seen a washing machine since Ireland. Bathroom sinks, cold water and Woolite barely sufficed; at some point a deeper laundering was required, and I resolved to make Stockholm the place, damn the expense. Everything except the clothes on my back went into a garbage bag. I paid the lady at the laundromat to wash and dry them for me, went for a walk, and returned to comparative spiffiness. It was a profound relief.
Three days and two nights in Sweden strained the budget, and splurges for food and drink were out of the question. Forethought was key, and the plan came together admirably, with an early morning arrival on Friday in Stockholm, the purchase of a three-day transit pass, and a room at the Columbus Hostel, located to the south of the city’s historic center (it ceased operations only recently).
Here are a few scattered memories about Stockholm.
***Rock Hudson
The American film star’s revelation that he was suffering from acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) was a huge international news story. It was announced in America on Thursday, July 25, yet I have no recollection of hearing about it while in Sweden. Word came the following week, standing at a news stand outside a pizzeria in Finland.
Why the delay? First and foremost, my lack of language skills eliminated most local news sources. Fewer natives spoke English than today, and while many fellow travelers were American, not all of them paid attention to current events. I was dependent on English-language newspapers and publications. They could be found in big cities, not always in smaller ones.
British newspapers were more reliably available than the International Herald Tribune and USA Today’s international edition, but without critically important baseball standings. Of course, I couldn’t afford newspapers on a daily basis, and perusing them on the racks at shops depended on the indifference of attendants.
If memory serves, USA Today bundled Friday, Saturday and Sunday into a weekend edition. The Herald-Tribune combined Saturday and Sunday. Either way, my guess is that Hudson’s revelation missed the weekend editions, which often remained on the racks into the following week.
It’s strange what one remembers.
***Weak beer.
Sweden had a state alcohol monopoly, which in practical terms meant having to go to liquor stores to buy just about any kind of full-strength booze, with the exception of beer brewed to sub-standard strength, somewhere around 3.5% abv (Folköl). Weak but affordable beer seemed better than none at all, so I indulged at a supermarket and bought oversized bottles of Pilsner Urquell and Budvar (Czech Budweiser), brewed and bottled to spec for the Swedish market.
***Uppsala.
Dag Hammarskjöld spent his youth in Uppsala, an historic university city roughly 45 miles from Stockholm. I went there for the express purpose of viewing Viking burial mounds in the oldest part of town (an ancient Swedish religious center) and drinking mead from a horn at Odinsborg, a restaurant adjacent to the mounds.
Mead probably is the oldest of mankind’s fermented beverages. Even before humans learned to farm, honey was a readily gatherable sugar source, fermented with wild yeast. Mead was a Norse staple, and big wooden “mead halls” were built to facilitate its consumption.
My recollection is hazy, but the mead served at Odinsborg was striking by its similarity to a malty-sweet beer. I believe this flavor stood out because the only mead I’d sampled previously was produced by the Oliver Winery in Bloomington, Indiana, and it reminded me of the homemade dandelion wine made in Floyds Knobs barns and garages, all the better to intoxicate under-aged drinkers.
Today, I’ve learned that mead can take many forms. At the time, Uppsala’s version was my favorite.
Vasa.
At a museum in Stockholm, I examined the remains of a wooden Swedish warship called the Vasa (or Wasa), which somewhat ingloriously sank less than a mile into its maiden voyage in 1628. It was located in 1961 and brought to the surface remarkably intact, to be housed in climate-controlled facilities on the island of Djurgården, also the home of the Skansen park (I believe it is now referred to as Museum Island).
Importantly, the Vasa ship is not to be confused with Wasabröd.
The Swedish company Wasabröd is the largest producer in the world of Scandinavian style crisp bread (Swedish: knäckebröd).
Wasabröd is in my cabinet right now, having become a staple of my pantry.
On Sunday afternoon, the Silja Line’s ship to Turku, Finland left Stockholm harbor. Deck passage was free with a Eurailpass, and on this boat there was a gratifying bonus: A dedicated crashing room for budget travelers like me, with lockers, where we could sleep on comfortable padded bunks without paying extra for the privilege.
This was so exciting that I joined the queue for the all-you-can-eat seafood buffet, surreptitiously packed my freezer bag full of breakfast goodies, and sent the debit card a bit closer to default. The Åland Islands, a Baltic archipelago between Sweden and Finland were gorgeous in the early evening glow. I’d be greeting Turku fat, sassy, clean and well-rested.
For a change, that is.
Among the songs I recall encountering serendipitously during July, there was this. I never watched the movie.
