Local Guides | Notion

After yet another travel saga, we arrived in Bergen, Norway about 2 weeks ago!

Expert IKEA furniture-builders building IKEA furniture

The Intermission Youth Hostel is a house for Christian university students during the school year, as well as the meeting place for a local congregation. Come summertime every year, a group of Wheaton students, led by our fearless leader Ieva, transforms the building into a functioning hostel and AirBnB for travelers. Our first two days here were spent building bunk beds (and testing them…don’t worry, we’re great at building IKEA furniture), setting up dividing walls, cleaning showers, and learning how to run the hostel.

The offerings of hospitality we experienced on the camino have continued in Bergen. We were welcomed by a group of Norwegian university students who had lived in the house during the school year. They showed us around the city, translated for us at church, and took us up our first of Bergen’s seven mountains. They’ve taken us for a swim in the fjord (which half of us bailed on because it was cold) and enjoyed several chaotic World Cup watch parties together. Their willingness to show us around their city has made us much more comfortable welcoming our guests to Bergen and showing them the city as well.

Mornings in Bergen are foggy and quiet. The morning shift is one of my personal favorites because of all the cleaning (yes Mom, I actually like cleaning). Guests are just getting out the door for the day, so they ask for suggestions and I get to send them on little adventures into the mountains (Løvstakken, always Løvstakken) or into the city. Then I update all the spreadsheets with bed assignments for the day, scrub down the kitchen, sanitize all the dishes, pull the hair out of the shower mats (that part is less enjoyable), and mop everything. All while jamming out to music in my headphones or being enlightened by a silly little podcast. Perhaps this will eventually feel tedious, but for now washing sheets and scrubbing showers feels like a tangible way to serve the people we host.

Store Lungegårdsvann on a foggy morning

Afternoons…also my favorite. This is when guests start to check in, so you get to meet everyone and give little tours of the building. Every night, we put out cookies, tea, and coffee for a social hour, and guests often stop by for a cup of tea or to watch whatever World Cup game is on that night. Although social hour is technically only an hour, we often linger in the common area for more like three hours before finally dragging ourselves to bed. Some nights include a Bible study, which is always an interesting time—anywhere from simply entertaining to enlightening. The best social hours are the three nights a week where instead of cookies, we make authentic Norwegian waffles with jam and sour cream and brown cheese (ironic, because they’re made by us non-Norwegians). Folks, the Norwegians put jam on everything. It’s genius.

Then one of us gets the honor of sleeping next to the doorbell for the night. Yeehaw!

If someone isn’t on shift, they’re either out exploring the city (searching for a Norwegian sweater in a thrift store…no success yet), hiking a mountain, or cooking a meal in our “hobbit kitchen.” Bergen is a city surrounded by seven mountains on one side—Sandviks, Fløyen, Rundemanen, Ulriken, Løvstakken, Damsgård and Lyderhorn—and fjords on the other. We’ve been slowly chipping away at our goal to hike all seven. We’ve also discovered the Nordnes Sjøbad—a sauna situated right on the ocean where you jump straight from the hot sauna to the cold ocean (we still gotta get Knox and Elsie to brave the ocean, but it’ll happen). If you ever want coffee suggestions, Knox has been to like every cafe in the city. Elsie’s got the yarn stores down. And David knows every thrift store.

Basically, we’re level 2 local guides at this point.

Peace and love,

The Norge Team

(long live Erling Haaland)

🇳🇴

Our new boy band photo (we gotta photoshop Elsie in, she took the photo)