Norwegian Fisheries Museum, Aquaculture Visitor Centre

This afternoon was all about fish. I had eggs Benedict for lunch, but I had smoked salmon under the eggs rather than ham. But, no, that’s not the fish I’m talking about. For my afternoon activities in Bergen, Norway, I visited the Norwegian FIsheries Museum and the Aquatic Visitor Centre.

Both of them are on the coast. However, despite starting from my lunch spot a couple blocks back from the landward end of the harbour, Google Maps directed me along the road beside the harbour only for a part of the way to the Norwegian Fisheries Museum. Then it routed me inland a couple of blocks and up a bit of a hill before sending me back downhill and toward the sea to meet up with the Norwegian Fisheries Museum.

The walk probably would have taken me about a half-hour, but I paused a couple of times to take in the views. For example, there’s another neighbourhood farther along from central Bergen. It’s nestled into a mountain that, back a bit from the base, is much more rugged and steep than the mountain behind central Bergen. And it has more exposed rock.

But the base of that mountain is gentle enough that the community climbs some of its slopes. The more I see of it, the more I’m in awe of Bergen.

Norwegian Fisheries Museum

In its early days, fishing pretty much defined Bergen. And there are still fishing communities on the islands near the city. So it makes sense that Bergen would have a fishing museum.

The Norwegian Fisheries Museum is in I don’t know how many connected small, rustic, seaside wood buildings that used to be stockfish warehouses.

When I bought my ticket, the person at the desk handed me a map of the facility and said (I know someone who will appreciate this), “If you get lost, or want to find a specific room, just follow the fish.”

Each room on the map is a different colour. They painted fish on the floor. By the entrance, there’s a school of different coloured fish, all of the colours on the map, swimming up a staircase leading to the starting point for all of the rooms. The different colours start to split off at the top of the stairs. If you follow the right colour of fish, you’ll find the room you want.

The exhibits cover the fishing industry, fish processing, fish, the nearby waters, and the fishing life, including some of the hardships and joys, of fishermen.

The exhibition at the Norwegian Fisheries Museum includes text panels, videos, and touch screens that provide detailed information on different relevant topics. There are also a few fishing- and fish-related items on display.

And not just fish-related. Actual fish, too.

See that picture somewhere near this paragraph that looks like a pile of driftwood on a wooden pallet, but bears a caption of “Stockfish?” Yeah, that one.

The driftwood isn’t driftwood. It’s dried fish referred to as stockfish. Stockfish is dried without salt and I think it keeps for about a month shy of forever.

Stockfish was a major export from Bergen hundreds of years ago. It made up a lot of the trade in the Hanseatic League’s warehouses in the Bryggen district of Bergen.

And Norway is still a major producer of stockfish.

One small room of the Norwegian Fisheries Museum is dedicated to information about stockfish and includes two displays of stockfish, including the one above.

Some of what I learned in this room includes that the largest market for Norwegian stockfish is Italy. It’s exported there directly from processing plants in Northern Norway. The stockfish is usually rehydrated when sold.

According to a sign in the Norwegian Fisheries Museum, there are major stockfish festivals in Italy in September. I did not know that. And I find it surprising for an alleged food product that, in its dried state, looks so vile.

In Norway, there’s a dish made from stockfish called lutefisk that’s been prepared in Nordic countries since the 1500s. A sign in the room says, “Stockfish is soaked in lye and then watered down. The side dishes served with lutefisk are important: potatoes, mushy peas, bacon, butte or white sauce, mustard, syrup, goat’s cheese or gamalost (a pungent traditional cheese). The Lutefisk season is from November to just over Christmas.”

November to Christmas. Maybe that’s why I haven’t noticed it on menus here. I started this trip at the end of June and it’s now July. So, so sad, I probably won’t have it on this trip. Never having tried it, I shouldn’t prejudge it. But I suspect that if my protein were something that at one point appears to be driftwood and is then soaked in lye, the side dishes would indeed be important for me.

Leaving stockfish behind, I also learned at the Norwegian Fisheries Museum that Norway has 239,057 islands and 81,192 skerries. (I had to look up “skerry.” It’s a reef or rock island.)

Despite having an extremely long coastline, very little of mainland Norway faces the open sea. Because the islands break up the often fierce North Sea waves, boating off Norway’s mainland coast is usually quite safe.

I also learned that Norway has 1,190 named fjords. 1,900!? Damn! I didn’t book nearly enough time on this trip. There’s no way I’m going to see them all.

However, “fjord” is a broad term here. In addition to true fjords—arms of the sea that reach into the land—people here also use it for small areas of open sea and some lakes.

The Norwegian Fisheries Museum displays one of its video presentations on three coordinated screens. At some times, there are some fishing-related scenes on each screen, but most of the video consists of three real-life fishermen talking to each other. Each fisherman is displayed on his own screen. They seem to be in the same room as they turn toward the person they are talking to. I don’t know, but maybe it was made in pre-vaccine COVID days and they couldn’t sit close together in the same room.

The fisherman on the centre screen was somewhat old, old enough that I would have thought he’d be retired, but based on his conversation, I don’t think he was. The fisherman on the right screen looked comparatively young. I’m horrible at estimating ages, so I may be well off in either direction, but I’m guessing he was in his late twenties or early thirties. The fisherman on the left screen was somewhere between the two in age.

They spent the film talking about their entry into fishing, how much they loved it and would never want to do any other job (although the younger one did say that he has some doubts), and about the hardships of fishing, particularly being away from their families for such a large part of the year while they were out at sea. The older one noted, in particular, how much of his kids’ lives he missed while he was away. But, he said they benefited from having a great mother, which, he said is important for a fisherman with a family. The middle-aged one concurred.

The younger one said he wanted to get his own fishing boat one day rather than work on someone else’s boat. The older one said that would be difficult these days because fish quotas are now bought and sold for high prices and it would be difficult to make money if he had to buy a large enough quota to make a go of it.

It was an interesting film. And the Norwegian Fisheries Museum is an interesting little museum.

Aquaculture Visitor Centre

First off, credit where credit is due. I’m pleased to say that the “Centre” In “Aquaculture Visitor Centre,” rather than “Center,” is what the English language version at the physical site and on the website says. It’s not my correction of the word. Chalk one up for our team. (“Our team” being “Canada.” And I guess the U.K. and a few other countries, but Canada is the most important one for me. It’s the only country that is willing to issue me a passport.)

When I went to the Norwegian Fisheries Museum, the guy who sold me the ticket said that it included the Aquaculture Visitor Centre, which is a less than ten-minute walk down the street along the coast toward central Bergen. I had to go that way anyway, so I decided to pop in. Besides, it was included in the ticket. How could I not?

The Aquaculture Visitor Centre is one small building divided into a few small rooms, with an open flow between them. Almost all of the displays are videos on salmon farming, although there is one brief video animation on the lifecycle of wild salmon.

The presentations talk about how salmon is farmed, the effects of salmon farming on the environment, and the problems with salmon farming.

A big problem is salmon lice, a parasite. Well, that’s lousy, isn’t it? Salmon farmers deal with lice in a few ways. If the salmon are moved to freshwater or heated seawater, or they’re briefly hosed down at low pressure, the lice detach naturally. Sometimes chemicals are used. Sometimes salmon farmers introduce cleaner fish, fish that eat the parasites, into the salmon pens. But the cleaner fish don’t fair well in pens and they have a high mortality rate.

Another problem is escapes by the penned fish into the wild. (The pens aren’t on land. They’re netted areas in fjords or the sea.) When that happens and the escaped salmon mate with wild salmon it alters the genetics of wild salmon. I don’t remember what they are doing to mitigate that problem, probably trying to make better pens.

A third problem is microplastics. Because of human activity, there are a lot of them in the environment. It gets into the food chain, including humans when they eat fish. Fish farmers are trying to address this by using fewer plastics in their operations and changing the feed they give the salmon.

The Aquatic Visitor Centre is quite small, and a fairly quick visit, but it’s interesting. The exhibits in it are all video presentations and the building itself is not particularly attractive. So I have no pictures of it here.

Because the Aquatic Visitor Centre is on the road along the coast, closer to central Bergen than the intersection where Google Maps brought me back down to the coast on the way to the Norwegian Fisheries Museum, this time Google Maps told me to stay on that coast road, where I got some great coastal views. I posted a couple of pictures here.

I have one more full day in Bergen after today. I know what I’m doing in the morning as I’ve already booked it, but my afternoon is unplanned as of yet. We’ll see how it goes.

This trip is winding down too quickly. I have one more new destination after Bergen. I’ll stay there for two nights. Then it’s back to Oslo for one night to catch my flights (two flights, one connection) back home the next day. Please stay with me for the next few days.