Stopping in Kristiansand

I took a bus from Oslo to Kristiansand this morning. I prefer trains to buses, and there’s normally a train from Oslo to Kristiansand, but there’s trackwork near Oslo going on now and they’re running replacement buses on the affected routes. So, a bus it was.

(Uninterestingly, the bus I took wasn’t one of the replacement buses, but rather a regularly scheduled bus that makes the run. It left at a better time.)

The bus ran late on the route. It was scheduled to arrive at about a quarter to three in the afternoon, but it didn’t arrive until after a quarter past three.

In truth, I chose to visit Kristiansand primarily because a journey from Oslo to my next destination in Norway would have taken much longer than I wanted to bear in a day, particularly with the need to take a replacement bus for part of the journey. Kristiansand was the closest city to halfway I could find. The guidebooks I’m using give it a passing mention. One lists a couple of sights here. The other just describes the town in a single paragraph.

Were it not for the desire to break up the trip, I probably wouldn’t have stopped here. But rather than just arriving in the afternoon and leaving the next morning, I’m here for two nights before I catch a train out.

As I said, I generally prefer trains to buses. But this bus wasn’t bad. It’s a double-decker. Seating on the top level is in a 1-2 configuration, with a decent amount of legroom.

I booked all my internal Norway travel a few weeks before coming here. I chose an upper deck premium seat and selected one of the single seats. (With this bus line, Vy, you choose your reserved seat with the booking. Or, at least you do on the routes I booked.)

If you have to travel by bus, that is not a bad bus to do it on. One of my other journeys within Norway is also by bus. I booked with the same bus line for that one. I’m glad I chose an upstairs single seat on that bus too.

From the Bus Station to the Hotel

I used Google Maps to show me the walking route from the bus station to my hotel. The map to the left is what it gave me. The white dot at the top of the route is the bus station. The red pin is my hotel.

See how Google had me walk along a main street for a couple of blocks and then veer closer to the sea? How kind of it to steer me by the sea. Not so much.

That portion of the waterfront is a container port. I couldn’t see much of the sea for all of the ugly containers stacked up on the lot there. I could, however, see the upper decks of a huge cruise ship docked there. A smaller cruise ship pulled in just as I arrived.

My hotel fills the whole width of the block between the main street the bus station fronts and the smaller street that Google had me veer onto. The hotel entrance is smack dab between the two, facing a block running between them. Thus, veering off to the other street took me a little beyond the entrance. So, as it turns out, Google Maps gave me a slightly longer, much uglier route to get to the door of my hotel.

Fortunately, my hotel room does not face the container port. Instead, its floor-to-ceiling windows give me an attractive view of Kristiansand’s marina and the sea beyond. The view is partially blocked by another building. But it’s a lovely scene nonetheless. I posted a picture from my hotel room window here. You judge.

Out of the frame of the picture, off to the right, I also get a view of Kristiansand’s colourful Fish Bazaar/Warf (see below) and a mostly green hill behind it.

Wandering Kristiansand

Kristiansand is the fifth largest town in Norway, but its population is under 100,000. Norway is not a particularly populous country, a little over 5.5 million people in 2024. I spent a couple of hours this afternoon just randomly wandering around a part of the seafront and a little of its central district.

When walking from the bus station past the ugly container port, I thought I made a huge mistake in stopping In Kristiansand at all. But I’ve now concluded it’s a nice town. Not spectacular, but nice. I’ll see if I alter that opinion up or down after spending a full day here tomorrow.

I started by walking along the waterfront beside the marina. The seafront there includes some small parks, a small garden, a fountain, and two or three playful sculptures.

There is also an open, hard-surfaced area. A small children’s midway with a few rides were set up there. They weren’t in operation when I walked by. I don’t know if it’s a temporary midway and a coming attraction, an attraction that’s finished but not yet dismantled, or it’s permanent but just doesn’t operate on Wednesday afternoons.

Fish Bazaar

I then walked through a cute district known as the Fish Bazaar. Or, rather, the Norwegian equivalent thereof, Fiskebasaren. I’ve also seen it referred to as the Fish Warf, Fiskebrygga. Think both names refer to the same thing but I’m not 100 percent certain.

None of the buildings there are more than four storeys tall. Most are three. The buildings are clustered around a small canal and painted either a burnt-orange colour or a reddish-brown colour. It’s quite quaint.

Only one of the buildings is labelled, in Norwegian and English, as the fish market. It’s not particularly big, maybe the total square footage of a decent-sized two- or maybe three-bedroom apartment. It’s possible I missed some back area, but I don’t think so.

I don’t know if it was just the time I was there, but there weren’t a lot of fish available. It was mostly slabs of what looked like smoked salmon and a few other fish.

Two vendors had small tanks in which lobsters with bound claws crawled along fretting their fates. One of the tanks teemed with crustaceans, the other had only a few.

There was also a tank with a dinner-for-two- or -three- or maybe -four-sized fish swimming around waiting to be sold and scooped up.

There can’t possibly ever be a lot of fish there. For one thing, there’s the building’s relatively small size. For another, the vendors also sell other foods. I saw several meat sausages on sale, along with a few loaves of bread and other food products.

The ground floors of the rest of the buildings in the fish bazaar contain mostly restaurants. I think the upper floors house offices, but I’m not sure.

In Town

I then walked into the centre of Kristiansand. (It’s not a huge town. I did less walking than it sounds.)

The buildings are uninspiring, although some are quite handsome. None are particularly tall.

In my walk, I stumbled on Kristiansand’s main shopping street, Markens Gate, which runs perpendicular to the marina’s seafront. All but two or three blocks of the ten-or-so-block-long street, the blocks closest to the seafront, are pedestrianized. Some of the cross-streets are also pedestrianized for one or two blocks in one or both directions off Markens Gate.

I know I mentioned it elsewhere, but I enjoy pedestrianized streets. Markens Gate has a more small-town feel to it than Karl Johans Gate, which I walked along yesterday morning in Oslo. Very much more. But, to my mind, every street is improved on an enjoyment-of-life scale when pedestrians are the driving force, so to speak, in establishing its ambience rather than cars.

I wish Toronto City Council (my hometown) believed that. Sigh.

Remember those playful statues I mentioned seeing by the seafront? Oh, come on. Of course, you remember. It wasn’t all that many paragraphs ago.

Well, I saw some more in my wandering, including a couple of large sand sculptures. None of the sculptures are great works of art, but I found them fun to stumble upon. I included a collage of many of them here.

So ends another day in Norway.

Tomorrow is Another Day

I don’t know what tomorrow will bring for me in Kristiansand. The forecast calls for rain all day. My guidebooks don’t suggest many indoor activities, just a small neo-Gothic church. Some outdoor activities look like they might be enjoyable on a nice day, but tomorrow doesn’t look like it will be a nice day. Hopefully, the forecast will be wrong about that.

If I don’t do much tomorrow I’ll probably post only a single entry here then rather than the two that have become my standard when I have a full day of activities. We’ll see, dear.