I met up with my travelling companion Katherine at the Victoria Coach Station in London. It certainly was great to see her after what she insists is eight years. (I thought it had maybe been five years since we last saw each other, but she knows when she retired!) The coach transferring us to Southampton left at noon, and by 2pm we were at the docks.
We had learned about a month ago that we had been given a major stateroom upgrade, and were going to be staying in a Window Suite - brand new since the ship was in dry dock in April. Not only would we get a much bigger room, but along with any suite comes a package of "Suite Amenities"... so we have been getting ready to receive some serious pampering ever since we learned of the upgrade.
As soon as we got off the coach, the perks began with "Preferred Embarkation" for us - a special line that sped us right through check-in and onto the ship.
Let me show you what our Window Suite room looks like:
Let me show you what our Window Suite room looks like:
Yes, that really is two big windows! And much more storage space than we have clothes. Plus there's a comfortable couch out of the picture on the left.
Fresh fruit and canapés (the champagne came a little later).
Then there was the one-time free set up of the minibar for us big drinkers.
And of course, fresh flowers for the room.
Sailaway was pretty much a non-event in the poor weather.
We just had time for the safety drill, followed by a bit of exploring, and then we went off to an excellent first meal in the dining room. I was surprised that we were seated with two American couples, as I had expected the majority of the passengers to be British.
My favourite "Suite Amenity" is that Internet service is free, which is a big deal because it is usually so expensive on a ship. And it is wonderful to have wireless right in our room.
Tonight our clocks go ahead an hour. I'm not sure if that gets us all the way to Bergen time, or whether we have to change them again tomorrow.
can't see the pictures, anyone else having probs?
ReplyDeleteI think I fixed them. Sorry about that!
ReplyDeleteWhich bed is yours? and was it really all rainy and foggy? did you go up on deck for the sailaway, or did each of you pick a window to stand in front of?
ReplyDeleteDid you notice Alex is now in Hamburg?
PREVIEW of Hanseatic Museum
ReplyDeletetext from http://www.bergen-guide.com/51.htm
The Hanseatic Museum is situated in one of the old trade houses at Bryggen. The museum has old interiors from the 18th and 19th centuries.
The Hanseatic League had one of their foreign Offices at Bryggen in Bergen from approx. 1360 until 1754. The Hanseatic merchants traded mainly with stockfish from Northern Norway and grain from the Baltic countries. Only German merchants were allowed to live at Bryggen during the period of the Hanseatic Office. The Hanseatics were unmarried and had to live in celibacy as long as they lived in the area. The tenements in the Bryggen area each consists of several smaller trade houses, each run by a merchant with a journeyman and apprentices. All of them lived in the house. The Hanseatic Museum shows us what one of these trade houses would be like in the last years of the German Office at Bryggen.
Neither light nor heating was allowed in the tenements at Bryggen because of the danger for fire. Behind each tenement there was an assembly hall, called “schotstue”, belonging to all the merchants of one or more tenements. The assembly halls could be heated, and in connection with these halls there were also a kitchen as well as storage room for food. Today the museum Schotstuene (belonging to the Hanseatic Museum) shows three assembly halls and one kitchen from the Bryggen area.
The building which houses the Hanseatic Museum was built after a large fire in 1702 which destroyed almost the entire town. The building is the only one in the area in which the old interiors have been preserved. The Hanseatic merchants had both their living rooms and their storage rooms in the same house. The storage rooms now have exhibitions on various subjects related to the history and architecture of Bryggen.
The “outer room” on the first floor was the dining room for the journeyman and the apprentices during the summer months. Next to the “outer room” is the office of the merchant, where he would receive his visitors. In his office we find the chancellery where he kept the main ledger of the house. In one of the cabinets there is also a secret staircase leading to his summer bedroom upstairs. All the cabinets in the office have landscape paintings an floral artwork from the beginning of the 18th century, and this is one of the few rooms in Bergen in which the original 18th century decoration is still intact.
Next to the office we find the winter bed of the merchant as well as his private dining room. The bed has doors which can be closed to keep warm, and this is the typical type of bed to be found in this area. The sample room is a small storage room where goods which were imported in smaller quantities were stored, like cloth, spices, tobacco, wine and liquors. This room is a reconstruction from 1917, and it is not historically correct.
On the second floor we find the bedrooms of the house. The room of the journeyman was both his office and his bedroom. Between the room of the journeyman and the summer bedroom of the merchant we find the apprentices´ room. They all slept in the same room, and they slept two boys in each bed. On the second floor we also find a reconstruction of some rooms of a smaller trade house.