Bergen, Norway

We then traveled by air to Bergen, the second largest city in Norway. It is a port city of about 250,000 people, and during the middle ages was used by the Hanseatic League which established several trading houses here to buy salted herring and timber to be shipped to Germany. The original wooden trading houses are still here, repaired over the centuries. It is now a port for the North Sea Oil Production. N orway is the third largest oil exporter in the world, and only has 4,500,000 people, so the government has no debt and can make lots of capital improvements. It is a "cradle to grave" socialistic form of government so they have lots of expenses also. It is a beautiful country of fjords, seas, lakes, rivers, and woods.