Stavanger

It was described as "not the prettiest city on our itinerary" so we had our bar set a little lower. But what a gorgeous day here in Stavanger. If only more of the weather had been more like this. 

We started off by walking through a summer market/festival and bought some reindeer sausage for our friends back home. 

We then walked through the Stavanger "Old Town". It's been upkept in a traditional way, all the houses are painted white (except for one), lots of pretty little flowers. It's nice to get to see what the city was like years ago. 

After a brief stop back on the ship for lunch we headed back out to see more of the town. Here is a great example of how the weather has been a bit of a punk/jerk: this morning was gorgeous - blue sky, fluffy clouds, no wind. After lunch - bleak gray clouds, rain, wind, almost no blue sky. It feels a little bit like as soon as Norway sees we are enjoying a bit of good weather it smacks us in the face with rain and wind. Boo Norway, boo. 

We ducked into a shop to wait out the rain. It cleared a little so we continued our tour of downtown. It weirdly looks like Orlando. 

We stopped by this church at the center of town. It (like almost every important building in Norway) burnt down but was rebuilt in its original style. 

It's also got this cool looking lock on the back door. 

Next we headed to the Norwegan Oil Musem to get a real life oil rig experience.  

The Musem has some cool older oil drilling equipment on display, some you can crawl through, others not. They also have the history of the Norwegan oil industry. The "rig" experience was ok though much of the interactive stuff was broken.  I don't think I'd visit this again. Still we had some fun. 

Outside there was a kids playground made out of reused drilling equipment. It might be more fun than the inside of the Musem. I walked through mostly to get some photos of a sweet mega yacht. 

Our ship is docked until midnight tonight so we've got a lot more time here in town. We are planning on heading out into the city again tonight to get a glimpse of Norway at night since this is really the first time we will have been in port this late. 

Stavanger looks nicer than I was expecting. The lecture about the town made it out to be somewhat troll-eque but I don't find it to be like that at all. It's no Flåm but it has a nice little harbor with ships and shops and it seems to be a very decent town.