Lofoten

Lunch / Dinner

We had a late start today and our first real stop on the ship was the dining hall to eat fabulous meals.

Lunch consisted of lamb sausage, Norwegian fish soup and tomato salad (image below).

Dinner – A three course meal with the usual seafood theme. The bowl has some type of mushroom soup.

Baked Cod (image below) – main course

Veggies

Our ship dropped us off in Stamsund and we took a bus to Lofoten and stopped at a small town along the way called Torvdalshalser where we took the photo below overlooking the whole valley.

Our next bus stop was Lofoten which features a museum and an art gallery of a local resident, Kaare Espolin Johnson. The photo below is right outside the museum.

Kaare Espolin Johnson

Local artist famous for artwork in books and magazines. Wikipedia page here.

Art exhibit in museum

After the art gallery we headed over to the Lofoten museum. The museum tells the story of how the family which owned most of the land in the area was built as a “company town” and the family that owned the land also owned the general store, the houses fishermen would live in when they came in to fish. The owners would eventually also buy all the fish from the fisherman.

The working and living conditions of the fisherman were abysmal.

There were tens of thousands of pounds of fish processed each fishing season. Image below shows fish being hung to dry, much like the fishermen.

Typical living conditions except there would be 14 or so people packing into a room like the one below.

After our site visit, the bus took us to the next port over called Svolvaer which is considered the “capital” city of Lofoten but our tour guide insisted that was a lie because it’s not a capital, just the biggest city in the area.

We got back late and the ship had porridge treat along with some type of exotic hot drink.