Hopperstad

Yesterday we left our wonderful Melkevoll Bretun and headed south to the town of Eidfjord.

Along the way, we stopped in Vik at the wonderful Hopperstad Stave Church. Norway loves its Stave Churches, and this one dates back to around 1140, which in and of itself is pretty fantastic.

From the outside, it looks terrifically like a Viking ship, and something about that deep dark brown wood and the shape of the church in general against the green of the mountains rising up around it and the dark cloudy sky was just haunting.

A fun fact I learned: the wood of the church doesn’t rot because it is actually standing on top of a stone foundation, and therefore has no actual contact with the ground.

I am used to seeing churches in Europe that are equally as splendid and elaborate inside as they are outside, with high vaulted ceilings, intricate carvings, stained glass windows and massive organs.

The inside of this church, however, was simplicity itself. The ceilings were indeed high, but the inside space was surprisingly small compared with how it looked outside.

There were a few very old paintings, but apart from that, the space was bare. No seating, no windows, just a small very simple altar, and that was it.

I am a big fan of large, beautiful, fancy churches and temples, but there was something quite moving I thought about the simplicity of the whole structure. I am not really a religious person, but it made me think about what this church said about these people who built and used it, and about different people’s ideas were of what was needed in order to be able to commune with God.

To me, the Hopperstad space seemed to suggest that for them, it was more about who they were with, what words of prayer were spoken together, and what was in their hearts and minds than what was in the space of worship.

These are the sheep. The Norway roads are full of all manner of barnyard animals: sheep, cows, goats. Now this in and of itself isn’t unusual for such a landscape, what is unusual is that the sheep, cows and goats all just hang out in the roads. They walk across them, they walk down the middle of them, they sit on them, sometimes they even lie down with their heads on the pavement, right where a front tire would normally travel. And the cars just slow down and go around them.

These animals are fearless in the face of tour buses and caravans. If people stop their car to take a photo of them, they approach the car as if they have been waiting for us to arrive for hours and are just delighted to see us. Either that, or they're just wondering if we happen to be edible.