The Gift of Letting It Go: A Weekend in Bergen

Bergen-Mostraumen Fjord Tour

After my first week in London, I published a post about being disturbed from usual routines: disorientation and a bit of chaos characterized much of my first impression of study abroad. I found that amidst great transition, the Eucharist provided me with a sense of routine and adventure within that routine as I adjusted to life in London.

Almost halfway through the semester now, various routines have newly developed or fallen out of my life as I’ve adapted to life in a big city. I don’t run as much as I like to on campus while here, but all of the walking in and around central London has grounded me in healthy movement. I don’t grocery shop on a certain day or time, but consistently keep my fridge and shelves stocked with classic Katie foods – including hummus, arugula (aka “rocket” in London), and digestives (wafer-like tea cookies) – from the same grocery store down the street. I shower, have a cup of tea, and do some reading for class each morning when I wake up. I pray the Angelus each day around noon, attend Adoration on Thursdays, and celebrate Mass on Sundays, but locations and/or times tend to differ for these special spiritual moments.

While studying abroad, “routine” has become a much more fluid word for me: it means comfort and organization, but with flexibility added in. It means being more patient with myself, and more adventurous in my relationship to the world. This semester, I have found it extremely important to become more go-with-the-flow when it comes to routine, and have found a great balance somewhere between organization and spontaneity.

While I have simply adapted routines during the week from life on campus while in London, weekends are an entirely different story. At Notre Dame, I would typically schedule several fun events, meals, etc. throughout the weekend as study breaks, and spend lots of time doing homework, regrouping from the previous week, and preparing for the week ahead outside of scheduled-in “fun time.” This semester, weekends are nonexistent if defined by homework, regrouping, and preparing. My weekends here are dedicated to travel. Exploration. Getting kind of lost somewhere in Europe and then discovering pieces of myself there.

Travel planning is an extremely intimidating, abstract idea when one has had little previous exposure to it; the first time I sat down to plan a weekend away from London with a group of friends, I had little to no idea what I was doing. I had composed a list of places I wanted to visit this semester, and did not plan on straying much from that list of famous cities and usual study abroad student destinations. But on a whim, we decided to try to see the Northern Lights. We flitted around online from Skyscanner to AirBnB to Lonely Planet to Hostel World. We found Bergen, Norway. I had never heard of Bergen, Norway, and neither had any of my travel companions. What was the first trip I ever scheduled on my own, independent of my family? A weekend in Bergen, Norway.

The city of Bergen from above

Our time in Bergen this past weekend was absolutely magical, even though our original dream of seeing the Northern Lights did not happen. In fact, once we began planning our trip in more detail, we realized traveling further north from Bergen in order to see the lights was completely a nonissue for us, since the gem of the town we discovered in Bergen had so much to offer on its own. We were blessed with gorgeous weather and a beautiful AirBnB to stay at that we happened upon online back when we first sat down to plan and found affordable plane tickets to a city in Norway none of us had ever heard of before. We took a boat tour of fjords, shared a meal on top of a mountain overlooking the city, and celebrated Mass in Norwegian among a couple hundred Bergen locals. We ate fresh shrimp from a fjord-side market, navigated our way around a foreign public transportation system, and learned how to convert American dollars and English pounds to Norwegian krones and vis versa. We even watched the movie Frozen during our stay, which is set in an environment based on Norway’s breathtaking fjords. A weekend that seemed completely random when we first planned it turned out to be one of my most adventurous, exciting, fulfilling experiences of the semester so far.

The random way that this weekend came about made our time together in Bergen all the much sweeter. While weekend traveling is not conducive to maintaining any sort of consistent routine from Thursday nights through Sunday evenings here, the adventure that comes from not being wed to any particular routine is extremely empowering. I just returned from my third weekend out of five travel weekends in a row. This lifestyle would have sounded insane and chaotic to the me that had not studied abroad yet, but it is lifegiving and beautiful to the me who has learned, like Elsa from Frozen, to say “let it go.”

Our view of spectacular Bergen and accompanying fjords from Mount Fløyen