Let’s stop making Bergen something strange and curious

It’s just a city.

“Bergen, for me you are not a city, but a state in my soul.”

The Immortal Doctor by Ole Paus the chorus is often seen as a tribute.

But imagine if Bergen could only be allowed to be a city. To be the most ordinary place it really is.

Last week still came a new group of students to Bergen. Many will only be here for as long as they are studying. They will then move back to Oslo, where they will continue a long tradition of remembering their studies in Bergen.

They will remember all the rainy days. Or maybe they’re the type who just thinks about what it was like when the sun came up. They want to think about the reading room, the parties, as we all do.

But please, students, when you ever look back, don’t think it was Bergen. That what you saw was everything.

Last year i met a former student from Bergen, at a party in Oslo. The obligatory reminiscence began, and she counted several times that she has visited the Bergen site.

And then he said:

“No, Bergen is fine. But it is good to have your adult life in Oslo.”

That’s the way it is sometimes at parties, but just for mentioning it – it was incredibly rude to say it. It’s like visiting people who live in blocks and saying, “It’s good to have an apartment, but it’s good to be an adult and have your own home.”

When it comes to Bergen, it is allowed to be klæssetryne. VG commentator Hans Petter Sjøli, for example, chose in 2017 to publish a text about how little walking around Nygårdshøyden gave him, 20 years after being a student.

“It was nice to be able to pass, but it will be good to leave you again.

Well, thank you the same.

That can be said about Bergen because the whole city is often reduced to a caricature of itself. The exercise is extremely simple. You need a dash of broad dialect, a good handful of inferiority complex, big mood swings, glacial flab, and then add 363 days of rain a year. There you have Bergen.

You can live in such a city for several years to study. You can walk around Nygårdshøyden, like a little Agnar Mykle or Knausgård. Trample the melancholy in the rain and drink the sorrows. But then you have to grow up and move east.

Because nobody wants to live in a city that is a magazine sketch about itself. People want a career and be serious. They studied law and earned a master’s degree from NHH.

We can diverge not all was due to the arrogant people of Oslo. Those of us who live and work in Bergen must bear our share of the blame. We always feed our own parody and think it’s a bit festive that we argue about everything. We say that Bergen is the most beautiful city in the world, although we know that it is not exactly the ancient Rome in which we splash.

Imagine if we could show that Bergen is a completely ordinary adult city, with ordinary adult problems that ordinary adults have to solve.

Maybe then they could take us seriously, and not just be a city that people are proud to have left because it grew up.

But to all the dives who drew:

Some of us have our adult lives in Bergen. And no matter how incredible it may sound, it is a completely normal experience.

We go to our more or less interesting jobs, pick up at kindergarten, drink beer and talk about the world and watch series at night. Very few of us usually “go man” in everyday speech. Very few of us walk around Torgallmenningen and shout “HALLAIEN” to people from the east and west.

Bergen is not a state in someone’s soul.

Bergen is a pretty good city to live adult life.