Wednesday - day 6 - Sandnes/Stavanger, Norway

On Wednesday, we arrived at Sandnes, Norway. While Sandnes is a fast growing city, Stavanger, about a 40 minute bus ride away, has more interesting places to visit.

We arrived at Sandnes port...

... but decided to take the bus to Stavanger.

We walked through Gamle Stavanger (old town) -- lots of cobblestone streets...

...to get to the canning museum (combined with the printing museum).

The printing museum was combined with the canning museum because printing labels for the cans was an elaborate process.

We learned a number of things in the printing museum, including that, in the 1500s, a printed hymn book cost half a cow and a Bible cost three cows!

They had an activity for children to assemble a book, which I tried doing!

Some of the lithograph printed labels on sardine cans

Examples of cans used

Sardines were primarily packed in these smaller rectangular cans.

One of the workers at the museum, Lisa, gave us a tour through the canning museum area -- this was an oven where the fish would be smoked.

An area where we could try our hands at packing sardines (rubber ones) into cans.

A device that was used to cut the heads off the sardines after they were smoked.

The cans were filled with oil so the product could be sterilized in a machine like a pressure cooker.

The machine next to Lisa attached the tops to the cans. Sardine canning had to have specialized equipment to seal the cans as the cans were rectangular.

As it turns out, Stavanger is no longer canning sardines. Various economic factors in the 1980s caused demand to drop and even combining all the canneries into a single business did not resolve the pricing pressures that they were encountering. So the canning operation was moved to Poland.

This is a company that catches sardines in Norway, sends them to Poland for processing (using the Norway process of smoking the sardines) and canning, and then sends the finished product back to Norway, and out to the world.

We walked down to the harbor area of Stavanger -- there was a Costa cruise ship at the dock (no picture of it) -- much larger ship that ours. We figured Holland America gets a cheaper rate docking at Sandnes (follow the money).

As we headed back to the bus stop, we stopped off at Stavanger Domkirke (Stavanger Cathedral), Norway's oldest cathedral still in continuous use. It was founded around 1125 and completed around 1150. There was an admission charge to go inside, and we were rather pooped, so we elected to head on to the bus.

East end of the cathedral

We had a good time visiting our last stop in Norway.