We passed a few distinct areas, architecturally, as we made our way towards the central public square of Trondheim, Torvet. Further out we’d come across more modern structures while the centre of the city favoured that more traditional Norwegian look with lots of exterior wood panelling in a range of colours. Always, though, you can see that the storeys in Norwegian buildings are quite high and there’s a strong leaning towards upright rectangular windows. If you’ve met many people from Norway then you’ll understand the reason for this: they’re not a short people.

We didn’t spend very long in Torvet, largely because of that persistent weird rain that I’ve mentioned previously. Just enough to be irritating, not enough to get you actually wet, although the ground seemed to maintain evidence of its presence.

There was a very puzzling but aesthetically-pleasing, squat cylinder prominent over a small raised area in the square. It looked like some brutalist hangover from the 1960s or 1970s during a secret communist takeover of Trondheim, but it’s far more modern – 2014 – and is actually a public stage with integrated functionality, a light system in its wonderful canopy, and a delight for the eyes. The backdrop of a McDonalds and a crane, perhaps somewhat less so.

Torvet also contained a tall monument featuring an obelisk, atop which stood a sculpture of Olav Tryggvason, king of Norway from 995 to 1000 C.E. and founder of the city. More interestingly, although I didn’t spot it at the time and so didn’t photograph it, around the base of the obelisk there is a sundial marked out allowing the shadow of the monument to act as a timepiece, although only during the winter months due to its calibration, and therefore only when there’s less sun around.

“Let us raise a monument to the city’s founder that will also be functional, Sven.”

“What a wonderful idea, Eivind. How functional should it be?”

“Not terribly.”

Because of the weather and because we had a destination in mind as we were walking and because we’d not spotted it on the maps before visiting Trondheim and because the maps didn’t really make a big deal of it while we were in Trondheim… deep breath… we failed to realise that there was a place just off the square that would have been of interest to us if we’d known about it. It’s the wooden building below and it’s called Stiftsgården, the official royal residence in Trondheim, and one of the largest wooden buildings in Scandinavia. However, all that being said, the building wouldn’t have been open during our visit to the city – it has a small viewing window in summer – and there’s no photography allowed inside which is the sort of thing that puts me right off places like this. However, should we return to Trondheim in the warmer part of the year then it’s a possibility.

The destination we’d had in mind, coming as no surprise at all to people who know us or who’ve read any of our other visits to places around the world, was a craft ale bar, and in this case it was Habitat. The place was a little sterile in terms of decor and atmosphere but we’ve come to expect that in northern Europe. For cold climates they don’t really embrace cosiness at all. The beer was varied enough and good enough to warrant us staying for three pints each, although that not-quite-drizzle weather certainly helped to persuade us to remain inside too. However, the actual dampener on the occasion was the overall genuinely unfriendly attitude of the staff. A very disappointing surprise as we tend to try to be friendly, ask about the beers, get any recommendations, that sort of thing. No, not here. It felt like we were intruding on the practically empty place. Perhaps they don’t like tourists, and perhaps it was just one of those days. We are due to return to Trondheim in both 2027 and 2028 so we’ll likely give them another chance to not make us feel quite so unwelcome because, after all, craft ales are craft ales.

The river Nidelva runs through Trondheim and there are a few canals off it, one of which we needed to cross to reach the port and bring us in sight of Ambience.

There were a few interesting public art pieces down by the cruise port area of Trondheim. I’m pretty sure the shoes and socks weren’t part of this cultural experience, and I don’t want to think too hard about the implications of just finding them beside a bridge over the water too much. The yellow structure, though, is called What Does The Fjord Say? and it’s a 2015 piece by Stale Sorensen. You can step inside and listen to the sounds of the wind as it’s picked up by the listening horns although we didn’t realise that so didn’t find out for ourselves. Next time. There’s always a next time.

Ørekonkylie is a piece by Ole Rosén and Mari Røysamb and it’s similar in a way to the yellow submarine-inspired artwork nearby with its theme of listening to the sea.

One of the last buildings we passed before getting back aboard our ship was Rockheim, a museum dedicated to Norwegian music. This had been a place on our radar if the weather was too bad to really give Trondheim a good explore simply because it was close to the port and would be something to say we’d been ashore and checked out Norwegian culture. We didn’t visit it on this trip. We might see what it’s like on a future trip to the city but we’re not huge music fans anyway, and that goes doubly so for that of foreign countries. If music is your thing, however, then this looks to be a very convenient tourist option about a minute from your ship if you’re cruising to this part of Norway.

And that wraps up our first time in Trondheim. Museums, a cathedral, some weird rain that never quite got us wet, and craft ale in an unfriendly bar. We liked that it was a pretty flat city so with two more planned trips to Trondheim over the next couple of years we’d like to explore a little more; there’s an old bridge, a small hill, a fortress, and former Nazi submarine bases that we had already earmarked as options for this visit and I’m sure we can find more.

Back on Ambience it was back to the regular relaxation routine of enjoying the sailaway and enjoying some food, drink, and entertainment aboard.

The next post in this series will be a very brief one as it’s a day spent at sea, one highlight of this chance to rest and read being the first sighting of properly snowy mountains in the distance.

We hadn’t known beforehand but there were two types of tickets to gain access to the cathedral, one of which included visits to the royal regalia museum and the archbishop’s palace archaeological museum practically next door. Naturally, we bought tickets to see all three places. You’d be mad not to on your first visit to a city, surely?

Nidaros Cathedral was gorgeously gothic on the outside. As with almost every church you’ll find in Scandinavia, it’s a Lutheran church, so our expectation inside was that it wouldn’t be that grandiose as Lutherans do like their spartan designs. However, the exterior was lovely. While the cathedral claims to date to around 1300 it’s plain to see that the architectural style is far later and, as you’d probably expect, that would be on account of all the times that God failed to intervene in lightning strikes and fires. Or perhaps a very holy church-builder prayed really hard for work in the diocese.

What was very pleasing about Nidaros Cathedral was its interior. As expected, there wasn’t a huge amount of gaudy showiness on display, but it also wasn’t the mostly white, non-distracting, blank canvas we’ve seen in other Lutheran churches when we’ve been travelling. The high nave with its gothic arch-topped supports to the vaulted ceiling was absolutely stunning.

The cathedral had two organs, and the older of the two – which, with its warm tones, stood out quite a bit from all the other cooler design elements – dates to the early eighteenth century, although it required extensive restoration work in 1990s before being put back into use.

We were quite amused at one point to see another couple of visitors to the cathedral trying to stretch over and look down what would turn out to be a well just off one side of the altar space. Our entertainment mostly came from the fact that they’d pushed in front of us to do so then not realised that there was a mirror positioned above the hole that showed exactly what was down there. We didn’t let them know there was an easier way, and I then made a point to stand in front of them several times as they were trying to take photos because churches may be places of forgiveness but my vindictive nature is far stronger.

We liked Nidaros Cathedral and we’d also like the two museums close by that we’d next explore too. The first of those, sadly, I can’t show any photos from. This was the royal regalia museum, showing crowns and capes and various other bits of jewellery of the Norwegian royal family. Very nice, but very much not a thing you’re allowed to photograph and there were people hanging around to make sure you didn’t. A shame, but if you like to ooh and aah over shiny things – perhaps you’re one of this site’s regular corvid readers – then you’d enjoy it.

The archbishop’s palace museum was definitely less palatial than we’d been anticipating from its name, but if you like architecture and archaeology then it’s worth the visit, and we do like those things so that was handy.

Elements of the palace and cathedral from previous incarnations of the buildings were shown, some dating back to the thirteenth century, and I particularly enjoyed the old photographs of restoration work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A lot of the museum was very modern but there were areas that opened up to show some of the ruins of the walls of the original fortified palace.

The last part of the museum that we visited was the mint, where some of the more valuable items were on display, but also part of the original, medieval, tiled floor, and that was probably the highlight of this place.

So, that’s what you get to see for a ticket that includes Nidaros Cathedral and two museums. If you’re not super-interested in archaeology and restoration work, and your main focus is on seeing the prettiest things and taking photos to make everyone you know jealous then you could perhaps limit yourself to just seeing the cathedral. For us, seeing all three places made sense and we’re glad we did so. We didn’t come away from here with a sense that we’d necessarily rush to visit them again any time soon, but they’re definitely worthy of one look.

In the next post in this 2025 Ambience cruise travelogue series we check out the state of Trondheim craft ale on a walk back to the port.

Trondheim looked like it had plenty of things that would interest us, culturally and historically, so we’d decided not to book an excursion here and our intention was to head for some of those places we’d identified ahead of time on foot, with the ship likely to be docked close by. That was the case but on the day we discovered that there was a complimentary shuttle bus service into the city centre and opted to take that instead as we’ve been stung before by thinking something was a short, easy walk only to grossly underestimate it. We would end up walking back later in the day and Trondheim is actually a largely flat, reasonably easy city to traverse on foot, even for people as generally unfit and prone-to-injury as us.

From our balcony on Ambience we could see across the water to a small island, Munkholmen. It’s apparently a popular tourist site here in Trondheim with a history that includes being a site of execution (with severed heads placed on poles to warn people), then a Benedictine monastery, a fort and prison, and finally the site of air defences used by the Germans during their occupation in World War II to protect the submarine base they’d built in the city. In fact, the submarine base had been on our list of places to visit while in Trondheim but we skipped it on this occasion, not being sure we’d have enough time to make our way there. We would have, and it’s on the list for one of the times when we’re due to return, either in 2027 or 2028.

Ambience had the main cruise port berth on our visit to Norway but another ship was visiting on that day, AIDAsol, and she was given the secondary berth a little further away from the main part of the city.

The free shuttle bus dropped us off near the city centre, although I don’t quite recall where. We’d earmarked a half dozen or so places we were interested in potentially visiting. as I’ve said, but with four of them in close proximity to each other and all less than five minutes’ walk away, that’s the direction we headed.

The first place we stopped – and this will come as no surprise to you if you’ve read the title of this post or been looking for it on the web and somehow actually ended up here despite modern search engines’ best efforts to stop all that in favour of invented garbage summaries – was the Trondheim Art Museum, or Kunstmuseum if you’re feeling reckless and not afraid of accidentally swearing in front of Norwegians.

The museum housed a mix of classic and modern art, in a mix of media styles. There’s not a lot to really say about the art museum because the works there will change periodically, and you’re either going to like some of what you see or you won’t. I don’t think anyone can ever truly say they will definitely love everything in a place like this or that they will hate it all without actually seeing it with an open mind. There were pieces we enjoyed and pieces that did little for us, but there were some standout items and I’ll point out a couple of those amongst the photos from the museum below.

Portrait of Solicitor Ludvig Meyer below, painted in 1892, was notable for being by Edvard Munch. It’s always nice to see other artwork from an artist typically known for one or two more famous pieces, and it’s great when you can get up close to something like this.

We liked the tapestry below because its simple form reminded us of a primitive-style, abstract artwork we picked up in Chile several years earlier. The work is called Ei Heks and it’s by Swedish-born feminist artist, Hannah Ryggen, whose art was often anti-fascist in nature. At the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris one of Hannah’s pieces, Ethiopia, was displayed next to Picasso‘s famous work, Guernica, but part of the tapestry was covered by a sheet as it depicted a spear piercing the head of Mussolini.

There was a room filled with war-themed art that I found very evocative. I’ve no idea how much of it is part of a permanent exhibition or how much was temporary and I spent more time looking at the details of artworks there than anywhere else.

One of our favourite pieces on display in the Trondheim Art Museum was a Hill House chair by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. A classic design piece, and nice to see something with an Art Nouveau connection again given that we’d just come from Ålesund which was awash with the style.

Trondheim Art Museum wasn’t huge but it had some lovely pieces. Whether you’d like it or not really depends on the sort of person you are and what’s actually on display on the day, but we enjoyed our visit.

In the next part of this series we pop around the corner and check out the cathedral and a couple of other museums in Trondheim, because you can never visit too many museums.

I took some photos of some of the other vessels in the port and that’s not because I have any keen interest in fishing boats or scientific exploration ships or anything like that, not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. Instead, my social media life mainly resides on Mastodon because all the other platforms are right-wing, algorithm-driven, tracking cesspits that will sell you and your family down the river. Amongst other great things that take place on Mastodon there are regular photo themes and ships do feature in one. It’s why I also take a lot of pictures of windows and doors as well.

If you’ve read the write-up about our walk up to Storhaugen then the photo below gives you some idea of the slope of the road leading to part of it with the very distinctive church and the primary school in custard yellow easily identified.

We stayed out on our balcony as Ambience departed, enjoying the island landscapes and more distant mountain ranges, more vessels along the shorelines, and the houses built to take advantage of all the scenery.

Eventually we lost some of the shelter that the islands had provided and the chilly wind drove us back inside for warming showers and the chance to get dressed for the evening.

Tonight was one of the speciality dining evenings we’d booked, this being for Sea & Grass, a seven course tasting menu. A tasting menu can be problematic as not every course suits everyone – I’m not a fan of cheese or mushrooms, for instance – but the courses are usually small enough that this isn’t that big an issue. We had no complaints about the venue or the meal, both of us eating everything we were given or chose, and finding it all prepared well, warm, and tasty. As a speciality dining meal it was very nice and worth the additional charge, but neither of us thought it was something that we’d do again. In this respect it felt a little like the dining options on a Virgin cruise in that there’s no issue with the meal quality, but also not enough variety or chance to switch it around, or no single outstanding element, that encourages return visits.

If the Sea & Grass menu choices and photos of the meal below look even vaguely interesting to you then this is certainly something worth trying on an Ambassador cruise.

Five macarons rounded off the meal and they were some of the nicest macarons we’ve ever had – my wife has a thing for macarons – but the number confused us. Why would you serve an odd number of these to an even number of people? Is there a macaron tradition of seeing if a fight can develop or making the most mess out of trying to split the odd one evenly?

In the next post in this 2025 Ambassador Ambience series we push further north into Norway than we’ve ever done before and arrive at our first new Norwegian port of the cruise, Trondheim, where we start the day with a visit to the art museum.

In the first post about our 2025 visit to Ålesund on our Ambassador Ambience cruise to Norway we’d walked up Storhaugen on Aspøya, the smallest of the main islands making up the city. Following on from our lovely time in the Jugendstil Centre, still on Aspøya, we next crossed over the small stretch of water linking that island to the larger island of Nørvøya. This is the island with the larger hill of Aksla but we had no intention of seeing if we could ascend the several hundred steps to reach its viewing point because one of us – me – didn’t want to be killed by the other one of us – my wife.

Our goal on Nørvøya was threefold: see if there were any interesting shops, eat up some time until the brewery we wanted to visit was open, and – something we only spotted on the map on the day – head for another couple of museums. Naturally, there would be lots of views of the architecture on the way but there are other posts about this sort of thing on this site so I will keep that to a minimum.

We spotted a sculpture of a sister and brother. The subject matter wasn’t terribly interesting to us but the sculptor, Odd Hilt, is worth mentioning. During Norway’s occupation by the Germans in World War II he was imprisoned in the Falstad concentration camp, a place originally destined to be part of the Nazi eugenics programme but later turned into a political prison camp. Hundreds were killed in the camp but Hilt escaped after a year and made it to safety in Sweden where we worked in exile. The sculpture was donated to Ålesund in 1961.

The first of the museums we were looking for was the general city museum but that turned out to be closed so we carried on towards the second.

The second museum was also closed – and we weren’t the only people who walked up to it, tried the door handle, peered in the windows, and muttered “Bugger” – but since the building itself was the main attraction I did at least bother to take a photo.

Waldehuset is significant in that it was a building that did not burn to the ground in the 1904 fire that destroyed Ålesund and led to the rebuild in the Art Nouveau form of Jugendstil that’s prominent to this day. You can read a little more about that fire and the rebuilding in my write-up of the first time we visited this city a few years earlier: Ålesund And Some Architectural History. There’s a story attached to the building in that the owner was, ahem, visited by an angel the day before the fire and told the house would be spared from the inferno to come, but that he took furniture out of the house to be certain. While the house survived, all the furniture went up in flames as some sort of punishment for only partially trusting a vision. Sure, Jan. Forewarning of a fire by a celestial entity to a single person who then gives nobody else the heads up before their homes and belongings are burned to the ground is not the feel-good, makes-you-think-there’s-a-god-after-all story some people seem to think it is. It would’ve been nice to have had a look around, though, just to see what a rare nineteenth-century building in Ålesund looked like. Perhaps next time.

With no open museums to eat up our time we fell back to more street-wandering at a sedate pace plus a little bit of shopping. We like jigsaws and found a nice one – not a cheap one; that’s Norway for you! – of a cruise ship in the fjords that we had to buy. For the most part, though, we were picking streets at random and snapping photos of the more interesting-looking buildings or sculptures.

Behind the deer sculpture below you can see some steps leading up. These are known as The Thousand Steps because there are fifty-three of them. It makes sense if you’ve no understanding of how numbers work. Regardless of how many steps there were, we didn’t climb them as they would only have taken us to a hilly road we’d already strolled along when looking for souvenirs.

Eventually, enough time had passed that we could head towards the ship, but not to actually board it. The ship would still remain in port for another couple of hours and we had no rush to get back on. It’s not just a thirst for knowledge that we have.

Incredibly close to where Ambassador Ambience was docked at Nørvøya, Ålesund, there was a brewery: Molo Brew. When we’d visited this port a few years earlier we’d hit a pub and tried some Norwegian beers, but they were mass-produced Norwegian beers. Fine at the time, but we’d overlooked that there was an actual brewery within shouting distance of where the cruise ships tie up. Craft ales is where our hearts lie and we were pleased to see that this sentiment was shared by about a dozen other passengers from our ship as we all filed into the large drinking space not long after it had opened. We stayed for a couple of pints each plus a pint glass of peanuts too (which was very nearly sensible of us). Lovely brewery, lovely beers, and a place we’ll hit again in Ålesund if we’re ever there and it’s open.

The next post in this cruise travelogue series will see us return to the ship, enjoy views of the sail-out from Ålesund, then try some speciality dining aboard Ambience in the evening.

Cruise write-ups tend to start with embarkation day and this is no exception, although the embarkation port was a brand new one for us, going well with the brand new cruise line too. In Ambassador Ambience Cruise: Boarding Day At Tilbury there are details of Tilbury as a cruise port plus photos from a quick look around the ship before we settled in to make use of the drinks package. We’ve said this on numerous occasions since this cruise, but Ambassador Ambience is one of the most beautifully-decorated ships out there once you look past her age and unusual shape.

It’s fairly common on cruises to follow up embarkation day with one spent at sea and that’s what we got on Ambience, the details of which you can read about in Sea Day And Formal Night On Ambassador Ambience.

Our first port of call on the cruise should have been Haugesund but wind conditions caused a last-minute change to a second day in a row on the ship, although rather than spend it at sea we were treated to scenic cruising along Hardangerfjord and this was a spectacular upgrade in our experience as we’ve visited Haugesund before and it’s a port that’s largely in the one-and-done camp for us.

Back in 2013 we’d taken our first cruise to Norway and on that cruise the first port had been Bergen, which we’d not visited since until last year on Ambience. The first of two posts from the city covers a walk around the harbour in search of an aquarium and a craft ale bar. We found both on a bright, sunny day that was quite a contrast to when we’d last been there twelve years earlier.

We had an overnight stay in Bergen with an early morning departure followed by a day at sea next.

The next port that Ambience docked at was Ålesund and we began our day here with a walk up the reasonably small hill of Storhaugen which still managed to provide great views over the city and out to the surrounding mountainous landscapes.

The final cruise-related post published on the site to this point then provides an account of our visit to the Jugendstil Centre which showcases some of the architecture and decorative pieces produced in this offshoot of Art Nouveau. If you like the sound of an intricately-decorated, early twentieth century teapot then this post features a photo of one.

One other post has made an appearance on the site since the last of these blog or newsletter updates, and that’s one simply showing some photos of water-based activities around Chichester Canal taken in 2011, when I used to work nearby. Occasional visitors to this site or subscribers to the newsletter may know that I like to break up the stream of travel content with posts from across the years every now and then. Keep everyone on their toes.

Onto the brief review of our short P&O Ventura cruise now, and it will be considerably shorter than normal. Even the full write-up, when I get around to it, will be fairly concise (for me), and that’s mostly going to concentrate on the port stop we had with little taken around the ship, partly because it was a family-friendly cruise with lots of kids around and I tend to keep my camera away for these.

We booked this cruise fairly late, only becoming aware that it was a possibility that wouldn’t eat up any annual leave when we heard that a friend and her daughter were going, and it was a three-night cruise to Belgium, docking in Zeebrugge as Belgian cruises do, and doing this on the last day so that the first full one aboard would be a sea day. We’d not been happy about that aspect of it, to be honest, because this made the day we were actually in Belgium a Monday, and it turns out that the things we like to do – museums, for instance – are closed on Mondays.

So, no drinks package, no overwhelming urge to visit Bruges or Ghent or even Blankenberge again, but this led us to looking into just what else we could do, and so we hopped on the tram in the opposite direction to most people, ending up spending several hours in the seaside town of Knokke-Heist. However you’re pronouncing that name, you’re probably wrong if you’re not from the area. Knokke (for short) was nice, but lacking in enough of great appeal for a return visit. Lovely beach, though, a lake you could almost see over the reeds, loads of art galleries (closed, because it was a Monday) and public artworks, and a fabulous bar near the tram station where we had a couple of red beers before heading back.

As for Ventura herself, she was in great condition, the captain’s announcements were often amusing, and the ship had really good staff aboard. P&O’s staff have been a bit cold and aloof in the past but that certainly wasn’t the case on this cruise. The staffing levels were good enough to make getting drinks a quick and easy affair too, and I wonder how much of that was down to this being a short cruise with a lot of first-timers and no drinks package availability, and the inevitable increase in drinking (and profit) to be expected. Cynical me wonders that, anyway. We’re hoping it stays the same when we’re on Ventura at the very end of October, but we shall see.

One thing we’re hoping changes on that cruise in October/November is a kitchen full of new chefs. With the exception of the buffet breakfast items the food was either dry, the wrong temperature, tasteless, or all three, and some main dining room dishes were so unbalanced in ingredients that they bore little resemblance to the menu descriptions. A meal with “avocado puree” for example, had so little of it that I would guess no more than two avocados had been pureed to serve the entire ship. Speciality dining on the first night in the Beach House barely reached average levels, but at least there was a promotion on with a free bottle of wine to soothe that particular irritation.

We’d booked an inside cabin for the first time since our very first cruise eighteen years earlier and it was okay. It still wouldn’t be our preference, but the room was spacious and in a quiet location of the ship, deck 14, forward. Carpets were definitely new, but still no USB sockets anywhere despite this year’s refit for the ship.

As mentioned, with a lot of families aboard for this end-of-the-summer short cruise I barely took any photos of the ship or had a look around to see what else had been obviously upgraded, but, as I’ve also said, we will be back on Ventura in a couple of months and it’ll be a longer cruise with a different demographic and more opportunity to hit all the venues properly. For us, for this cruise, it was just an excuse to get away for a few days and it was nice to experience a new part of Belgium to explore in the process. Plus we learned how to use the trams, which we’d not done before, and that may come in handy as we’re revisiting Belgium early next year so options to explore further still now open up.

The people we spoke to aboard were very friendly, and we got to meet Mark and Elliot, a couple of other reasonably well-known cruise bloggers, too, spending several hours on both of the first two nights chatting. The only other thing of note was that we did spectacularly well in the trivia contests, winning three of the four we took part in. What I do like about P&O is that their trivia prizes are actually good and worth winning (Princess, I’m looking at you here) and we ended up coming back with a P&O-branded highball glass, two power banks, a champagne bottle stopper, a pen and keyring set, and a card game. We actually won two of those card games and gave one away to the team who’d marked our papers for that second win.

So, the ship and cruise were better than we’d anticipated in all respects other than food. We’d have liked for the itinerary to have had us in Belgium on the Sunday with the sea day after so that more places of interest to us would have been open in port, but it wasn’t to be. Overall, though, a good time was had.

There’s one other thing to announce in this update, and that’s that we have booked another cruise – who’d have guessed? – and that will be on a ship we’ve cruised on three times already, but not since 2022.

In 2028 we’ll be getting back on Sky Princess. We found a good deal for one of Sky’s actual decent-sized balconies (this class of ship doesn’t have many) on an itinerary that will see us hit Spain, France, and Italy – including a couple of new ports for us – on a two-week cruise. Quite a few sea days at the start and end with the port activity all in the middle, so a chance to fully relax ahead of and after all the exploring ashore.

A fair way off yet, but it’s always nice to have something – or many somethings in our case – to look forward to.

That will do for this update. The next one will likely feature just updates of more published posts from our Ambassador Ambience cruise because we daren’t book anything else.

Ålesund is a place to come for early twentieth century architecture and we admired much of it on the walk down to the city centre. Art Nouveau, but not quite Art Nouveau.

If you’ve read the previous post in this series covering our 2025 cruise aboard Ambassador Ambience then you’ll have rolled your eyes as I droned on about the geography of Ålesund and how we’d docked on one of its islands, Nørvøya, then crossed over the short bridge to the smallest of its islands, Aspøya, when heading up the hill. We would be staying on Aspøya while visiting the museum but since I took a photo of the waterway that separates the two islands at this point, below you can see just how close the islands really are and what’s involved in crossing from one to the other.

The museum we were interested in was Jugendstilsenteret, or the Jugendstil Centre. It’s a building that’s hard to miss if you’re visiting, and it was the first listed building relating to the Jugendstil movement in the city, earning this accolade in 1984. The building itself – a pharmacy originally – was built between 1905 and 1907, like most of the rest of the city, and if you want to delve into the reasons for that, as well as what separates Jugendstil from the closely-related Art Nouveau movement, then I covered it more fully in our first visit to Ålesund a few years earlier (see: Ålesund And Some Architectural History), but the very abbreviated version is: big fire followed by rebuilding assistance from Kaiser Wilhelm.

The Jugendstil Centre is not a large museum but it has some lovely pieces on display in its rooms. A few photos here will whet your appetite if this is the sort of place you think you might be interested in visiting while in Ålesund. Given the relatively small size of the city then if you’re not heading off on an excursion – assuming you’ve arrived on a cruise ship – then it’s probably the main attraction for people who like to learn a little when they travel. Other people like to shop or drink or walk, and if that’s you then that’s fine too, but since you’ve found this page (somehow, given the terrible state of searching online these days) then it would seem you’re carrying a keen mind in your head, and the architectural and art centre is worth some of your time and money in my opinion. I have great opinions.

There was plenty of silverware and brooches on show, the former being of interest to my father-in-law and the latter being of interest to my mother-in-law (with one brooch we saw looking almost identical to something she owns), so my wife took lots of pictures to send to them in an attempt to encourage them to visit here at some future point. They’ve actually since booked a cruise to this part of the world and will be stopping in Ålesund so they’re bound to pop into the museum now. This officially makes us influencers.

I adored the intricate detailing on the following two pieces we saw in the Jugendstil Centre, and the teapot particularly. Small, yes, but I bet it pours a wonderful cup of tea.

The Jugendstil Centre includes a small shop and a café and we spent money in both of them. The café was a bit weird, appearing to work on the honour system where you sorted yourself out then popped back to the entrance to tell the people what drink you’d made and what cookie you’d eaten.

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we do a bit more wandering around, exploring more of the streets of Ålesund until such time as the brewery near the port opens.

Before looking at the city, here’s the view from the top deck of Ambience looking southwards on this cool, ever-so-slightly damp day in Norway. The distant, snowy mountain range is known as the Sunnmøre Alps.

We had two things we actually wanted to do during this day in Ålesund: visit a particular museum; and have some local ales in a microbrewery near the port. Neither of those things could be done immediately as both locations opened later in the day, with the museum opening mid-morning and the brewery mid-afternoon. So this meant we needed to kill a little bit of time first and we’d already identified an early possibility.

Let’s talk about the geography of Ålesund. It’s considered to be mainly spread over three close-connected islands, these being, from west to east, Hessa, Aspøya, and Nørvøya. As a cruise ship visitor you’re more likely to only really see the latter two of these as the city centre is grouped around the narrow stretch of water and marina area that separates them. The largest island, Nørvøya, can be seen in the photo below, and it’s the one with the hilly Aksla viewpoint, a popular destination for people wanting the grandest views over the city. Cruise ships dock at Nørvøya, very close to the vehicle and pedestrian bridges that cross over the narrow strait to the smallest island, Aspøya. Aspøya has its own hilly viewpoint, albeit a far smaller one, and that’s where we would be heading instead. If you’ve read about our time in Bergen then you’ll know that my wife had an old injury flare up while walking up a road there so any further form of strenuous walking wasn’t really advisable, but it doesn’t feel like we’re truly been on a cruise unless she’s grimacing in pain and telling me to shut the fuck up when I ask her if she’s coping okay at some point. Even if we’d both been in great physical shape – for us – then Aksla on foot would not have been an option. We’re not natural climbers.

We headed ashore for a morning that would be accompanied by that faintest of drizzles you can only really feel on your skin as a cold, prickly mist, not see.

We almost immediately came upon a grand example of Jugendstil architecture, the Germanic form of Art Nouveau that dominates the city thanks to its history. If you’ve read our previous visit to Ålesund, or if you wait to read the next post in this series when we visit the museum dedicated to the architectural movement, then you’ll know that a city-wide fire in the early years of the twentieth century is the reason for this look. The building is the Arbeideren Kulturhus, a cultural centre and theatre.

As we came to Hellebroa, the short road bridge connecting the islands of Nørvøya and Aspøya, we passed by a World War I mine – presumably defused – that had been set up in the city in 1920 as a spot to collect money for relatives of lost seamen.

No matter the weather, Norway’s mountainous landscapes are just stunning.

The viewpoint we were heading for on Aspøya was Storhaugen, and while it was up, as viewpoints tend to be, it wasn’t too up with easy-to-ascend roads and pavements. I wouldn’t necessarily want to do this sort of thing in icy conditions, but on this day, with it also not being too hot, it wasn’t exactly pleasant (for us), but it wasn’t a troubling bit of walking either.

We passed a few buildings of note on the slow trek up the hill. Ålesund Church, you won’t be surprised to hear if you know anything about the state of religion in the Nordic countries, is Lutheran. It didn’t appear to be open as we passed by on the way up and the way down but if it had been then we’d have popped inside for a look at its likely fairly utilitarian innards, just because that’s the sort of thing that nosey people like us do. The bright yellow building is a primary school, built about a decade after most of the rest of the city and therefore shifting architecturally from the more common Jugendstil to Neo-Baroque. For a time during World War II it was used as a warehouse and accommodation for occupying German forces.

You know you’re at a place of some interest if you see a sign with the distances and directions to various destinations around the world. Storhaugen is just a tad under seventeen thousand kilometres from the south pole. You never know when that information will come in handy.

The views over Ålesund and the surrounding area from Storhaugen may not have been as wide-ranging as those from Aksla – we don’t know; we’ve never been – but they were still lovely and provided a full 360 degrees of distant landscapes and waterways to admire.

We could see Ambassador Ambience back in port – and we could even see our balcony cabin; one of the square balconies a couple of decks straight up from the A of Ambassador – and cruising law required us to take a photo, post it on our Instagram page, and tag the company, so that’s what we did.

There was a cylindrical stone pillar at the top of Storhaugen but we never did discover if there was any special significance to it, or if it was decorative, or marked the highest elevation, or was functional in some way. Still, who doesn’t like a mysterious pillar?

In the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll head down but stay on the island of Aspøya as we visit the Jugendstil Museum to learn some more about the history of the rebuild of Ålesund and see some examples of items produced in the art movement.

The day ashore had been bright, clear, warm (for Norway), and sunny, but our day of departure was cloaked in cloud cover. We still admired the views as we left port, though, even if there wouldn’t be much in the way of fjord-like scenery to pass on this itinerary given that we were following the coastline north for the most part.

We’d already passed under the Askoy bridge before I’d had a chance to grab my camera. Cruise people like to sail under bridges. It’s something you’ll enjoy too if you’ve never cruised before. And you’ll wave to people on the shore and people on other ships as you pass by. You won’t be able to help yourself.

As you might be able to tell from the photos above, there are lots of geological features to admire in the rocky shoreline and islands that mark the passage out from Bergen but. as with all the ports on the western coast of Norway, you won’t get that complete wow factor that happens when you head inland and down the narrower fjords. And on this particular day the flat colours of the grey sky reflected in the calm waters didn’t add a lot of drama either.

We would be spending the rest of the day on the ship as she slowly headed out to sea and up towards the next day’s port of call and there’s a tiny chance that you might be interested in seeing what a daily programme of events for a sea day on an Ambassador Cruise Line ship looks like, so here’s what we had on offer.

One thing not in the plans for the day was the possibility of rough sea conditions as evidenced by the appearance of comfort bags dotted around Ambience. We’re fortunate in that – to date, at least – we’ve never suffered from any sea sickness. In fact, we love a nice rough sea and the rocking and rolling of the ship when it happens. If the ship never felt like it was moving then it may as well be a hotel. Unfortunately for us, though probably welcomed by some aboard the ship, there was very little noticeable movement on this sea day and the presence of the bags was unwarranted.

You can do as much or as little as you like when you cruise. If you need the ship to entertain you and provide activities then there will be opportunities throughout the day, but it’s ultimately up to you what you do and how much you do. For us, other than the trivia, we’re usually content to simply find somewhere to read and that’s mostly what we did.

We spent part of the morning in the bright and airy Botanical Lounge, in part because the lighting made reading easiest here given the grey day outside. Like all the lounges on Ambassador Ambience, the Botanical Lounge was double-height, making it feel like a proper place to come, designed for that purpose, and not somewhere wedged into a deck somewhere. The lounge’s aesthetic was that of a traditional orangery with some pale, warm tones and splashes of greenery.

While we were in the Botanical Lounge we got talking to a Belgian guy which initially surprised us because some cruise lines are definitely international in feel, attracting people from all over the world, while others are far more domestic, leaning heavily and almost exclusively on their home nation for passengers. Ambassador’s British-based ships certainly fall into that latter category and we’d not expected to bump into anyone coming from abroad to take the trip. However, there was a very good reason in this case because the Belgian guy’s dad had always wanted to see the Northern Lights on a cruise but also had some serious health issues. One thing that sets Ambassador apart from many other lines is that they have a dedicated medical facility that provides dialysis services on both Ambience and Ambition.

Below there’s a view of the central atrium spanning three decks on Ambience. As central spaces on ships go it’s a large one with the usual array of coffee shops, bars, guest services, and shops hanging around it, but we didn’t spend an awful lot of time here on this cruise, preferring the more stylish lounges elsewhere.

Dinner that evening was another perfectly fine meal with some great service from the staff. We generally found the food on Ambience to be good, never quite veering into great, but perfectly fine, as I’ve already said, and never had an issue with taste, quality, or temperature.

We spent some time after dinner back in the Botanical Lounge to catch a set from the Albert Duo – who were absolutely, definitely a pair of undercover international hitmen – and followed that up with one of the most talented pianists we’ve ever experienced listening to on a cruise ship, Alex Dennis, in Raffles.

The sea day from Bergen concluded, like most days on Ambience for us, in the captured UFO that served as the ship’s gorgeous nightclub, The Observatory.

In the next post in this series we’ll arrive at the port of Ålesund where we begin with a walk up the hill Storhaugen for some views over the city.