Rain
by Lars · 18 June 2026 · Biography & Memoir
Bergen has 250 rainy days. Lars finds sympathy for this confusing — he grew up with it. He describes the horizontal November rain and the rain after sun. Visitors ask what to do when it rains. Everything. There's no other option.
Bergen has around two hundred and fifty days of rain per year. This is a fact that people from other places bring up quite often, usually as a way of expressing sympathy, which I find slightly confusing. I grew up with the rain. It's the weather. The question of whether I mind it is roughly equivalent to asking if I mind gravity.
What I will say is that Bergen rain is specific. It doesn't always come from above. There's a particular horizontal rain that comes in off the Byfjord in November that you notice not because it's wet — you're already wet — but because of the sound it makes against the hood of a jacket. There's also the rain that comes just after the sun comes out, when the street stones steam slightly and the city smells like it just exhaled.
Visitors sometimes ask what there is to do in Bergen when it rains. The answer is everything. There's no other option. You develop a different relationship with being outside.
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