Crawling with tourists

Bergen it seems, has opened its floodgates now to the summer tourist flock. Germans, Frenchies, Americans, Brits, Dutchmen, eastern europeans, and the occasional Australian. I was offered up a soup of nationalities and nationality stereotypes yesterday at work. The spanish tourists -"Español, Español!", the rigid unsmiling Russians, the camera toting, tourist headphone wearing japanese, the frenchman in his see-through green mesh muscle shirt which shows off his upper body muscles, but sadly reveals his lack of abdominal muscles and rather fleshy stomach, the enthusiastic American´s who asked me "Snakkar du engelsk?" (if there was really any chance that any Norwegian wouldn´t´speak English), the pensionist Brits who commented on how good my English was ("Oh really?! Do you think so? Thank you! I´ve been practicing hard since I was about 1 year old!"), the bank teller lady from Perth who just complained about the lack of accomodation, the expensiveness of Norway, George Bush, and Bill Clinton (who is visiting Bergen right now), and the nice Norwegian bloke who I chatted to for a good while at work about friluftsliv and the various hiking trips we´ve been on, and the various hiking trips around Bergen I must do whilst I´m here. Oh and the old Germans who speak at me in a babble of German thinking I understand whilst I stand there vaguely nodding my head with a bemused smile painted across my face (I meantioned the war a couple of times, but I think i got away with it!").