On the first day in Stavanger, Norway, we had a late and delicious breakfast (prepared by our amazing AirBnb host) and went into the city. One of our first stops was the canning museum and there we learned how they can sardines. For me the museum was really cool, here is how they did it:

First they would put a net in the ocean and they would take out the net and take the sardines and put them in buckets, they then would drown the fish in salty water. After that they would thread a rod through their eyes and smoked them. And then they would decapitate them: they would slice there heads off with a big blade (which the guide joked was so sharp they invented sardines with tomato sauce after some ‘accidents’...) They would put them, manually, in cans and seal them with big machines. (First they used manual solder and would produce around 500 cans/day, when they invented a machine to close them they did 1000 per hour, which is around 12,000 cans a day!) Finally, they would put wrapping on and sell them in tin cans. It was super interesting.

After the museum we went to the Workers house. We looked around and then we met a local woman that told us about the house.  She said that there would be 25 PEOPLE ON EACH FLOOR (and each floor was tiny)!! They wouldn’t even have a living room there would be people laying there. Did you know that back in the days if you were > 4 years old, at 6:00 A.M. you would get up and go to school until noon and then you would have lunch and then you would go and work until 11:00pm and finally go home and go to bed? Well it was true. You would have no dinner. Just breakfast and lunch. She told us this story that a women had 3 kids and 2 of them were older than 4 so they went to work already. The other child was 6 months old and so the mom would leave the baby at the house 10 hours a day by itself as she also had to work!!! That blew my mind.

Stavanger is beautiful and we had a great day! 

Here are some of my favorite pictures at the canning museum: