Like Danielle, I'm also basically reviewing the guided tour. At 120 NOK, it covers your entrance to both the Bryggens Museet as well as Det Hanseatiske Museet. Since those are 60 NOK each, you basically get free admission to the Hanseatic Assembly Rooms as well as all the info you get out of the guided tour. Well worth it. And as Danielle points out, you can go back to any of the three museums if you keep your little tour sticker. Your visits are a bit rushed, so this is a nice bonus.
The museum itself is not large. There's a permanent exhibit showing the foundations of some of the original Hanseatic buildings, right where they stood, as well as a few other pieces about the Bryggen area. Upstairs are two other exhibits - as of right now, a small one featuring some interpretive art about the early days of Bergen, and a kind of cool exhibit about shoes. Yes - shoes, including some found in Bryggen.
But the shining star here is the tour. If I had paid 60 NOK for this museum alone, I would probably have been a little let down. But the 120 NOK I paid for the tour was priceless. The guide was incredibly knowledgeable, with excellent English. She was not only able to answer quite a few questions about the Bryggen area and the history, but also some random questions about Norway's western coast. Plus, given that the three museums in question can lack English explanations in a lot of cases, for the non-Norwegian speaker inside of me, this is definitely the best way for me to appreciate the history of the area and the content of the museums.
My one complaint is very tight operating hours. Only open from 10-4 the day I was there, by the time I did the 11am tour, visited another spot, had lunch, and came back to here, there was almost no time left in the day for me to visit what I hadn't seen earlier. read more