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This was a trip for the University of the Arctic, of which I am the "Director of the International Office," a title which may someday mean something but which, for now, just means that the UArctic desperately wants a means of keeping student records across eight countries and I was volunteered to run the office and they expect me to Make It Work. We're not there yet, but there may be a way... To set the scene, Svalbard is an arctic archipelago under the protection of Norway and, at nearly 80 degrees north, contains the most northerly non-military human communities on earth. By the time we arrived, the sun had set about two weeks previously, and would not be seen above the horizon until the end of February. It's dark, and it's also cold. We were in Longyearbyen, the largest community at about 1,100. The Climate
The use of a watch was completely theoretical. It told you when to be where but bore no relationship to what was going on outdors. In fact, the sky lightened just slightly at noon - though you could still see stars overheard - but in a week or two even that would be gone. Every morning at 6:30 I would wake and look out my window, to see people walking their babies in carriages, or standing around talking, or heading out on errands; and that was how it was for every hour of day and night as far as I could tell, except that it did get busier during working hours. LanguageEverybody spoke English, no matter where we met them. Our own meeting was a mixture of English, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and Russian; but English was the working language except at breaks, where you never knew what you were going to hear. Traffic
Our glacier guides (see below) told us that the sport of choice for the local yahoos is referred-to as "highmarking" - where you ride your snowmobile as hard as you can straight up the mountain and see who gets the farthest up before the machine tips backwards onto you. The winner, of course, is the one with the high mark. Hotel Accommodations
Things to Eat (and drink)
They started with champagne, and once we were seated preceded the meal with an appetizer wine (the 1996). This was followed by the entrée and another red wine, the meal being followed by liqueurs and finally cognac. Now to the entrée: we had, that evening, ptarmigan over Svalbard reindeer. For those of you who have tried elk, reindeer is much like that only even finer. Interestingly, that afternoon we had seen a herd of local reindeer grazing through the snow inside the town limits (the Norwegians exchanged glances: "Mmmm, dinner."). Svalbard reindeer are a subspecies of the Lapland variety, with very short legs, and stout bodies carrying the most massive antlers I have ever seen. Anyway, it's not very often that I go to bed in an alcoholic haze, but I was not alone on this occasion. I recall staggering out of bed for a 3 a.m. for a male mid-life trip to the washroom, and needing to support myself to and from the bed :). By morning (thanks to the dry air and plenty of fluid intake?) I was fine again. Shopping
The grocery store was noteworthy in that, just inside the door, there is a large gun rack where patrons can deposit their weapons while shopping (See "Weaponry," below). Generally speaking and as a rule of thumb, anything you might want to buy is twice as expensive as anywhere else. WeaponryIn Prince George the neighbourhood signs say "This neighbourhood adjoins bear habitat. Please take care not to put out garbage until the morning of pickup." In Longyearbyen the signs say "If you plan on leaving the town boundary, be sure to carry your weapon and know how to use it." This, of course, was because of the polar bears. We didn't see any, but they do take the danger quite seriously. The local schoolyards are stoutly fenced to keep the wildlife out rather than to keep the children in. People carry rifles slung over their shoulders throughout town. I was particularly intrigued to note a high concentration on rifles among the civilian population in the arrivals/departures area of the airport, and nobody seemed to mind. On our outside-town excursion to a glacier (see below) our guides were two young-and-pretty graduate students, one Norwegian and the other Danish, who unslung their rifles at the start of the walk and loaded them before we set off. We were told (and they held us to it) that outside town there had to be a gun at the front of the group and another at the back - no stragglers allowed. One of the locals told us, half-seriously I think, that when camping he preferred a large caliber pistol for dealing with any bears at close quarters, as it had the added advantage that, in extremis, you could use it to put yourself out of your misery ☺. Glaciers
During the summer, when the ice is melting, the river is full of water gushing from water conduits sandwiched between ice and rock. In the winter these dry up with freezing, and you can penetrate the base of the glacier by following the stream beds - which we did for perhaps 200m. Inside the glacier it was fascinating to see the jagged pieces of rock, caught in the ice, that were (when the ice is moving) eroding the glacial valley. In places the ice itself, a plastic under pressure, was impressively flow-banded. Prettiest were the ice-falls turned into cascading icicles, and the ice crystals - some of them several cm long and perfectly six-sided, that adorned the roof. That's it. The trip to and from carried its own interest, but mostly was just pain long. We saw little of Oslo because on each transit we only had an overnight. Another time, though, I would plan to stay a couple of days as from what I saw it's lovely city.
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