Walking on a Sunday

As it was Sunday yesterday (our first in Longyearbyen!), I´ll write about our Sunday walk. Not very exciting stuff, I´m afraid, but nothing much else happens here at the moment. And what else to do on a rainy Sunday, but what every true Norwegian do (on a Sunday) - but go for a walk?


We were aiming for the Longyear glacier, which is 3-4 km upvalley. It´s a good spot for finding fossils, or so they say. The weather was like this:

And this. Lovely snow in August.


After struggling uphill against the opposing wind for a couple of kilometers, we gave up on the glacier. The fossils will have to wait.

Instead we decided to settle for "Huset", which those who remember the film "Orions belte", will know was the pub Helge Jordal staggered drunkenly from. It used to be the miners welfare building in the old days, but today it houses the cinema (1 show every Sunday evening), plus a kiosk and an excellent restaurant and bar. We were hoping for cocoa - but it was still closed, too bad.

On the way we passed the church yard. Normally people aren´t buried on Svalbard because of the permafrost (they tend to resurface), but there are 33 people buried here, only 30 cm down. If you´re interested, you´ll find a list of those lying there here.

A few of them are from 1918, they died famously of the Spanish flu.

Another result of the permafrost is that all the pipelines are placed above ground. Kind of ugly, but interesting. They carry water (hot, cold and waste-) and electricity around.

More pipes ... and a reindeer.

They´re everywhere - this one was just outside our front door when we came back.

I suppose I´ll be blasé about them in a few weeks, but right now I think it´s pretty wonderful that there are reindeer strolling around everywhere. Their bodies seem quite compressed and stocky compared to their cousins on the main land - they look like they would be no match for a polar bear. But apparently they´ve got more stamina than the bears, and can outrun them.

We got our cocoa (and cakes) at the café downtown (that is, at the "Lompen" centre) - and thus our Sunday walk ended.