June 17, 2015

Me outside of the
 Longyearbyen airport.

            I boarded a plane earlier this morning from Oslo and landed in Longyearbyen, Svalbard.  Before boarding our ship, we spent a few hours touring Longyearbyen; we stopped at a local museum which was interesting, though I spent more time talking to our tour-guide -- a Norwegian woman from the mainland who had moved to Svalbard three years ago in order to get closer to nature -- than I did looking at exhibits, which were largely in Norwegian.  We went to a local art gallery where a local painter had worked in semi-impressionistic landscapes of snow and mountains, perpetual light and perpetual darkness.  We toured the town which still looked like an old company mining town, its homogenous apartments painted in earth tones dictated by the local government.

 

 

The entire town of Longyearbyen -- population 2000.

 

            The custom in Longyearbyen is to never come inside any building with your shoes on.  Wherever we went we needed to wear socks or special inside shoes or fabric covers over our boots.

            After our tour we boarded the ship.  I'm sharing a room with two other teachers -- Doug and Dave.  Our cabins, B209 and B211, are connected and in the belly of the ship.  The rooms are small but they'll be comfortable.

My ship, the National Geographic Explorer.

            The view leaving the fjord, heading out to sea, was amazing.  Rugged black mountains, jagged, defiant, covered in snow.
            As I'm writing this, we've moved out more, closer to the ocean.  Mountains are to the port side but quite a ways off; flat dark ocean to the other side.  Perhaps a dozen seagulls are playing with the ocean, taunting it, their pure black shadows reaching up to kiss their white/gray bodies.  They fly faster than our ship -- effortlessly -- their wings sometimes a fraction of an inch from touching the surface.