July 02 – Longyearbyen and Barentsburg

Right after breakfast we boarded a bus for a drive out of Longyearbyen 

to the Green Dog outside of town.  We got to visit the friendly huskies…

and toured a replica of a cabin that had been built by Willem Barentsz, a Dutch navigator who discovered Svalbard and who was stranded on the island over a winter. 

We finished that part of the tour with hot beverages, waffles with whipped cream and strawberries, and a talk about polar bears.

Then it was back on the bus and back to town with a short stop at a lake and 

a road sign about polar bears (watch out for polar bears "over the entire island")

Once in Longyearbyen

we stopped at their small but very fine museum.  It had stuffed animals and birds from the area,

information about the early whalers and coal miners and early settlers,

and the Global Seed Vault.  The seed vault is backup storage for individual country or region seed vaults around the world. This vault currently has seeds more than 5000 different plant species, including over 40,000 varieties of beans, 156,000 varieties of wheat and almost as many varieties of rice.  Who know there were so many varieties of these food types.  The total capacity of the vault is nearly 2.25 billion seeds.  The information in the museum was very interesting.  Too bad the vault is closed to the public.

The we were off to the ship where we got our very tiny cabin…

and then had lunch.  Our table partners are a young couple from Poland.

The afternoon was spent cruising.  The weather is overcast but not too bad, only a bit of sprinkles and light wind.

We stopped late afternoon at Barentsburg.  This is the site of one of the few coal mines in Svalbard that remain open.  The mine is run by a Russian company with an entire Russian community there to support the coal miners and their families.  We had to climb over 200 steps up to the top of the bluff to get to the community.  Our tour guide was a young woman from Russia.

One of the buildings was the Red Bear Bar.  The bar developed a drink called “See you tomorrow” that is 78% alcohol.  That goes with the fact that the town is at 78° latitude north…something about it being a tradition to create drinks with an alcohol content that is the same as the latitude.  No, we didn’t try it.

They have a very large and colorful (blue, white, gold and grey) community center that includes indoor sports fields, a swimming pool and a theater.

Some of the apartment buildings were built in the 70’s and are equally colorful with one of orange, gold and white and another being blue, green, white and brown.  For old Soviet buildings they are pretty colorful.

There were also brick and wooden buildings from earlier periods.

The prettiest building was the old governor’s building.

Even the entrance to the mine was in a very pretty building.

This is the business side of the mine where the coal is loaded onto ships.

After the tour we walked over to the small Russian Church that is a memorial to the victims of a plane crash a few years about where over 100 miner and family members lost their lives. 

Then it was to the very fine community center where we were treated to a very good concert and show of Russian folk music and dancing.  The show was very good, especially considering they only have a few hundred community people to draw performers from.

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Video of Folk Show 1

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Video of Folk Show 2

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Video of Folk Show 3

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