Longyearbyen, Svalbard

Arrived this afternoon, only a day late after suitcase drama in Oslo. The airlines had left my suitcase, containing all of my Arctic gear, in Newark, and as the plane landed in Longyearbyen I still didn't know whether my stuff would have caught up with me. Today's windchill is about 18ºF, and the wind is carrying tiny stinging bits of snow, so I'd have been in trouble without a hat and coat. (Although the flight did prove the Chicago truism that no matter how cold it gets, there's always going to be some dude walking around in cargo shorts. Even Longyearbyen, it turns out, has that dude.) Anyway, the suitcase arrived--through a special side door, not the regular baggage conveyer I was anxiously watching--and when I spotted it across the room it was like the moment at the end of the romance movie when someone has been running to the train station and she sees him and it's NOT too late after all and the soundtrack swells with feeling. 

This is the main drag in Svalbard:

There are several shops selling cold-weather gear; one--evidently honoring the old fur-trapping tradition--where you can buy polar-bear-skin rugs and, in what seems like a rather cruel redundancy, little stuffed seals made of seal fur; a knitting shop called Moods of Norway; and, improbably, a Thai restaurant. There's a school and a small hospital. There are several parking lots devoted to snowmobiles, although weather like this evidently doesn't deter the locals from riding bicycles. No one bothers to lock them up. Crime is nearly nonexistent here.

Longyearbyen is right at the edge of the water (a bay; I'm not sure if it counts as a fjord). On the bus ride from the airport to the hotel I saw a tall-mast ship in one of the docks. I don't know if it was the one for the expedition, but it was absolutely dwarfed by the mountains and mining vessels around it. 

There's one visible church, a bit outside the polar-bear-free safe zone, higher up in the foothills. If there are any Unitarians around, I'm going to guess they content themselves with committee meetings in one of the lower-lying cabins.

This is the first time I've been in a foreign country without at least a rudimentary grasp of the local language. I feel a bit like an ugly American, expecting everyone to instantly converse in English...but the truth is, everyone can instantly converse in English. Just to be polite I'm trying to pick up some words and phrases (vennligst, takk, unnskyld meg, hvor er toallettet, luftputebåten min er full av ål). My favorite so far is the greeting "Hei"--pronounced exactly like "Hi," but often repeated, so that as you approach a service counter you'll get a cheerful "Hei-hei."

No polar bear sightings yet. I'm as disappointed about that as you are.