jet lag

I seem to be suffering from a bit of jet lag so I'm updating at 4am Svalbard time.

Last night I checked out the bar in the hotel ... I say hotel, but think polar outpost. Mary Ann's Polarrigg was an old Russian mining dorm. It is a series of long, low buildings, strung together, each on a slightly different level...so there is a lot of going up and down steps to walk through the buildings.

I left my wing of small rooms, past the office, communal kitchen, through the common sitting area (one stuffed polar bear here), through the restaurant's kitchen, through a dinning room with old mining hats, boots, and pick axes left from when it was a working dorm, through what looks like a rock cave and into a long,candle lit, greenhouse style dinning room full of plants and a waterfall (three stuffed polar bears here and a few Arctic foxes too). This is a new addition to the old structure.

There were three people in this huge dinning room having dinner. It's off season. I sat at the bar and talked to the bartender, who was also the woman who checked me into the hotel on the first day (everybody does everything). She is third generation Svalbard (although each generaton was born on the mainland as required). The table of diners left and the chef and her assistant came out and joined me at the bar. The chef is from Thailand and her assistant is from Croatia. We taught each other words from our native languages, but they were all much better at English than I was at Norweigen, Thai, or Croatian.

[These aren't my pics, I should have some up soon.]