Barentsburg, a vibrant town close to the North Pole

“There used to be quite a problem with alcohol here, you know. But now it is not so bad. The miners can only buy one bottle of vodka a month”. We were on a guided tour in Barentsburg, and the young girl from St. Petersburg showed us the old crooked buildings of the Russian town on Svalbard. Compared to Longyearbyen, I found the town surprisingly green and colorful. Geeba and her roomie took pictures of dandelions and the grass that grew along the road.  

Our guide informed us that there are 350 Ukrainians that live here, and the remaining 100 are Russian. There is a school+kindergarten with 30 kids and 3 teachers. The hospital looked ancient on the outside, and we were told it isn’t any better on the inside. But they now have a dentist in addition to the doctor and two nurses. Barentsburg still looks like a soviet republic with commie posters and slogans everywhere. They even sold artifacts from the soviet area.

As we walked with the guide, people of Barentsburg flocked around us, yet they pretended to have an errand somewhere. We took a look in a souvenir shop and bought knitted gloves. Geeba’s roommate had been to Barentsburg on a snowmobile trip six months earlier, and she told us tales of the nasty swimming pool in the sports centre. We smiled at the guy in the entrance and were let in to look around. According to the guide, swimming is a popular spare time activity for miners. The water was thick with algae and there were little bobbles of air coming up from the green mud. What really did us in was the floating devise for little kids at the edge of the pool. Is this pool used in gym classes for the young ones?

The boat trip to Barentsburg lasted all day. We stopped by a glacier and let off a group of French kayakers (they were going on a 20 day adventure trip in Svalbard). The weather was amazing, no clouds on the sky and sun shining brightly. The night before we’d played some board games and close to finished a 3-liter-box of wine. Needless to say, after taking a few pictures of the mountains, birds and water, we laid down to rest.