‘Pyramiden has captured a part of my heart – so many secrets, stories, such beauty… Diolch yn fawr!’ Samantha Saville, Aberystwyth, Wales, UK. The guest book at The Tulip Hotel, Pyramiden, in which I attempted to sum up the impossible, has entries from 1987 up to 2000 (I guess some tourists found it… Read More
We log in via the visitors book, pass the security guy, don hard hats with the Statsbygg logo (the state construction arm of the Norwegian government) and file into the dank corridor (which must be the bit outside the mountain) and through the second metal door that has been unlocked for us. We descend as… Read More
Messiness is something that most of us are brought up to avoid, and certainly as a quality not particularly revered. At some point I realised that, for the most part, I am a ‘messy’ kind of person: messy room/office/desk; messy thoughts/ideas/approaches; messy hair…. Whilst I enjoy a good clean up of all these things occasionally,… Read More
Bit of an extended post today since I have skipped a couple…. Staying here in Longyearbyen for any length of time, people start to become concerned that you manage to find your way out of town and experience some of ‘the nature’ here. Though Longyearbyen has just about everything one needs, after a few weeks,… Read More
I have a proper update in process, but in the meantime, I thought I would share some of the sounds of yesterday up on Foxfonna glacier….but my trusty phone that has been a very reliable tool so far in all my audio recordings didn’t pick it up. It was too much to ask perhaps, given… Read More
Today I met someone who just picked up an email I sent months ago when I was looking for somewhere to stay in Svalbard. We are, hopefully, going to help each other out on our respective research projects, and it’s going to be great 🙂 These are the kind of things that often get left… Read More
Out goes the snow, in come the birds! It seems more and more geese, ducks, gulls and other varieties arrive daily at the moment. I am not much of a bird watcher, but wildlife here seems especially interesting, partly because it is different from home, but also because although it is relatively sparse in comparison,… Read More
For once, I didn’t take many pictures today! Photography is, as Mia Hunt points out in a recent paper on urban photogrpahy as a research method, a way of being in, and producing versions of place[1] . This has all kinds of benefits from being able to tell a story visually as well as, or… Read More
Takes one to know one, so they say. In that spirit we booked ourselves on a guided walk up a glacier and into an ice cave as an exploration into tourist mode and a bit of a day off. Of course it wasn’t, but it was heaps of fun in the sun! Along the way… Read More
Quite a bit of the week’s discussions have been around cultural heritage, how that is defined, protected and managed in Svalbard. Time with my trusty field assistant is running out, so we went on an excursion to go and experience some local cultural heritage…or did we? Gruve (mine) 5 was built from 1957 and extracted… Read More
samsaville.org 