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Home* News and Stories → Fresh vege­ta­bles …

Fresh vege­ta­bles …

… are curr­ent­ly a bit dif­fi­cult in Lon­gye­ar­by­en. This has hap­pen­ed befo­re, after all, it is still at the end of the world or at least not far off. But things are get­ting thin­ner now and will pro­ba­b­ly stay that way for a while. This is what some of the shel­ves in the fresh pro­du­ce sec­tion of the Sval­bard­bu­tik­ken super­mar­ket look like the­se days:

Svalbardbutikken, Empty shelves

Emp­ty shel­ves in Sval­bard­bu­tik­ken.

The regu­lar car­go pla­ne stop­ped ope­ra­ting at the end of last year. A repla­ce­ment is plan­ned, but not yet in sight.

Car­go ships come regu­lar­ly to Lon­gye­ar­by­en, the pas­sa­ge from Trom­sø takes 3-4 days. Howe­ver, the logi­stics are obvious­ly not yet per­fect, and depen­ding on the wea­ther, it is not unhe­ard of that a car­go of eggs arri­ves in the shape of of scram­bled eggs mixed with card­board and eggshells.

At the moment, Sval­bard­bu­tik­ken has no choice but to ask its cus­to­mers to be pati­ent.

Svalbardbutikken, leere Regale

Noti­ce on an emp­ty shelf: ‘Due to the new flight and freight situa­ti­on, the­re will be a shorta­ge of peri­s­ha­ble goods bet­ween deli­veries for some time.

Until the air­port ope­ned in 1975, Lon­gye­ar­by­en was cut off from sup­pli­es for months in win­ter. After the war and until 1975, the­re was a mail pla­ne that occa­sio­nal­ly made deli­veries by ‘mail drop’ (lite­ral­ly). The­re were pro­ba­b­ly no bana­nas or eggs in it eit­her, and the con­tents of many a tin of apri­cots had to be scraped out of the snow later, fro­zen 🙂. At that time the­re was a ‘jern­ku’, an ‘iron cow’, in which milk was made from pow­de­red milk. The term ‘jern­ku’ is often used in Lon­gye­ar­by­en the­se days, with a slight­ly sar­ca­stic under­to­ne. The­re was inde­ed a real cow, and some­ti­mes seve­ral ones, but the milk it pro­du­ced was reser­ved for pregnant women and fami­lies with small child­ren.

Cows in Longyearbyen

Cows in Lon­gye­ar­by­en (1937). Pho­to: Odd Dani­el­sen.

For now, we have to make do with what we have. The car­go ship is due to arri­ve on Mon­day.

New pages

By the way, if you have the time and incli­na­ti­on to let your mind wan­der a litt­le more towards Spits­ber­gen, you can do so on the new pages that are being crea­ted during the long evenings of the polar night. After years of explo­ring remo­te cor­ners of the island also regar­ding new pages within this web­site, I’m now con­cen­t­ra­ting more on the beau­tiful places we’ll be visi­ting in the future. The­re are still many unknown cor­ners to be dis­co­ver­ed, but I’m going to take a more or less sys­te­ma­tic approach, start­ing with a few well-known spots. Trygg­ham­na with Alk­hor­net and Ymer­buk­ta tog­e­ther with the neigh­bou­ring beau­tiful Erd­mann­flya will cer­tain­ly be remem­be­red fondly by some.

I men­tio­ned Sas­senfjord and Tem­pel­fjord in this con­text back in Decem­ber. The gap bet­ween them will also be clo­sed in the future.

Esmarkbreen in Ymerbukta

Esmark­breen in Ymer­buk­ta: still one of my favou­ri­te gla­cier pho­tos,
in beau­tiful light at the end of Sep­tem­ber. One of many pho­tos on the new Trygg­ham­na, Alk­hor­net and Ymer­buk­ta & Erd­mann­flya pages.

Have a nice weekend!

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last modification: 2025-01-17 · copyright: Rolf Stange
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