The Adventures of Kerri & Matt

This is Longyearbyen, the largest settlement in Svalbard.

Technically we stayed in Nybyen, the suburb of Longyearbyen, because we are cheapskates.

But it is close enough to town that you can walk around without a “polar bear kit” including a rifle. You don’t need that until you go past these signs.

Longyearbyen is on a huge fjord at the end of a long valley.

It was settled for whaling and coal.

So there are a lot of coal mines.

And tramways for transporting coal from them to the port.

Now it has a lot of tourism and husky farms.

The huskies get very excited when people come to their farms.

A plane crashed near Longyearbyen once.

It was never cleaned up.

Longyearbyen has a little church.

They also have a big famous icebreaker boat.

We found some art in Copenhagen.

The sign said that “slumpies are a series of sculptures designed to hold our physical body upright while you scroll through your smart phone.

Kerri didn’t find them very effective for that purpose.

They were slightly better at holding the body non-upright.

We wound up in Copenhagen! This was a bit of a surprise because we booked tickets to Stockholm. But we booked them with Air Canada, so we should have known better than to expect to get where we paid to go. So we went for a walk down to Nyhavn, the waterfront area.

That’s where all the sailers and fishermen used to land, so the area was known for booze and prostitution.

But then they cleaned it up and painted all the buildings pretty colours.

So now it has “gentlemen’s clubs”, which sound so much classier.

The pretty colours reflect in the water.

They reflect in everything.

We went for a boat tour of the canals in the rain.

Did I mention that it was sunny in Stockholm? Thanks Air Canada!

We got to see the backside of the little mermaid statue.

And this weird dragon building.

It’s pretty hard to tell that they are dragons without binoculars.

And the opera house with the roof that serves as a high dive into the canal.