Monday, February 16, 2009

Sighting Svalbard

New adventure. This time I wanted to investigate a place known to be under the plastic on your common classroom globe. This island houses the world’s entire collection of seeds, has more polar bears than inhabitants (although most have never seen one), one school, one university which only offer courses in Arcitc something-or-other, and an automatic preservation of anything and everything placed here before 1945. Even cinderblocks. It is also a place where everything should be in the Guinness World Book of Records; northern-most swimming-pool, northern-most newspaper, northern-most road system, northern-most café-which-serves-lattés, northern-most elementary school, northern-most car dealer, northern-most restaurant and northern-most city where I'm visiting the northernmost-family-who-just-moved-here. And I'm currently the northern-most-girl-in-a-coffeeshop drinking the northern-most-latte.