Everyday LIFE in Longyearbyen Before Polar Night ︱ Svalbard.

Good morning from Longyearbyen. Look we're in town and it's a winter wonderland. Again this happened overnight. So today we woke up to well pink and blue skies, snow and minus two degrees. So it really does feel like winter is almost here. This is just like the start. Welcome back to Svalbard and to the world's northernmost town Longyearbyen. Our world is starting to look like something out of a winter fairy tale again. With fresh snow, pastel skies and fading daylight. We're entering that time of year when it kind of feels like we're living in Whoville. The countdown to polar night continues and we're now only six days away. Today Christopher Grimm and I are in town for a little walk to show you how Longyearbyen looks right now before the darkness sets in. We'll wander through some of the places that make up our everyday life here and talk a bit about what life is like living in this tiny remote community at the top of the world. Our days are changing quickly now and there is a quiet excitement in the air as we get ready for the long months of polar night ahead. We also have these two with us of course. It's the whole team. Today we're gonna do like a walking tour kind of. We want to show you more of Longyearbyen especially before the polar night sets in. So you have like a better idea of what the village looks like and you're more acquainted with the little town. The little town. So that's the idea for today and we have the most beautiful morning as well. So it's minus two degrees ish. It's a little bit crispy. Yeah a little bit. Yeah a little bit crispy. We are gonna go to some of the places that we have in town that you've been wondering about. Today I think we're just gonna gather them and give you a better overview of the entire village. And I think it's gonna be a nice and cozy thing to do now that it's very beautiful and wintry. So that's the plan. I'm ready. Okay we're gonna start right at the bottom of the village. Here we have the university and also the museum. That was the the first very easy start to this tour. Now okay I know, first stop. We need to go and pick up a coffee. When I lived in the village, now we live in a cabin a little bit outside, but when I lived in the village I walked everywhere. I didn't have a car. I actually didn't even have a snowmobile the first year. And I say even because this is such an adventure place and snowmobiling in winter is such a big part of life here. So in the beginning I was just hiking with my friends and living the village life. But so many people commute just by walking everywhere. You walk to the gym and to work. You walk every day and get groceries. It's very normal to buy what you need for the day and just bring that home instead of doing like a super big shop like we do. So it's a very small and cute little town. Okay now we're gonna have to get a coffee first. That's our first stop of the day. I feel like that's the best way to start this adventure of living the town life. Kind of like a village tour. What's happening here? Who even are you? Coffee has been acquired. Christopher didn't want one. I paid 78 Norwegian kroners for this. Which I think might be some sort of record. But it's not too bad. It's actually pretty much the same as mainland Norway is what we just realized. We also met a ton of you now. I think we've said hi to 10 different people which we love. It's so much fun. So Grim has had his photo taken. He has gotten treats. We have gotten some good chats. But now we're gonna continue the tour. We've gotten to stop one. That's a good start. So now we're on the main street. The main driving street. So this street goes all the way up through town. But it has a lot of things along this road that you would want. So we're gonna stop at some of them. Longybyen is a small village with only a few main roads which makes it ideal for walking. There's no public transport here so most people just walk or call a taxi. We do have an airport shuttle that runs when flights arrive and depart. But apart from that things are very simple. At the very top of the village is an area called Nybyen where you'll find places like the guest house and coal miners, the veterinary office and some student housing. On the opposite side of the meltwater river that runs down the entire village are two restaurants. You have Gruvelagret and also Huset. Huset is where I first worked when I moved to the village and this location actually used to be the heart of Longybyen. Down where we are currently along the main road is where you'll find most of the cafes, shops and everyday life. The population in Longybyen is around 2400 people and half of the village, half of the population is not Norwegian but it's a mix of like 40 different nationalities. So it's a very mixed which we call a melting pot of people from all over the world that live and work here. Which is what I really like because you have so many different types of people, different cultures, different languages. So Norwegian is definitely the official language and you'll see that on signs and everything. But English is also widely spoken and I mean you can use that throughout the In some cafes, like now in the Husky Café, the guy was from Canada so we spoke English. Did you see that he was not wearing a top? I'm so confused. Anyway so the guy at the Husky Café... What is happening? The guy at the Husky Café is from Canada so he spoke English. The current population in Longybyen is actually around 2500 people and it's the world's northernmost town with a population of over a thousand. What's interesting is how much the population changes from year to year. Around 20 percent of people move away annually while roughly the same number of new residents arrive. The average stay is short, for Norwegians the median time living here is just over three years. In the last 15 years the population of women has risen by about eight percent and today nearly half of the population are women. There's no indigenous population on Svalbard so everybody has moved here from somewhere else. There's quite a mix of ages but one group definitely stands out. A big chunk of the population are between 20 and 44, followed by those aged 45 to 66. There are also plenty of children around 300 under the age of 15. Longybyen really is a constantly shifting little community where a lot of people come and go. As we're walking through the village today I started thinking about how often we connect to public wi-fi when we're traveling or exploring new places. Grim doesn't trust any suspicious wi-fi networks and honestly neither do I. That's why NordVPN, the sponsor of today's video, is such a must-have. Head to nordvpn.com slash Cecilia or use my code Cecilia to grab my exclusive deal. Whether it's at an airport, a cafe or a hotel, those open networks are not always safe. That's where NordVPN comes in. It keeps your internet connection secure by encrypting your data so your personal information stays private, even on public wi-fi. And let's just say Grim takes online safety very seriously. He refuses to let me connect to any suspicious wi-fi networks unless NordVPN is on. He is the self-appointed internet safety officer after all. So whether you're traveling, working remotely or just scrolling from your local coffee shop, NordVPN keeps you safe with just one click. Head to nordvpn.com slash Cecilia or use the code Cecilia to grab my exclusive deal. A two-year plan with four extra months and a huge discount. It's risk-free with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee. Now let's head back to the video. This is one of the two kindergartens. On the main street is the only hospital that we have in the medical care. This is where you go. There's no other place. You can get basic medical care here, but if there's anything that you need that they can't do, they will send you to the mainland and they have like either emergency flight or you just go on the regular flight and you get to see a doctor in Tromsø is usually the way to go. So this is the hospital, the one and only. It has dental, physio, regular care. I can't remember. That's the reason why if you're pregnant, you have to leave before your due date because they don't have the equipment needed for child birth. If you are to go into labor early, they can help you because they've done that before, but they always send people to the mainland for best optimal care. So you leave at least one month before your due date. Okay, on to the next. It's so quiet in here. This is the library. So if we want to borrow books, we can go here. Why I buy most of my books is because they usually don't have the ones that I'm looking for, but otherwise this is a space you can come to study or work or use their computers and then of course borrow books. You can also borrow a sewing machine. I've wanted to do this for like three years, but I've just never done it because I have some sewing to do, but maybe one day I'll go in here and borrow it. All you need is a library card, which I can't remember. I have one. I can't remember how I acquired it, but I have one. We have to pick up a package, so we're going to go to the post office. You're going to notice these on almost all of the places you go into. Since we have polar bears here on Svalbard, you do need polar bear protection when you're outside the village. So if you bring that with you into the village, which is common when you're on a hike or something, first of all it needs to be empty and then they will ask you to put it in lockers and gun lockers. If you go to the supermarket or if you go to a restaurant, you just give it to them. So that's something that's good to know. We're going to have some lunch because we actually haven't had any food yet and it's 1pm now and this is such a good lunch spot. Also Grim is sitting right outside. He has gotten his full winter fur, so he's completely fine and we can also see and hear him, which is good because he may bark, but then we'll just run out and see if he's okay. But generally he loves sitting right outside here and watching people go by. So don't feel bad for him. He's a winter dog. He's literally made to be out in the snow all day long. That's where he loves to be. When we're at home, he will lay outside in the snow. He won't come inside. That's going to be perfect. This is also the cafe where they have knitting evenings on Thursdays. They stay open longer in the afternoon and towards the evening so people can come here and knit together. You can also buy all of your yarn and everything, which is very cute. Here comes Christopher. I'm ready to go. So this part of the streets, you've been here so many times, so we're just going to walk it up and go towards the end of the main street. The sunrise today was at 10 in the morning and it's going to set at 3 20, which is in like a little bit more than one hour to what is it two hours maybe. So this is basically like the last of the light that we have, at least for like today. You know what I mean? It's crazy how fast it goes from being like this. And then in a few days time, we're not going to have any daylight at all. So now every day is going to get shorter and it actually goes pretty quickly because in about a week's time we have the last sunset. And then the last days before that, it's like 40 minutes shorter. So it goes so quickly. Crazy. But so it's very nice to be out and really enjoying this daylight while we have it. Supermarket. This is where the cinema is now. I was actually here yesterday and saw a movie. Big, bold, beautiful journey. I think it's really nice because they have like big seats and it's all kind of bougie and it's within the art gallery, which is also new. So this was pretty newly built. Really nice. So we have a cinema. This is a hotel. They also have like a Christmas style hotel stay. So they decorate this so beautifully. And I think we want to go and test it out because they've redone some of the rooms as well. So we might do that this winter. I think that could be so cozy. Right here we have another hotel. So just on this main street you have three. So there's good options to stay if you don't want to have to walk far and you want to be on the main street. It's quite nice, especially if it's cold or polar night. You can just be right on the main street. Our main street really is the place to go for almost anything. You have food, you're shopping, hotels. Right here is also the, what's it called? Visitsvalbard. So the tourist office, if you want to ask questions or you need any help or whatever it could be, that's also on the main street. So it's a good street to stay on and also to find anything you need. All of these are apartment blocks and I've actually lived in one of these blocks. It was really nice. They're pretty new, which is quite nice in a village like this where a lot of the housing was built many years ago and a lot of it has to be replaced and some houses are even deemed unlivable. What's it called? We have to kind of update stuff quite a lot. But these are new and they're very nice to live in. So with housing it's actually something that we do have a shortage of here and ever since I've lived here there's been a shortage. The best way is to get housing with the job that you get because finding it on your own is going to be quite difficult. Maybe even impossible because there are so few available units at one time. We're going there. Since Longyearbyen is such a small village it's very much a place where we have one of everything. So here's a little rapid fire list of some things we have one of. We have one gym and inside it our only swimming pool, one gas station, one post office, one supermarket, one local newspaper, one Grimm, one cinema, one fire station, one Santa Claus mine, one church and then lots of other things. All of those things you see on the mountain that's avalanche fences and they were actually built a few years ago after two avalanches happened on this mountain which is really sad and pretty devastating. So they had to put up this system to avoid avalanches happening there again. So the guy running without his top, we looked it up and he's doing a charity run for mental health so that's what he's doing. Crazy, what a unit. So yeah that's what he's doing. As you can see behind there you have this Törrbarnabocka and that was to transport all the coal from the mine into town. So we have them all around Longyearbyen and even further out. It was a company town, a coal company town, that's why you had them. While Grimm gets a little treat I'm gonna tell you about our church. They're working outside the church though so we're gonna do it from here. This is our only church. I don't know really much about it more than we have a really cool woman priest, her name is Sid. I googled and it said that it's a parish church. I don't really know what that means but in Scandinavia religion doesn't play a huge role. I don't know a lot of people that are religious and it never has been a part of really my life at all. So we're just not a very religious people. But what is nice about stuff like the Swedish church, I'm going to talk about because I'm from Sweden, is that they do a lot for the community. So it's a place to gather. I know that when you have young kids and stuff like that they have play hours, you can go to the church more to find community and hang out with other people and get support in that way. Where it's not even centered around the religion but about helping people in the community. So that's really nice. This church also does that, they have gatherings. They have, what do they do? They do like board game evenings and stuff like that and it's open for anyone at any time to go in and see it and be part of whatever they're doing. They have musical events and stuff like that. So that's nice. It's very very nice. I think this concludes our village tour for today. We walked further than Christopher has ever walked in his life. You've taken so many steps. So many. So many steps. 250. 250 steps. He's taken I think a lot more. But I hope that you've seen more of the village now. Maybe you have a better understanding of where everything is kind of located. Which was kind of the idea. So before we go into Polar Night, if we hang out in town, you know where we are and what it looks like. And I also realized that we haven't really done this kind of tour before. Walk tour. Walk tour. So I just hope you enjoyed it. It's also getting really close with the Polar Night Grim. I'm telling you, every single time we stop for two seconds, he's like this whining. And he has met 50 people today. I'm allowed to stop, sir. You've gotten 400 treats. So many nice hugs and kisses. Thank you so much, sir. So I hope you enjoyed this. We're going to be back next week. We are now doing the last few days of countdown until the last sunset. So you're going to see that next. But it hasn't happened yet. So we're just waiting for it to happen. Oh, we're getting some pink skies. So we're going to keep capturing the incredible beauty that is just before Polar Night begins. And then we shall be living in the darkness and do all things cozy forever. We have beautiful pink skies here, but snowstorm incoming. Look at this. I can just feel the snow flurrying from over there. So we have something coming our way. Very gray. And the wind is starting to pick up. So this is going to conclude our walking tour pretty nicely. Bye.