Hammerfest, Norway

 We arrived early at Hammerfest and thankfully, the skies were a clear blue and the weather relatively warm.  It's a beautiful town, although that's probably helped by the beautiful day.  It claims to be the northernmost town in the world.  Norway considers you a town if you have more than 5,000 people and Hammerfest has around 9,000.  Our tour took us to the Polar Bear Society, which is a museum dedicated to life in the area with an emphasis on fishing and polar bears, which aren't that common around here actually.  Reindeer, on the other hand, are a dime a dozen.  We watched a little girl on a walk with her mother on a soccer field chase after some and they ran away from her like the seagulls used to when we were kids in San Francisco.  Can't do much about the reindeer here and only registered Sami people can own them.  Our guide said we'd see even more tomorrow.  

After the Polar Bear Society, we went to a couple of nice scenic spots.  There really isn't much to see so the whole thing took about 2 hours.

Buildings are much newer here than most places we've been so far.  That's because when the German occupiers left at the end of WWII they had a scorched earth policy and burned or destroyed every possible useful thing in the area.  There's a very nice hospital which serves a very large area, although a new one is being built (thank you oil/gas money) and even an airport, albeit it can't take jets because the runway is too short.  

The bells in this church rang at 2:45 and again at 3:10.  Maybe it was a wedding since it's Saturday.

Housing here is relatively inexpensive at a general range of $100 - $400k for a comfortable home.  And electricity is very cheap compared to southern Norway because they have an abundance of hydroelectricity and the price goes down when there is good rain or snowfall.  Our guide said his bill in the winter can be as low as $20 per month and no more than $90 when things are very bad.  His friend in Oslo can pay up to 10 times that in the winter so the government subsidizes people when it gets that bad.

After the official tour, we walked around a bit near the port and checked out the nearby small supermarket of course.  Picked up some shampoo and cough lozenges since Michael seems to cough more on the buses and people look askance at you nowadays if you cough or sneeze.  

We did a good job in trivia.  Well, guess I should say a "good job" for us as we got 12/15 which got us 2nd place.  

Tonight was another pre-dinner show by the wonderful singer, Isabel Commandeur, who performed beautiful broadway favorites.   We ate at Sette Mari and I only had a sampling of appetizers which made for enough for dinner.  

Another night with no sunset.

We watched some of "High Society" on the cabin TV before calling it a night.  Tomorrow is an early tour again, so early to bed.