Tapas are a fab way to get a taste of lots of little things, and have found their way all over the world from Spain, and yes have even reached the Arctic!
Saturday evening (which felt like it was still in the middle of the day) I went on the Longyearbyen Arctic Tapas tour. It is run by a character called Bent - there is always one person around who is the gregarious character that everyone loves and knows, the kind that no sensible woman would take seriously but just enjoy, who is full of great ideas and has a passion for what he does. Bent fits the bill!
He has developed an extremely unique and interesting tourist attraction whereby you get to sit in a specially modified bus (with sheepskins covering every seat), travel in style around the sights of Longyearbyen (such as they are) whilst drinking copious quantities of beer, wine or Aquavit, whatever you tipple is, and feast on imaginatively displayed plates of tapas that are specific to the Arctic.
These foods are smoked, dried, or buried for 6 years versions of fish, meat (reindeer) and award- winning blue cheeses, accompanied by seed crackers and numerous tasty relishes. They were delicious, and the only thing I left on my plate was a lettuce leaf.
While we were eating the tapas (the bus has been modified to contain tables for 2 or 4), Bent drove us around and out of Longyearbyen, filling us in with all sorts of interesting historical tidbits. Bless him, there were 17 of us on this trip, 16 of whom were Norwegian, and half of those were locals. He kindly gave the commentary in English, being aware that everyone else would also understand, but also recognizing that they could all engage in lots of banter that would leave me out if he spoke in Norwegian and then translated. Very thoughtful of him, indeed!
Bent was on a mission to find Wildlife from a moving bus, and the girls in front of me kindly got my attention each time he saw something. So I have now seen my first Arctic fox (or polar fox as they call them here), ptarmigan (totally blending in with the rocks on which it was sitting), barnacle geese, my first reindeer in its natural habitat (thereby discounting the ones I saw on South Georgia, which were introduced, and are now gone I believe), an Arctic tern (seen plenty of them down in Antarctica - nice to see them in the Arctic!), husky dogs, all in 3 hours trundling around dirt roads in the Arctic Tapas bus!
It augers well for polar bear and walrus from the ship, and apparently there should be no good reason not to see Beluga whales!
