It took me a week to figure out where I was even going in the arctic, and once I was there, four days to differentiate how Longyearbyen , Spitsbergen, and Svalbard were related. As you can see, Svalbard is almost exactly in between Norway and the North Pole I had originally planned a trip to Norway to see the Northern Lights in Tromsø, but when someone suggested going even further North, to an Arctic archipelago that’s known as the “Northermost inhabited place in the world ”, I obviously couldn’t say no. The people there refer to it as “Next to the North Pole” or the “North Polet” , because it’s the closest location that commercial flights operate to, and well, because it’s right next to the North Pole. It’s peculiar in general that people are eager to travel there, but what I found even more interesting is the way of life there. With only 2,100 official residents , 3,000 native polar bears , and a rapidly increasing amount of global visitors , Longyearbyen, the sma...