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Yesterday we were in Hammerfest, Norway. Having been there before, we had decided not to get off the ship and instead to work on our MKSAP. This was a fortuitous choice. It was a miserable day. Cold and raining. The high only reached about 48 degrees but it felt colder because it was cloudy. The sun set at 3am and the sun rose at 3 am. I guess it is summer in the far north. Yesterday the engineers had to come and fix our heat. I finally got warm. We had dinner last night with the General Manager, Victor. He is Portuguese. We had a delightful time.
Today we are in Murmansk. It is a beautiful day and warmer, about 60 degrees. After lunch we will go ashore and visit the monestary,Alyosha, and the light house.
Getting ashore was no problem. They had 27 buses leaving at different times. All of the buses were modern Scania buses. Murmansk has a population of about 350000. It is on the Kola Gulf of the Barents Sea. It is the terminus of the Northeast passage and the world’s largest city North of the Arctic Circle.Until the dissolution of the Soviet Union it
was a major shipping port, fishing center, and the base of the Russian nuclear submarine fleet. Murmansk was heavily bombed by the Germans in WWII. During the 70’s and 80’s the Sea of Murmansk was the dumpsite for exhausted cores of Soviet Nuclear reactors. Murmansk is an ice-free port in the winter. The water has only frozen 3 times in its history.
The Soviets love monuments and there are many in Murmansk. The most famous is the Murmansk Alyosha or the Monument to the Defenders of the Soviet Arctic. This is a gigantic statue representing a Soviet soldier facing the West.. There is an eternal flame burning in front of it. It is the second largest statue in Russia, the largest being the Statue of Mother Russia in Volgograd. From here we went to the light house which is in memory of all those lost at sea. Next to this lighthouse is the tower from the Kurst (the Russian Submarine that sank in the Barents Sea about 50K from Murmansk. All 121 aboard were lost. ( 9 lived for 6 hours after the onboard explosion that doomed the ship.) The ship was finally brought up by an international consortium.
Putin would not allow anybody to try to raise the ship when the disaster happened. The tragedy happened in 2000 and the ship was finally raised in 2009. It was then that they found that 9 seamen had survived for 9 hours in a forward compartment. They wrote letters to their families and described what had happened. The people of Murmansk still blame Putin for the tragedy.
We then went to the Church of the savior on the waters. This is a small beautiful Russian Orthodox church that overlooks the harbor.
It was a great day. Our guide, who was a professor of English at the University, was our guide. She was terrific. Tomorrow at sea and then to Solivetsky.
I waited until today (july 9) to see if my pictures would upload. That has not happened yet so I will see what tomorrow brings. Meanwhile here is my post. As beautiful as yesterday was, today is cold windy and densely foggy. I fina;;ygot a few pictures to up load so here goes
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Mike Kass
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I would think Murmansk would be a great place to see - definitely on the bucket list!