GIVÆR
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Givær is the place I lived at from August 96 to July 99. It's situated on a small island on the coast of Northern Norway. There are 12 souls living permanently out here. There's no shops of any kind here, so people have to go to the mainland to get things. Else, they've got a quay and a post office, a school (for the moment), two farms and one fishing vessel.
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Givær itself consists of a number of tiny islets, with all the people living on the largest one, which takes all of seven minutes to walk around... The scenery is quite beautiful (when the weather is nice, that is...), with the mountain ranges on the mainland clearly visible for miles and miles on our east side. On fair days, you can see as far south as the Svartisen glacier in the south, mountains in faraway Sweden in the east, and the alp-like islands of the Lofoten archipelago in the north and northwest. Every other direction holds vast displays of ocean, ocean, ocean and even more ocean. Next stop: Greenland. So, I guess it makes sense when I say that weather can be quite rough here...*s*
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So, what does people do for a living here? Fishing and agriculture are what Givær is built on. The main island and the surrounding islets provide just enough soil and grass to sustain neccessary farming (as potatoes and carrots) and a small number of livestock (cows, sheep). If you take a walk among the old fishermen cabins and the old stores, you can venture centuries back in time among old fishing nets, coils of rope and seaman's chests...
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Electricity is supplied by a generator on the island. This generator runs on diesel, and every so often, it stops due to lack of fuel. These stops tend to come when you least expect them, so we're used to showering in dead dark bathrooms and having PCs crash when they ABSOLUTELY not should.
Water is supplied through a desalination plant (if that's what it's called when you pull the salt out of seawater), probably the best water supply for miles and miles.
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Some of the old traditions of the Norwegian coast are still very much alive out here, such as the gathering of eider-down for pillows and thick bedquilts (nice and warm on cold, lonely winter nights....). The main island is littered with lots and lots of small "huts" made for the eider ducks to nest in. The eider ducks isolate their nests with their own down, and the down is gathered as soon as possible after the ducks have settled in. The down is then thouroughly searched for debris and smudged feathers. About 80% of the down gathered is discarded, which in turn means that even getting enough for ONE pillow may take the entire harvest of a year... As you may see from the pic above, the female eider ducks are pretty domesticated (the ones on the main isle, at least), the males on the other hand is a totally different matter.... Oh, and one more thing: the gathering of seagull eggs is also an old springtime tradition. Some years as many as 2.000 eggs are gathered. Yum! :)
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When people decide it's time to go anywhere else in the world, we rely on the catamaran route from Bodø, some 35-90 minutes away (depending on the weather and day of the week). The "cat" calls at port here 1-2 times/day, so they're pretty well off in spite of being a minuscule community here.
And that's it, really... There's not much more to talk of where Givær's concerned....
