Country Folk Are Great

It became clear that our water was not coming back of its own accord. We called our landlord and he called our neighbours. Two local men arrived at our house and set to work trying to defrost our pipes. After a time they realised that the problem lay with the well up on the hill, where we get our spring water. It was frozen and so was the pipe that leads to the house. Lack of snow and temperatures of below -20 will do that.

They called in a third man, busted up the ice with a massive metal stake and set to work with what looked like a home-made defrosting machine. After several hours we had running water again and we were given the job of shoveling snow over the well for insulation, which meant that we didn't feel totally useless. When we thanked them, one of them just said, "Vann må man ha." (One must have water). And off they went into the night.

I don't have any pictures of this process, obviously, but I did get out to take some of the fjord yesterday when it was freezing over in places.