you grind your claws, you howl, you growl
Here is what happened: I went to Iceland for two days, then I went to Paris for four days, and then I spent five days in Cardiff rocking out with cheapmetaphor. Now I'm on the Eurostar back to Paris, where the GPS on my phone says we're speeding towards the Chunnel at 181 mph.
This post is about Iceland! Retroactively.
One thing I would not do, if I could time travel: take the red eye there from Boston. 4.5 hours in a seat that doesn't recline makes sleep impossible which makes for a singularly unpleasant arrival, despite the gorgeous wood-paneled airport and the bus ride into Reykjavik through lava fields of black volcanic rock, which was a strange throwback to the Central American lava fields of two years ago.
I slept like the dead for a couple of hours, then went out and found breakfast: strong coffee, something like a cheese danish, and what I think was walnut yogurt. Turns out Iceland is a country of coffee nerds! Perfecto! (The coffee in France and the UK has been pretty dismal in comparison, to say the least.)
Iceland looks like England in its residential bits, but I was stupidly shocked by how much Icelandic is used and spoken. Not that I disbelieve in other languages, but I'd assumed a country with a population of 300,000, pretty much all of whom also speak English, would mean a dying language -- but everywhere there were bookstores, libraries, tv shows, newspapers, parents and kids speaking Icelandic. Impressive.
It rained, snowed, or sleeted the entire two days I was there, which was a bit like aversion therapy, but I made the best of it: on that first Saturday, found a stretch of hip thrift shops, then visited Hallgrimskirkja, the city's biggest church, made of volcanic rock with a statue of Lief Eriksen outside. It was astoundingly light and airy inside, even on such a dreary day, in contrast to most cathedrals. I went up to the bell tower and looked out over the whole city, where it had started to snow in earnest, then took myself to an art museum, which also managed to somehow magnify the little bit of natural light so it felt bright and cheery through its glass ceiling, despite the gray sky. Some tricksy cousin of Scandinavian design, with all that light wood.
For dinner I had battered cod & rosemary chips with coriander & lime skyr dipping sauce (rarr!) and took myself back to the hostel to bed.
Day two: A fact: I despise being cold, and I'm usually cold about 20 degrees before anyone else. So waking up to six inches of snow and 34 degree weather did not make my planned outdoor swimming trip seem like a fantastic idea. But there were two big trips outside the city I'd wanted to take, the Blue Lagoon geothermal pool and the Golden Circle, and managed to find a tour that did both, so off I went.
Here's how it is: you come out of a shower room full of naked middle-aged German ladies, dash through the cold air in your bathing suit thinking WHAT AM I DOING WHAT AM I DOING, into the 99 degree water. Uh-maz-ing. The water's a milky turquoise, and everything more than an inch below the surface completely vanishes. The water is surrounded by craggy black volcanic rock, and there are huge clouds of steam rising off the surface of the water into the cold air, so the other people are just dim black silhouettes of heads and shoulders. There are warmer patches of water, billowing invisibly, and thick silica mud you smear on your face and let dry. After a while it started to rain lightly. Everything was so astonishingly bright I had to squint the whole time and could see the light reflecting off the water even with my eyes shut. The water was full of people speaking French, German, Icelandic, Japanese, and except for the bits between the water and the door, I wasn't even a tiny bit cold. I'd also heard to load up my hair with conditioner and pin it up out of the water to avoid lagoon hair, and it worked. The whole thing was one of the absolute coolest things I've ever done.
Lunch, wolfed hastily: a hot dog, Icelandic style, with remoulade and mysterious, awesome crunchy bits.
Tour Part Two took us all around the beautiful, desolate landscape outside the city, in and out of snowcover, through completely opaque fog, past huge craggy hills and more black volcanic rock, and volcanic rock from eruptions old enough that it had finally been covered by moss. We hit:
Where the North American and European continental shelves meet, the thing that first got me fascinated with Iceland maybe ten years ago. Two huge jagged pieces of land moving away from each other infinitesimally slowly, tearing Iceland apart. You can walk right down in between the two, in the middle of all that empty landscape. Somehow I'd misunderstood the tour description and thought I wouldn't have time to see this, so it was extra exciting to end up there, right in the middle of everything.
The Gullfoss Waterfall, two-tier, the hugest I've ever seen, torrential with melted snow and rain. This is just the top section:
Geysir Geyser, the OG, which no longer erupts because people threw so much crap down there over the years, and its sister the enjoyably active Strokkur. The ground there was full of plumes of steam and boiling puddles. Can you imagine first finding that kind of thing however many hundreds of years ago?
I made friends on the tour bus with an Irish kid and afterward we got supper and it wasn't 'til I was walking back to the hostel that I realized I'd paid like $20 for a bowl of soup and a beer. So I guess that's the downside of the country. I kept doing the kroner conversions wrong by a power of ten -- oh, this sweater is $65. No, wait, $650! (I told myself not to want one of those cool Icelandic sweaters because they're so expensive, but -- I totally want one! And they're so expensive!)
Miscellany:
I can't pronounce Icelandic for crap. I kept trying different ways to say the name of my hostel, and the street it was on, and no one could understand me. There's some weirdness with the vowels that I'm not getting.
God bless the iPhone: I have no service over here, of course, but the GPS chip works in any country, without the need for a cell signal, and there's an app (MotionX GPS) that lets you download maps to your phone so you can always see where you are. Uber useful.
A million thanks to interminable for being a great and enthusiastic repository of Icelandic info.
Now I'm back in Paris, in our little apartment in the 11th, which we're subletting intermittently for the first half of the summer, before we move to the one in the 15th for the parts of June & July when we're both in classes.
It's so nice to come out of the Metro onto the already-familiar street and walk home through the warm air and open all the windows and finally have time to post this.
Tomorrow we're going to Germany for ten days. I want so badly to write down everything everything everything, but if I want to have time I'm going to have to figure out how to slow down a little.
This post is about Iceland! Retroactively.
One thing I would not do, if I could time travel: take the red eye there from Boston. 4.5 hours in a seat that doesn't recline makes sleep impossible which makes for a singularly unpleasant arrival, despite the gorgeous wood-paneled airport and the bus ride into Reykjavik through lava fields of black volcanic rock, which was a strange throwback to the Central American lava fields of two years ago.
I slept like the dead for a couple of hours, then went out and found breakfast: strong coffee, something like a cheese danish, and what I think was walnut yogurt. Turns out Iceland is a country of coffee nerds! Perfecto! (The coffee in France and the UK has been pretty dismal in comparison, to say the least.)
Iceland looks like England in its residential bits, but I was stupidly shocked by how much Icelandic is used and spoken. Not that I disbelieve in other languages, but I'd assumed a country with a population of 300,000, pretty much all of whom also speak English, would mean a dying language -- but everywhere there were bookstores, libraries, tv shows, newspapers, parents and kids speaking Icelandic. Impressive.
It rained, snowed, or sleeted the entire two days I was there, which was a bit like aversion therapy, but I made the best of it: on that first Saturday, found a stretch of hip thrift shops, then visited Hallgrimskirkja, the city's biggest church, made of volcanic rock with a statue of Lief Eriksen outside. It was astoundingly light and airy inside, even on such a dreary day, in contrast to most cathedrals. I went up to the bell tower and looked out over the whole city, where it had started to snow in earnest, then took myself to an art museum, which also managed to somehow magnify the little bit of natural light so it felt bright and cheery through its glass ceiling, despite the gray sky. Some tricksy cousin of Scandinavian design, with all that light wood.
For dinner I had battered cod & rosemary chips with coriander & lime skyr dipping sauce (rarr!) and took myself back to the hostel to bed.
Day two: A fact: I despise being cold, and I'm usually cold about 20 degrees before anyone else. So waking up to six inches of snow and 34 degree weather did not make my planned outdoor swimming trip seem like a fantastic idea. But there were two big trips outside the city I'd wanted to take, the Blue Lagoon geothermal pool and the Golden Circle, and managed to find a tour that did both, so off I went.
Here's how it is: you come out of a shower room full of naked middle-aged German ladies, dash through the cold air in your bathing suit thinking WHAT AM I DOING WHAT AM I DOING, into the 99 degree water. Uh-maz-ing. The water's a milky turquoise, and everything more than an inch below the surface completely vanishes. The water is surrounded by craggy black volcanic rock, and there are huge clouds of steam rising off the surface of the water into the cold air, so the other people are just dim black silhouettes of heads and shoulders. There are warmer patches of water, billowing invisibly, and thick silica mud you smear on your face and let dry. After a while it started to rain lightly. Everything was so astonishingly bright I had to squint the whole time and could see the light reflecting off the water even with my eyes shut. The water was full of people speaking French, German, Icelandic, Japanese, and except for the bits between the water and the door, I wasn't even a tiny bit cold. I'd also heard to load up my hair with conditioner and pin it up out of the water to avoid lagoon hair, and it worked. The whole thing was one of the absolute coolest things I've ever done.
Lunch, wolfed hastily: a hot dog, Icelandic style, with remoulade and mysterious, awesome crunchy bits.
Tour Part Two took us all around the beautiful, desolate landscape outside the city, in and out of snowcover, through completely opaque fog, past huge craggy hills and more black volcanic rock, and volcanic rock from eruptions old enough that it had finally been covered by moss. We hit:
I made friends on the tour bus with an Irish kid and afterward we got supper and it wasn't 'til I was walking back to the hostel that I realized I'd paid like $20 for a bowl of soup and a beer. So I guess that's the downside of the country. I kept doing the kroner conversions wrong by a power of ten -- oh, this sweater is $65. No, wait, $650! (I told myself not to want one of those cool Icelandic sweaters because they're so expensive, but -- I totally want one! And they're so expensive!)
Miscellany:
- (Side note: oh man was my data withdrawal bad the first couple of days. What do you mean I can't instantly look something up the second I wonder about it? Having a smartphone has taken my information sponginess to the extreme.)
Now I'm back in Paris, in our little apartment in the 11th, which we're subletting intermittently for the first half of the summer, before we move to the one in the 15th for the parts of June & July when we're both in classes.
It's so nice to come out of the Metro onto the already-familiar street and walk home through the warm air and open all the windows and finally have time to post this.
Tomorrow we're going to Germany for ten days. I want so badly to write down everything everything everything, but if I want to have time I'm going to have to figure out how to slow down a little.