Last few days

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Morning is not really morning here. It is the middle of the night. The last few days have been very cold and the trees are coated with a hoarfrost from the sea fog hovering low in the fjord. The snow sparkles diamonds in the morning nighht. The sacred early morning feel, like you’re privy to something, lasts and lasts. Going to work in it feels wrong. Of course, it’s the same time I go to work back home. It’s just that dawn is still four or more hours away. Funny. Quiet, Cold Beautiful.



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Last few days.
Dinner at Erla’s
Discussion about energy saving in the Icelandic context.
Melt off. Grass is now out. Snow is gone. Just slippery packed ice.

Yesterday
Driving over the pass
Rented a car to drive out to Myvatn on Sunday. It was very cool. The car was a little corolla, and I rented it from the same guy I rented the Yaris, at budget, at the airport. I walked in, picked up the phone on the wall, and he anwswered it. I could hear his kids playing in the bacground. He was at home. He would be in in a few minutes, and he was, with the kids in tow. This guy sits at home in the winter with the budget phone hotwired to his house. Then he is always on call. Better than sitting around doing nothing in the airport. But, it must be a little aggravating to be on call all winter as well.

Hot spots and Mudpots
Past Myvatn, there was a geothermal hot spot. It had all sorts of activity. Steam spouts hissing sulfurous teapots, boiling cauldrons in the ground, mud pots bubbling away their stinky bubbles (blurp!). There was a walkway through the area, and the dangerous parts were marked off with a rope strung from stakes a foot off the ground. There was a little sign explaining that the water was hot, around 100C, in Icelandic. Back home of course there would be big signs and constructed people barriers. And of course crowds. This place I had to follow Thor’s jeep into through the deep snow. One other truck of people showed up just as we were leaving.
We then went to a geothermal swimming pool out in the middle of nowhere. These places have been active for many years, with sulfur mining (for gunpowder) in the middle ages, to a small power plant, including some sort of abandoned looking building, and a tourist swimming pool. We stepped into the shop, but did not go swimming. The place was finished with nice plywood fastened tight with machine screws. It made for an interesting aesthetic. Through the windows was the swimming area with no swimmers. It did have the characteristic blue water, and was a pool fashioned into the lava rock there.
On the way up into the hills to see the geothermal area, we passed a big caution sign. Barb and I cracked jokes about not understanding the caution sign. Thoroddur later told us it said, “You have entered the highlands. Does someone know where you are?” Heavy.

Santas in the Elvin church
We parked at the place with the rocks. These are formations that stand up twisty and creepily out of the snow. There are several areas in the formations, named things like large church, small church. We went to elvin church, which was also where the trail was packed down. A hundred yards down into the rock formations, along a twisty trail, we came to the elvin church. It was a clear spot, surrounded by spires of stacked up lava rock. There were a couple of windows, or arches in the spires.
There in snow was a pair of Icelandic yule lads. One was sitting in a big solid chair made out of 4x4 lumber. He had on an ill fitting santa jacket and was asking kids to sit on his lap and have their pictures taken. He had a goodie bag full of apples to give the kids. The other fellow was skyr-gobbler, with a long grey beard and stringy hair sticking out of his cap. Both blew around in the winter wind. The santas wore traditional wool clothing, down even to a mukluk style boot (with a modern rubber sole). They had wool patches sewn on old wool sweaters, and were layered up pretty well.
There was another couple leaving as we arrived, and our kids spent a good twenty minutes talking to the santas, while we took pictures. Just as we left, another family was coming in. not much traffic outside of us and the santas in the elvin church in the snow. There was a commercial side to this whole thing as well. If you sent 1000Kr to the farmhouse, you could get a picture postcard of you visiting the santas.
The Icelandic santas, or yule-lads are interesting characters who live in the mountains. They are not strictly giants, or elves, but their mother is a nasty character who collects the naughty children for dinner. They also live for hundreds of years, as evidenced by skyr gobbler who claimed he was “one hundred and two hundred and three hundred years and almost seven.”

Direction finder
As people were loading into the cars, I climbed up to a platform. The platform had a pedestal in the middle. I brushed the snow off and there was a silver plate underneath. The plate had a pointer in the middle, and the directions engraved around the plate’s outside. There were also landmarks’s names in the engraving as well. So you would squat down, line a mountain up with the pointer, and read where the pointer went on the plate. It told of every mountain, every crater, and every lake you could see, their height and distance away.

Smoked fish place
We pulled into the drive of a farmhouse at Myvatn. It was right on the lake. We walked into the fish room, where several racks of trout hung drying. Nobody came, so we went up to the house. As we exited the fishroom, I stepped on a trout tail in the snow. We passed the smoke house, with barrels of manure out front. The best smoking is done with manure I’m told (eww!). We walked up to the house, and the lady there said that the farmer was in Copenhagen, so ask at the guesthouse on the property. We crossed the gravel lot and knocked. This teenage kid opened the door and said he’d be down to the fishroom in a couple minutes. We returned to wait for him, stepping over the same fish tails in the snow. He came and sold us two kinds of trout, manure smoked, for 1700 a Kg. Pretty cheap actually.

Turf house
The turf house rocked. It was one of the church farm houses, so the priest in it was fairly wealthy. As such, it had little of the nastiness I was expecting. First it was large. It was a lot of rooms connected together by a long underground hallway. There was an upstairs too, with narrow steep stairs. Second, the interior was very nicely done. While parts of it were the exposed rock and turf, other parts had been paneled with plank lumber, making it look just like any old fashioned house. The one we visited was lived in until 1936. My grandma would have been 25 years old already. Not that long ago. These things were dug into the ground a few feet. The first few feet of the wall were stacked rock. Then there was sod, stacked into bricks, and laid edgewise at angles, like books on a shelf falling over. There was interior framing that helped support the walls and the roof. The roof was raftered like any other, with some sort of planking, and then turf on top. Grass grew on the roof. The walls and roof had several feet of turf to insulate it. The front was planked around the door, giving it a formal façade. Otherwise, it looked a lot like a hobbit hole. There was no auxiliary heat other than the kitchen fire, which would have been restricted to the kitchen itself. The fire was mostly open, with a little vent chimney at the top. Meats hung in the rafters of the kitchen. Maybe they stayed continually smoked that way.

The folks putting the show on were dressed in traditional clothing and were performing traditional tasks. They were candle dipping, weaving scarves, knitting mittens. They had double sided mittens, so the palms would last twice as long. That meant also they had an extra thumb bouncing around, which makes for strange mittens.


General things
Icelandic staring
Icelanders don’t have a sense of not looking at people like Americans do. In the US, if you catch someone’s eye, you nod and look away. To do anymore is aggressive and inappropriate. Here however, people look right at you for some time. Maybe they are seeing if they know you, who knows? But they look for a long time, and then they look away, without any acknowledgment that they’ve caught your eye. Disconcerting certainly, until you realize that you can look right back at them without intruding on their space.

Sense of space
They don’t have the same sense of space. As a Yank, I am not really comfortable with anyone being within arm’s reach. If I can reach out and touch someone’s body, they are too close. Not for Icelanders. They park close. They squeeze in behind you to get into a restaurant table. They stand in the middle of the walkway when they are having a conversation. With Icelanders, you must get used to people standing much closer, watching much closer, brushing your coat in the store. They are just closer than Americans.

Unisex bathrooms
Yeah, that too. These guys are so gender egalitarian, that many of their bathrooms are unisex. Some aren’t even marked as bathrooms. Very different than home.


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Iceland is confounding. We are having better weather than the American Midwest. It is nearly 40F right now, at 1230 am. There is a warm wind blowing, and everything is melting. The moon is out tonight, and the clouds are skidding by. The illumination highlights the valley wall across the fjord. The snow is spotted along the dark swampy wall in the moonlight. Almost glowing. The northern lights were out a little earlier. A beautiful night. And I thought my little island was cool.

Further, since it is so dark so long, it doesn’t really matter what time it is. There are about 6 hours of useful light, with the sun over the horizon for just about 2 or 3. By 530, it is full night. And it is not daylight until 1000 or later. So, your body clock just doesn’t seem to work right. The kids are upstairs watching a video right now., for example.

Here is another thing. Icelanders not only have a different sense of personal space, and eye contact, they also don’t have an innate sense of right-of-way. Walking down a sidewalk, there is no rule which side to step to when passing someone. This makes for a lot of dancing