Iceland 2025

I just spent some time reading my previous blog entries on Iceland and realized how nice it is for ME to be able to remember our good times. So while I still remember what we did, I'll at least put up a list and hopefully get some pictures up, too.

We got off to a nasty start, as we were planning on flying out on Monday, March 10. Except the BER airport was closed down because of strikes that day. We spent a good bit of time on the Saturday getting seats nailed down for Tuesday. We had booked the flights ages ago when there was a sudden offer of 50 % off on Icelandair flights. We decided to use the discount and splurge on Saga Class (the business class). One could get used to this! Very short lines for baggage drop, you can take 2 suitcases each, you can spend time in the lounges with seats and food and drink, the seats are wider and you get a bottle of water the minute you plop into your seat. There is also a meal and alcoholic beverages served in Saga Class. We were quite pampered on each trip, we really enjoyed it! Okay, the fourth bag was the LAST one out at BER, despite having a "priority" tag, but hey, this is Berlin, okay?

I offered our friend, who is a professor at the University of Iceland, to give a talk on my favorite topic, plagiarism and AI detection. It was a quite well-attended talk with a very good Q&A session. It was brilliant weather, warm (okay, 6°C) and sunny. WiseMan took off to see the Edda manuscripts at the National Library, I enjoyed lunch in the cafeteria and browsed the bookstore afterwards. I feel so much at home at universities, one knows how they function and can get essentials sorted out.

We also had a visit another day with a former student of WiseMan who is now living in Iceland, and our old friends from Kiel came over for a fun night of food and talk and pictures and talk and talk and talk and talk!

We walked around Reykjavík a good bit, exploring the spooky old cemetary above the Tjórnin and walking around the embassy street. Just around the corner from the Russian embassy is a little park with a sculpture called "Support". The park has been renamed "Kyiv Square" (1 - 2):

"Support" in Kiev Square, Reykjavík

 

There were a surprising number of tourists in Reykjavík for it being March! Okay, we had great weather, only one day of pouring rain and snow on our last day, but unfortunately cloud cover every single evening. WiseMan lugged his cameras and tripod with him for nothing. 

We spent a day visiting the Art Museum with a good bit of very bizzare stuff and an Erró exhibition. Buying a ticket also gave you free entrance to the Ásmundur Sveinsson museum which was a good 3 kilometers away. It was nice weather, just a bit of rain, so we walked out and took the bus back. The guide at the entrace was happy to give us the introduction in German, as he was originally from Germany. This was the last place the artist lived with his family and worked. There are many sculptures and replicas both indoors and in the garden.

A woman making butter

Copy of a woman carrying water,
the sculpture itself is in downtown
and was used as an image
for the women's protests in 1974.

The big excitement was that we actually made it to Ísafjörður in the Westfjords! This time of year is always iffy, as landing a propellor plane on the landing strip at the base of the fjord takes a lot of experience! The wings almost seem to scrape the mountains as the land or take off. If there is too much wind, the plane doesn't fly. We had a wonderful time visiting old friends, walking in the wind the next fjord over, visiting the Dynjandi waterfalls (wonderful, no tourists except us!) and the birthplace of Jón Sigurðsson, the leader of the Icelandic Independence movement. The sun actually shined quite a bit, and we had some great lemon cake made from lemons grown in the greenhouse the friends have! One friend drove us around, the "highways" have lots of potholes, sharp stones that have rolled down the steep mountains, and patches of snow here and there. Not every street has a guardrail, I would not have wanted to do the driving!

We had to leave days before and after this adventure because of the uncertainity, so when we got back we spent a good bit of time in the local hot tubs. On our last day in Reykjavík I attended a doctoral defense at the university. The doctoral candidate was one of our friend's students. The university hoists a flag when a defense is happening, the main hall is used for the occasion. The dean and the two opponents were dressed in gowns, the candidate spoke for 30 minutes, then each opponent grilled the candidate for 30 minutes each. She passed! There was champagne in a special room after the candidate was given her certificate: In English, Icelandic, and Latin!

Since the flight back to Berlin was at 7:30 and we were to be at the airport at 5:00 (!), we spent the night in a hotel next to the airport. Expensive, but worth it to have a few more hours of sleep. Hotel Aurora is within walking distance of the airport, is comfortable and quiet, and you can get skyr or drinks at any hour.

It was another great trip to Iceland, now I want to speak Icelandic when shopping back here in Berlin!

Madame President

Vigdís Finnbogadóttir was in Berlin this evening, answering questions posed by Andrea Fischer (former Minister of Health from the Green Party and candidate for local mayor in one of the boroughs here) about her life. The occasion was the publication of the German translation of "Frau Präsident", a biography of the life of the first freely elected female president in the world.  Halldór Guðmundsson, an Icelandic writer who used to lead the largest publishing house in Iceland, Mál og menning, did an excellent job of translating.

Vigdís, very chipper at 81 years old, speaks very good German, but she was convinced that it was rusty, so she stuck to Icelandic and let Halldór translate. It was a very good exercise for me to hear her stories first in Icelandic, try and piece them together, and then listen to the results. I found her very easy to listen to, only a few jokes I didn't get until they were translated.

She spoke of the Icelandic women's strike in 1975, and the search for a female candidate for the presidency in 1980. She was then head of a local theater company, having formerly worked as a modern language teacher in school. People were joking - Vigdís, you do it! What made her decide to run was a long telegram she got from a fishing boat kindly requesting her to please run for president. She said: When the fishermen ask you to do something in Iceland, you listen!

She was elected, and I had the pleasure of interviewing her for the taz on my way over to the States, although the article never appeared because the revolution broke out in Danzig and revolution was much more important than wimmin's stuff. Anyway - it turned out that she is the godmother of the friend I was staying with, so I not only got to interview her in her presidential office but also visited Bessastaðir, the official residence. I interviewed her 20 years later when she was in Berlin after leaving office - she was reelected 4 times - for Nordeuropaforum.

She refuses to talk politics - deftly avoiding Andrea Fischer's questions about the kreppa and other remotely political topics. Fisher remarked over wine that she didn't even start into her questions about whether Iceland wants to join the EU, as it was clear that she would get no answer, but a charming smile and another story.

She spoke at length about identity and language, and language being the glue that holds society together. The only mildly political statement was: "They can take away everything from you except the language in which you think."

Afterwards she signed copies of the biography, having each person sit down with her, tell her a bit about them, have them write out their name, and then she wrote a dedication in each book. Sure, I stood in line, too. Spoke with the consul from Bremerhaven, and got my autogramm - and I very proud that I managed the whole thing in Icelandic.

This is going to be a great year - Iceland is the partner country of the Frankfurt Book Fair, they already have a web site up (Fabulous Iceland) and are churning out German translations by the boatload.

Learning to read Icelandic

Brainerror asks in a comment how to best go about learning to read Icelandic.

Bragi heitir einn. Hann er ágætur að speki og mest að málsnilld og orðfimi. (Snorra-Edda)

I'm just a learner, not a teacher, but the number of available books is rather small.

• We used Learning Icelandic by Auður Einarsdóttir, Guðrún Theodórsdóttir, Mária Garðarsdóttir og Sigríður Þorvaldsdóttir in the course we took two years ago in Ísafjörður. It is great on colloquial speech and just enough grammar to get along.
  
• There's an online course from the Háskoli Íslands. It is a bit childish at times and tiring, but there is some good stuff here.
  
• There is a great collection of self-teaching material at the Humboldt University: Project Bragi. (Disclaimer - I had a great bunch of students get this moved to a database-based, multilingual version many years ago. It is still great!)
  
• There's an active group at LearningIcelandic at yahoogroups.com that discusses the finer points of translations.
  
• If your eyes can stand it (Icelanders seem to *love* moving, blinking, flashing animations in 57 colors and 18 fonts on the same page) you can try and wade through Mogga (the online version of the daily newspaper Morgunblaðið) using the great online Icelandic dictionary provided online by the University of Wisconson

Have fun!

One God is called Bragi. He is famous for wisdom and most of all for eloquence and skill with word. (The Prose Edda)

Arnaldur Indriðason

It's the Berlin Mystery Story Week, and the guest country this year is Iceland. They are having Icelandic authors reading in the back rooms of bars all over Berlin.

I had my calendar marked in red for this evening, as Arnaldur Indriðason, the author of the book I am currently reading (in Icelandic!) was to be reading, with bad-guy actor Claude-Oliver Rudolph reading the German.

The place was packed - all sold out half an hour before starting time, so they started early, something very uncommon for anything Icelandic who tend to be very nonchalant about things like times. I was there in time to get a seat in the front row (lucky me, Germans are shy) with a friend who also is a fan whom I met coming in the door.

Arnaldur began by reading a few pages in Icelandic as fast as his tongue could carry him. I was only able to pick out a few words here and there, but the melody of Icelandic was there.

Then Rudolph began reading the German. Rudolph is a guy pushing a big, wide, sunglasses-wearing-in-the-dark ego in front of him. He seems to love this bad-boy demeanor. But oh boy, does he ever have a good voice! It is a pleasure to listen to him, except that he mispronounces the Icelandic names - constantly! All Icelandic words are stressed on the first syllable, not the second. We can forgive him not being able to hack the nd and ð and ll and what-not. But he could have at least practiced the stress.

It was an interesting story, I need to read more (which is, of course, the point of these things, get folks to buy the books).

During question time it was much easier to understand his Icelandic. The woman from the embassy unfortunately did not know his works and had to struggle with the translations. But we did get a nice feeling for his character - he seems to be a very funny guy, a bit crazy perhaps, but you have to be to write all these murder mysteries about a city that doesn't actually have murders.

I queued up with the rest of them to get my book signed afterwards. I don't normally do this, but I am slaving away at deciphering the Icelandic, so I decided to get this stamp of approval on it. It's only the paperback edition (and pretty dog-eared by now), but since I asked in Icelandic I got it addressed to me "with best greetings".

Got two pages read through without using a dictionary this evening!!

Við sáumst, Ísland!

The course is over, back to "civilization" from the wonderful seclusion of the wild north. The locals had been telling us gruesome tales of planes not being able to land because of wind/cloud/hail/snow. A short overview showed that missing the flight Saturday evening would entail missing the flight to Copenhagen, so I was a bit anxious.

But all was fine, they said, not "much" wind, not "much" clouds. And let's go pick some blueberries in the berjamó. In the pouring rain? Oh no, next fjord over the weather is fine.

It actually was. We turned off the "main road" (euphemism for "at least it has tar on it") and tooled down a pot-holed mud track (known as a secondary road, that's why they all drive 4-wheel drives). We stopped at a deserted farm house.

We walked up the path alongside of a river that actually had a name, Small Weather River. Why it is called that, no idea. The red bits at the top are the blueberry bushes, perfectly ripe for the picking. And the sheep are too stupid to like blueberries.

We climbed and we climbed (I was quite out of breath), and suddenly we were in a landscape of krækiber and bláber. Big, fat, sweet blueberries. We picked and picked in the drizzle, was actually not that bad, as it washed the berries as you picked. I eventually lucked on to a patch where you could just grab into the bushes and come up with a handful of berries. Stuffing these all in your mouth is just wonderful - one bite and the cool sweetness fills your tongue.

When the baskets were filled we went to feast on blueberries. Just blueberries, brown sugar, and cream. I think I had four bowls.... I took a box of them with me on the plane for a friend in Reykjavik who was born up here.

I started getting nervous about the flight - it is at 6.20 pm, and it was already 5.30. No problem, they say. We'll leave around 5.45. And indeed - since the airport was just around the corner from the tunnel and you have the right of way that way through the tunnel, were did get there about 5.55.

Now imagine showing up that late for a flight anywhere else. You probably don't fly. But not here. You check in by giving your first name, dump your bags, and get a little slip with a bar code on it. The suitcases get put on a conveyor belt that slips them outside - and you can watch them get loaded up. No one asked to see my passport. Seems if you made it up here, you must be all right, so you can leave again.

We leave right on time, punch through the clouds, and 35 minutes later we land in Reykjavik. What a large place it has become! And so flat, no mountains! And so noisy - I got used to sleeping with the window open (so as not to suffocate, the heat can be turned up but not down, so your regulate by opening a window. There is so much noise here through the open window of the bedroom.

Gotta get up at 3.30 to catch the 4.30 bus to Keflavik. Ugh. Even though it goes late, we still get to the airport in time. The lines are long, but proceed efficiently. Iceland Express does a great job. And no one complains about that extra 5 kg of luggage, the plane is only half full.

You get one last chance to spend your Icelandic funny money, I got some "Black Death" at the Duty-Free Shop and some breakfast. Last chance for skýr! This plane, too, leaves right on time, but there are 3 hours of sitting behind some Icelanders who are partying on their way to Copenhagen...

I got into my book, I am reading Dáuða Rósir by Arnaldur Indridason ("Dead Roses"), a mystery story. It is hard going, but it is actually a good story, and I am making some headway guessing what words mean. My little dictionary does not have translations for words and phrases like óforbetranlegur eiturlyfjafíkill, nauðgun, samfarir, marbletti víða um líkamann, vændiskonur (no male ending??), þjófnaði and melludólgurinn. Better not translate them, or this blog will be labelled NSFW.

Landing in Copenhagen went fine, suddenly everyone speaks with potatoes in their mouths. Danish sounds really horrible! Suitcases take forever to come (one gets spoiled in Iceland), then the train to Sweden is late and crowded. The Swedish conductor on the train speaks a slow, broad Skanska, uff. After the machine gun speed of Icelandic I feel like she is going to fall asleep in mid sentence!

A friend gives a lift to the cabin, I try to converse with her, but now the words keep popping out in Icelandic! Speaking German, English, Icelandic, Danish and Swedish during one day is very tiring. How nice it is to start a fire in the fireplace and contemplate the rain.... I want to go back to the West Fjords, they were just awesome. What a shame I have to go back to work!

Hazing in Ísafjörður

As I came back across the harbor after lunch this afternoon I saw a crowd gathering and heard a lot of young men making silly noises. There was this one young man standing around without a shirt, smeared in what looked like soap (but turned out to be eggs), looking down on the small boat dock.

Curious, I snapped a picture and stepped closer.

The next thing I knew I was surrounded - by 8-10 cars! Since there is nothing interesting to do in Ísafjörður, it seems, the youth spend their free time driving around and around and around in their cars with the windows open and the music blaring, hoping that something exciting would happen. There were at least 20 cars that passed me last night at midnight on the way home, and here were all these cars come by in no time!

And what a sight there was to see - down below were two more young kids with bare chests and all sorts of yucky stuff on their pants and skin. They were being pelted with eggs by the crowd, and it was strange, as they were not resisting at all.

One of the guys timidly got down and dipped his toes into the water - I knew enough Icelandic to understand that he was complaining about the coldness of the water.

The crowd yelled "Áfram! Áfram!" - come on, come on, and he eventually sat down straddling the pipe that marks the berths for the small boats. He again complained about the coldness of the water as he slid out towards the end of the pole. Now it was the next guy's turn.












He, too, gingerly got down and straddled the pipe.
















And off they went, they began jousting, each trying to force the other guy into the water. But they seemed to be an equal match (frozen and drunk) and they quickly both fell into the water.

I asked the receptionist when I got to school what on earth that was. She said that during the first week of high school, the freshmen have to go through a hazing. They are "sold" to the third-year-students and have to do everything that is asked of them that day. They submit, because that is the tradition, and of course they cannot wait to be third-year students themselves and buy their own slaves that they force to do silly things.

Klikkaður!

Icelandic Course - Part 2

Gosh, suddenly the course is almost over! Getting up this morning we discovered that the mountains had disappeared - the clouds were so low and thick that you couldn't see them anymore. The morning flight got diverted to the airstrip two fjords over, somehow they alerted everyone to get up an hour early so they could catch a bus for a 45-minute ride there, using the Breiðadals- og Botnsheiðar Tunnel, a really scary one-lane, 6 km tunnel. There are "meeting points" every 200 meters or so. Traffic coming towards Ísafjörður has the right-of-way. One of the course members comes into town through the tunnel, she said there was an enormous amount of outbound traffic this morning.

So we had "talking about the weather" as our topic this morning. Seems there are five different ways to say "it's cloudy" out and about 15 different terms for storms. Sort of like the urban legend of the Eskimos having 40 different words for snow. We were looking them up, and there was one for "wind of gale force 9" and a different one for "wind of gale force 10 or more". There was a word, Él, for the sudden onset of snow.

We listened to the weather news - goes on forever, there are so many different weather condition areas in this little country. And then we went on a field trip to talk about the weather.

Lucky us, it cleared up! We first went to Skrúður on the Dýrafirði. This was the first botanical gardens in Iceland, started about 100 years ago. It is a walled garden, just below a mini-glacier, and it has a bunch of different trees and flowers and berries growing inside. It also has a whalebone jaw set up as a door - notice the size of the thing by observing that there is a grown man in the right hand corner!

It had stopped raining by now, and the clouds had lifted, so we practiced the words for "it's clearing up" and "nice weather today, isn't it?".

We continued on to a "sandy beach" that is sandy half the day - when the tide is out. It was a very nice beach, the sand half white and half black (volcanic dust). We had a sand-castle building contest that was supposed to be in Icelandic, but it was done under time pressure, so we ended up using English to delegate tasks and to build. We had a lovely castle built, we called it the "beach botanical gardens", built with all the nice stuff we were able to collect in just a few minutes.

After a nice coffee and berry crunch we returned to Ísafjörður - where it started to rain. So we got to try saying that as well.

Forgot to mention the cruise ship that pulled up to Ísafjörður for the day. Some British boat filled with pensioners exploring the arctic lands. We came up to the school and had groups of 2, 4 or 6 people coming our way. One group spoke to us, anxiously, asking if we spoke English. Of course! "Can you please tell us which way the town is?" Um, you're in it, folks. This is the university center, next door is the museum, the other side is the sporting goods shop, then we have the harbor, and then a few more buildings/shops. That's it! But we were nice, pointed them in the direction of "town", and wished them a pleasant day. Now they can tell all their friends that Icelanders speak with American accents!

Gísli Saga

I just realized that I seem to only have written my blog post on the Gísli Saga in my head, not anywhere digital and most certainly not on my blog. I probably need a WLAN-connected thought processor in my head, but I supposed I should just learn to post using my mobile phone.

Anyway. The Gísli saga is about - surprise - a guy called Gísli who had to leave Norway sometime around 950 because he had killed a few people too many. The saga is one of the shorter ones, so it is often read with students (I actually remember reading it about 20 years or so ago), and it happens to depict the adventures after Gísli and his companions landed in these parts.

The story was written down about 200 years later, so the details may be off a tad, but the places described are rather accurate, so scholars think it is true. The story is a rather involved one with women telling each other gossip and men overhearing and overreacting (i.e. killing each other) and eventually Gísli getting himself banned but refusing to leave his wife so she moves to a remote fjord and he hides alternately in her house and in a cave. He was quite a sly fox and had evaded his followers for years. He is eventually killed, with her fighting by his side, but he takes a lot of guys with him. His wife moves to the Viking town of Hedeby (Haithabu, just north of Kiel in Germany), converts to Christianity and eventually moves on to Rome.

We know the story by heart now - we saw the movie (Útlaginn, directed by Ágúst Guðmundsson), had a 3-hour lecture (in Icelandic!) on it, and then had field trips to see where it happened. I went on the first one, which was described as "easy paths". This included crossing some creeks balancing on boards with someone helping you over, hopping from hillock to hillock, jumping down a little hill and climbing over some fences. It was not raining by Icelandic standards, but we do look a bit bedraggled in the pictures.

We had a knowledgeable guide who recited the saga to us in Icelandic (lucky me, I ran through the English version over lunch just to be sure I remembered it). Then we were treated to a one-man-play by the only actor in Ísafjörður, Elfar Logi Hannesson who does a one act play, Gísli Súrsson, in English or in Icelandic. We got the English, thank goodness. It was very funny, and very well done for making you remember the story.

The hardiest of the group took the second field trip and walked down to the fjord where Gísli hid with his wife, nominally a four hour trip, but with an abundance of blueberries, they ended up taking lots of blueberry breaks. They had great weather and quite enjoyed the trip, but I liked my own blueberry picking.

So now we are completely checked out on this saga, I suppose we have to go on to the others, in order to have a more complete understanding of the Icelandic soul. Egilssaga, here we come!

Die Hard 4.0

Hah. Bet you never thought I would go to see one of these, did you? Well, up here in Ísafjörður there is actually a movie theater that shows films Thursday through Monday. They have matinées for the kiddos on the weekend with a speaker speaking in the Icelandic over the English. Not good for me, although I would have liked to see Ratatoullie.

Last week war Transformer, I decided to wait a week. It got worse, the choice this week was Die Hard 4.0. Or Icelandic TV, which is like US TV, only worse. They choose the worst of German, US, and English TV, and everything about fish. And then pepper it with advertising and sub-titles. Since tonight was a nice film about tuna fishing on TV, I figured I would go for the movie. It was about computers, wasn't it?

Well, yes. Former US computer specialist is fired, is now determined to show the country its soft underbelly. He can get into all systems, and bring them down. But never fear, Bruce Willis is here, with more lives than a cat. He saves the last hacker who can help, and together they save the country and Bruce' lovely daughter. Along the way a lot of things get blown up, a lot of cars get smashed, an airplane that can fly through bridge columns gets smashed, and a lot of people get killed.

Bruce and his side-kick get wounded a lot, but it is rather amusing to see the wounds come and go. I think they forgot to hire a continuity editor. I eventually begin to see bits of the Gisli Saga in the movie, which makes it a lot more fun, Gisli and his wife were able to kill 8 others in that final battle, you see, just like Bruce.

The computer stuff was awesome. Nokia mobile phones; rollable keyboards; suitcases with multiple color screens that flip up when the suitcase is opened; biiiiiig flat screens, lots and lots and lots of them. The two Palms just mystified me, however. What were they doing with them, checking off their task lists? Mine is a great address book and alarm clock and a nasty opponent at backgammon, but can you cause mass system failure with a Palm?

The software was kind of silly - the screens were either bunches of numbers, or TTY-type terminals flashing login codes, or fancy maps and videos and stuff. One funny scene at Warlord's basement - Bruce puts his finger over the camera to ask Warlord something, but of course that doesn't kill the mike. The nasty opponent makes a sarcastic remark to this effect.

These guys can trace anything, anytime, get into anywhere with phony FBI suits and ID cards. In times of an emergency, anyone who says they are FBI probably is. And as one character says: they needed 5 days during Katrina to get water to the Superdome. The US systems, computer and human, are broken, terminally.

Some observations:

1. Even if we have all these surveillance cameras just to find the "bad ones" and the government is always going to be a "good" government (cough, cough, cough), if the bad guys can penetrate their system, then they can use all this stuff for their own deeds, as shown in the movie.
2. When the mobile phones go out, you are hosed, unless you still have a ham radio outfit working.
3. If you are planning on stealing millions of digital dollars, you won't actually be able to cash it in if you trash the financial system while you are at it. Bits aren't gold.
4. Even though Icelanders pay a pretty penny to see the movie (about 9,50 €), they get popcorn and chips and cokes both before the film and during the break, and they rustle in their bags the entire film. That's why the film has to be turned up so loud, I suppose. The advertising was nice, though - just slides for the next films and the one clothing shop in town. They had to cycle though it many times.
5. Icelanders can't read - even I could figure out that one of the slides said: Don't dump your garbage on the floor, put it in the garbage can!!!!! And there were BIG garbage cans at the end of the rows. But they still just dropped everything.

Some questions:

1. Can planes fly down the lower level of a double-decker highway?
2. What was in the final truck Bruce was driving and why?
3. Where did all his guns come from? He always had a new one.
4. Why was there always a drivable car available for Bruce?
5. How many flights can he fall down and not get killed? How often can he get wounded and not get killed?
6. How did the hacker guy get all that cool equipment into his tiny shoulder bag?
7. How can you drive a car up to the 4th floor in order to smash it into people?
8. What are the physics of smashing up a car just so that it manages to down a helicopter?
9. If there are all these wrecked and burning cars all over the place, why are there no dead drivers anywhere?

Enough questions, time for bed. Got class tomorrow early!

Necessities

There's a nice little shop in Ísafjörður that is open pretty much all day, the hamburger shop at the bus service. Busses run 3 times a day during the week. The shop has a few newspapers, ice cream and coke, sweets and chips, pizza and microwave hamburgers, skýr in all the flavors you can think of, and a few necessities.

I waited for the sullen teenager behind the cash register to go to the back room to snap this little collection of necessities next to the coffee machine which spews a foul brew. Let's see, what kinds of things could you need after the grocery store closes at 9pm?

• Toothbrush and toothpaste - check.
• Razors and Band-Aids - check.
• Sanitary pads - check.
• Baby pacifiers - check.
• Drumsticks, guitar strings, and a guitar strap? Well, maybe.
• Condoms and massage cream - okay, so we can figure out what people do evenings and weekends around here :)

A Blueberry Day

It was a wonderful, sunny, summer Icelandic day. Blue skies, sunny - even this evening is cloudless, but I am freezing my hands as the open WLAN is only reachable from the outside benches, not from my cellar room....

I climbed up a bit of the mountain behind Ísafjörður this afternoon, looking for blueberries. Are there ever blueberries! Big, sweet blueberries, close to the ground. Tons of them. All you have to do is grab down and pull. I picked for 45 minutes, stuffing my gob on occasion. What a wonderful taste sensation having your mouth just stuffed with blueberries!

I had a whole bag of them picked, enough for lunch, supper, and breakfast tomorrow. It was so sunny I was starting to get sunburned, so I thought I would head down. Going down shouldn't be soooo difficult, should it? It is. Looking for a good place to put your feet when the ground (and the potholes) are covered in grass is a challenge. I crossed some little creeks, washing my hands in the first one. Yup, seems glacial to me - freezing cold! I finally made it down almost to the houses when I remembered I had crossed a bridge waaaaay up there - no bridge here, but a few furts here and there. You climb down a very steep hill, jump or wade, and back up another very steep hill. Hmm. Maybe on down a bit?

I walked though a few pine trees, an Icelandic forest. The old joke goes: What do you do if you get lost in an Icelandic forest? You just stand up. This forest had wild strawberries, lots of them! I picked and ate on the spot all I could find! I finally made it down to a place where the hill was not quite so steep, and made it across the creek.

Now, how to get back to civilization? The houses weren't far, but the space between them and me was covered with weeds higher than I am! I tried to follow this bit and that, but the brush eventually got to be too much. I climbed back up to the top of the hill, set my sight on the nearest street, and then just charged through - and made it!


I was home quickly, chatted with the landlord, she gave me a tour of her restaurant - it is closed as she can't get anyone to be cook or waiter - there is no unemployment here at the moment! Then I got out some skýr, added milk, put in tons of blueberries, and sprinkled with brown sugar. Just delicious and well worth the hike!

In the news

Not much real news happens up here at 66 ° North (which is also the name of a great clothing label for stuff to keep you dry and warm), just south of the Arctic Circle, which is at 66° 33".

But when 15 crazy foreigners come up here to spend 2 weeks learning Icelandic - and spend lots of money on the local economy - it's news for the local rag, Bæjarins besta. (in Icelandic)

Service - a foreign word in Iceland?

Iceland is a country not really known for being service-oriented. I don't just mean that many cashiers don't smile at you or won't make small-talk. It's things like the bus driver opening the trunk, but expecting you to get your suitcases out yourself, they are yours and he is only paid to drive the bus.

The shops are filled in the afternoons with sullen teenagers behind the cash registers who would rather be home watching movies on the radiation-disk in the sight-caster. They may or may not take their MP3-player-earphones out in order to sell you something. They may be on the phone discussing the party last Friday, which is more important than taking your cash for whatever it is that you want to buy.

We were invited out to dinner with a friend at a local fish restaurant. It is only open during the summertime, and the tables are long, Viking-like rows of wooden, hewn tables and benches. There is no menu. A young girl came up to ask what we wanted after she bangs down some glasses and a pitcher of water. We ordered 2 fish soups and 3 fried fish - this was confusing, didn't everyone need soup? No, one does not like fish soup. Okay, what kind of fish do you have today. She at least gets the fish-name-translation-card out and points to the fish they have today. Fine, we choose, and white wine with the fish.

We get some bowls plonked down, no problem, we can distribute them ourselves. Some bread comes, plonk. The wine comes - bang, bang, bang. We serve ourselves, no problem, and the soup is delicious. We sit around for a while with our dirty bowls, eventually the girl comes to pick them up. I say "that was very nice", she is rather shocked - she didn't ask me how I liked it!

We wait some more. We wait. Everyone else in the restaurant gets served. Our friend wonders if this was because he had a little spat with the owner last time over a bill that was never settled because the owner didn't write a bill at all, so it was never paid. "Send me a bill, and I will pay it," he had said. Finally he asked - turns out the girl forgot to tell the kitchen about the fish, only the soup. So we wait some more, and finally a wonderful pan of the most delicious fish I have ever eaten is bonged down in front of us, without a word. You want fish, you get fish, why bother with fancy words like "Enjoy your meal!"?

We go up to the cash register to pay and I try some more Icelandic - "that was really excellent fish!" The woman looks up in shocked surprise, I suppose I interrupted her while she was doing the sums.

Am I being silly? I was hungry, I wanted fish, I got fish to eat and it tasted excellent. What more do I want?

I do think, however, that if Iceland wants to increase their tourist return rate, they might want to start some courses in service-giving. I mean, if Berlin bus drivers can learn to speak English, surely Icelandic shop clerks can learn to smile and say some nice things.

Icelandic Course - Part 1

The Icelandic Course in Ísafjörður started Monday with 15 students of all ages, countries, and occupations. Many people are hard to nail down: "Well, I was born in X but lived in Y and I lived in Z before coming here and am continuing on to M!" or "I studied A but found B to be rather interesting, so I am working as a C in order to study B but with an emphasis on D".

I am a bit bored, but there is a good Internet connection .... I need pronunciation and vocabulary in order to shake off all that Swedish which invades my brain when I want to say something in Icelandic. It has been good to re-learn a lot of the all-purpose phrases and the way Icelanders get around all those horrible endings. They just say Èg ætla að and then slap on an infinitive ("I am in the process of doing" ) and this tends to expand widely to include things past and future, so you get around the horrible, awful inflection of the language.

I even ordered a hamburger in the hamburger station today and the guy asked me if I was from Reykjavik! Okay, I only needed about 3 sentences, but I seem to have managed to get them out pronounced right, so something is working, even if I really have trouble wanting to say something - it still comes out Swedish.

I am also getting better at puzzling out some articles in the newspaper. I delight in finding words I just learned the meanings of. Stígvél, climbing-machine, means boots. The teacher told me that this was an attempt to make sense of the German word "Stiefel".

The Icelandic people are just as allergic to foreign word influences as the French are. A computer is a tölva, a number-oracle; A stove is an eldavél, a fire-machine; alnæmi, too-sensitive-against-everything, is the word for AIDS; myndvarp, picture-thrower, is an overhead projector; geisladiskur, radiation-disk, is a CD-ROM; rafmagn, amber-power, is electricity; TV is sjónvarp, sight-casting. What fun! It seems, thought, that they do not have Icelandic words for either "party" or "to date" yet, although there is currently a contest going on amongst the teenagers to have them find the best word for "to date". My money is on something like "daijta".

We had a talk by a historian about Icelandic history. The short version is: dried fish, salted fish, frozen fish. The long version includes some Vikings and monks and bishops getting their heads chopped off and some witches (all but one a man) burned at the stake and one of the early pseudo-democracies in the world and some fish wars. Iceland does not want to join the EU because then everyone and his brother could come fish their waters, and they are already overfished. But they are considering using the Euro, although mostly Icelanders seem to like to argue with each other and this is a fun new topic to argue about.

There is also a lot of written history - the sagas, some family books, lots of church documents except for about 50 years after the plague hit Iceland with an English boat coming to port and two infected guys going to the yearly parliament meeting where they died after infecting everyone, who then went home to infect their neighborhoods. About a third of the population died (apparently, most of the people who could write) and the Danish king figured the place was a goner, so he offered the Icelanders land in Jutland if they wanted to come to Denmark.

They didn't. They like it here. They make fun of us for wearing wearing so many clothes when it is so warm (10 degrees C, they have open-toes sandals and no jacket on, even some bare midriffs and of course, T-Shirts) and raincoats when it is "not raining", i.e. you don't have to start swimming yet.

We had a field trip up the coast today, really stunning scenery. There's this fishing museum up the coast that has this guy who wears an old fisherman's costume (he's on all the tourist brochures) and explains how they caught sharks with rotten horse meat doused in rum and then used their livers for oil and buried the carcasses for 6 months, then dried them for another 7 before eating the meat - with lots of schnapps called "Black Death" to wash it down. He showed us the needles used to string the fish together (poke it through their eyes) and all sorts of other equipment, as well as some dried fish used to make interesting things.

We went on to a "Natural History Museum" that was a collection of stuffed animals and some stones. The birds were nice, we got to see a lot of birds we learn songs about (and when I look the birds up in the Wikipedia they have names like Whimple that I have never heard of before). They also had a flamingo. I gathered my vocabulary and asked the guy if they had flamingos in the area. "No", he says, "but there was once one that flew to the south by mistake." "And that's him?" "No, we found that one in a foreign country." And that was that. So he/she stands, next to a stuffed stork.

Ísafjörður Arrival

I flew to Ísafjörður on the "late machine" on Sunday. There are two flights a day from the Reykjavik provincial airport. The emphasis is on PROVINCIAL. I mean, there are signs saying you have to have your liquids in a clear bag and all, but gate 1 is right across from the cafeteria cashier and a guy takes your little boarding card and scans the bar code on it. You walk out and on to a nice, sturdy little plane. They even serve coffee during the 35 minute flight.

It was a clear, sunny day - what a view of the volcanic landscapes, the glacial lakes, the bits and pieces of snow still left on the mountain tops! The deep blue of the water, crystal clear, I swear I saw whales twice. In the sea are many rock islands, a few with houses on them even, and some boats were under way. Coming up to the Westfjörds there are very steep mountains and very narrow fjörds, you could see the shadow of the plane on the almost sheer mountainside and you wondered how ever they were going to land this thing.

Sure enough, there was a flat piece of land jutting out into the fjörd, it landed on that although up until a few seconds before landing I thought we were going to land on the water. This airport is even more provincial, if that can be imagined. There is a little window with a small roller thing, and some guy plucks the suitcases out of the plane and throws them through the window.

You go out the door - and there are the mountains. And a few cars. And a red thing that appears to be the bus. Tell the driver the name of the place you are staying, palm him a 500 krone note, and he'll drop you off at the door.

I have a nice little guest house, 5 rooms sharing a kitchen and 2 bathrooms. That's fine - it's cheap, too. The town is cute, there are a few stores, a swimming pool, a couple of churches and a lot of water around.

The school has Iceland's only outdoor badminton field in the inner court, and is a nice place. At the reception for the course we were shown around - regional development center, distance education rooms, offices, and: open WLAN. I love it!

On to learning more Icelandic!

La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc

It's "Culture Week" in Reykjavik, there are so many things going on in town it makes your head spin. A group called "Deus ex cinema" that shows films relating somehow to religion had a very special event set up - a midnight film in the cathedral, La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, a silent film from 1928 by a famous Danish filmmaker, Carl Theodor Dreyer, with live organ and Gregorian chants. The organ music was composed by Wilfried Kaets, a German organist, who was playing.

The cathedral has modern pews that can be turned facing the altar - for church - or facing the back, for cultural activites. There was a large screen hung and a beamer that was to backlight the screen with the movie, the organ had a monitor for the organist to better see without having to crane his neck.

The cathedral was full, maybe 200 people! They began late (we are, you see, in Iceland) - and the picture quality was horrible. I know it is a restauration, but I have seen bits before, it was not this bad. The picture on the organ monitor was much better - that meant the beamer was not correctly set up.

The quality was so bad, some people began leaving after 5 minutes. After 30 they interrupted the program to say that they needed to fix it. The organist was livid to be interrupted in his presentation! A guy got a ladder and started going through all the menus, playing with them, trying to get it correctly set up. He didn't try the one menu that would have fixed the problem, in my opinion.

As he was going through the menus for a third time, I couldn't sit still and went up to suggest that he try this menu he kept avoiding. "No, no," he said, "This is expensive equipment. That is not the problem." Translation: what does a woman know about beamers?

We watched them fiddle for another 15 minutes or so, then heard that they had decided the DVD was "broken" (although the picture was fine on the organ monitor) and they were going to burn a new one. Sigh. We got our money back, I thanked the organist (who was still fuming) and went home for a nice whiskey-cola before bed.