Iceland A-Ö

Vertu sælt, Ísland, og þakka þér fyrir allt! (Good bye, Iceland, and thank you for everything!)

After nine months, which flew by so very fast, I am flying out tomorrow afternoon! Well, that’s the plan, if the Eyjafjallajökull volcano condescends to let me leave. It’s been an amazing year, and it’s been an amazing last week here too!

I was lucky enough to have one of my good friends fly out from Maryland to visit me, and of course it ended up being a much bigger for her than she expected—thank you very much, volcanic ash cloud. She got routed through Glasgow, then Akureyri in the north, and then she had a 6-hour bus ride from there to Reykjavík! At least she was able to come at all, though, and we’ll just hope that doesn’t happen again tomorrow afternoon!



We had two lovely adventures together in the few days she was here: first, we saw the puffins! I didn’t think I’d have a chance to see Iceland’s most famous bird before I left, but my friend was clever enough to find a tour that was operating already—so we went! Puffins are adorable birds—clumsy and frantic in the air, bumbling on the ground, and oddly formal in their tuxedo outfits with those ridiculous toucan-colored beaks. We were entirely charmed.






Then, the next day (having rescheduled once due again to the ash cloud), we took a day tour to Akurkeyri and Mývatn! Akureyri is the “Capital of the North,” and Mývatn (the unprepossessingly-named “Midge-fly Lake”) is one of Iceland’s greatest natural wonders. We stopped at Goðafoss, a horse-shoe shaped waterfall that’s almost as famous here as Gullfoss on the Golden Circle. It’s not very tall, but it looks a little like a miniature Niagara—only without the hydroelectric power plant and casinos.

The lake itself is dotted with pseudo-crater islands, the remnants of ancient volcanoes that exploded and left great pockmarks on the land. We were so lucky in terms of weather! We had only a little rain here and there, mostly while we were on the road, and only one stop where we couldn’t see anything because the fog was so thick. Sadly, that stop was Krafla, an active volcano—but I think I might have seen enough of volcanoes already, thank you very much.

The next stop was Dimmuborg—the Dark City (or, more accurately and more creepily, the Dark Fortress). It is a vast field of basalt formations left by volcanic eruptions underwater, and legend goes (in the North at least) that Grýla and her thirteen impish Yule Lads live here. I personally kept looking over my shoulder for orcs.

Also at Dimmuborg is another section of the rift where the Eurasian and North American continental tectonic plates are drifting apart. Here, you can stand with one foot on each plate, straddling a gap half a foot wide and several yards deep. Talk about a tourist photo op!

Then there was a geothermal site to visit: Námaskarður, I think it’s called. It was eerie to be standing in the midst of what looks like the surface of Mars, knowing that all of Iceland is turning green and lush everywhere else!

Because our flight wasn’t until late, we had the bus drop us off in Akureyri so we could see the town. It’s a city of some 17,500 people, but it only took half an hour to see the downtown shopping area. Akureyri is famous for several things, including its burgers, which are eaten with béarnaise sauce and with the French fries inside, and its stoplights, which are shaped like hearts.

With those adventures under our belts, my friend departed (this time with much less hassle!) for home and I decided to check one last thing off my to-see list: the Reykjavík Zoo (Húsdýragarðurinn). It’s not a big zoo and it only houses native or common animals, but I got to pet a cow and see a baby goat standing on top of its mother—and best of all, I got to take pictures of a very lively Arctic fox! Well worth the entry fee, even if they did look at me like I was speaking Chinese when I tried to ask for a ticket in Icelandic.

I decided to title this post “Iceland A-Ö” because Icelandic adds several letters to the end of their alphabet and has removed the Z (along with C and Q) altogether, so A-Ö is the local version of A-Z. But I haven’t gotten to know Iceland from A to Z yet. I’ve reported on things here and there, posted pictures where I could—yet there’s still so much more to see! I hope to come back here someday, and someday soon.

But as a final reflection, I’ve put together a list of things I will and won’t miss in Iceland, as well as an answering list of things I look forward to at home:

Things I won't miss in Iceland
-Never finding ANYTHING on the shelves in the library (Dewey, come save us!)
-The wind
-The cold—the really, really long cold
(The fact that this list is so short should give you a sense of how much I’ve liked it here—or at least how nostalgic I’m feeling at the moment.)

Things I'll miss in Iceland
-Safety (You could probably walk drunk and naked down the creepiest ally at 3a.m. and nothing would happen to you.)
-The smell of the sea
-The super pure tap water, and the geothermally-heated hot water that never runs out
-The really blue sky (when you see it, that is)
-A phone book organized by first name

Things I'm looking forward to at home
-Not having to use big heavy adaptors for electronics
-Being able to play local DVDs on my computer
-Having more than four choices for cereal
-Real peanut butter (Oh my goodness, you have no idea.)
-Talking with native speakers
-No longer being the only “dumb American” in company

I hope to continue this blog, not so regularly, but perhaps when I have good pictures to put up or ramblings to share. Thank you for reading, and verið sæl (be well)!

Westward Ho!

Barbara Ara bar Ara araba bara rababara (Ari´s Barbara brought Ari the Arab only rhubarb—an Icelandic tongue-twister)

At the very beginning of the school year, our program director told us that one of the highlights of the program would be a class trip to the Westfjords in the spring. The Westfjords are to Iceland what the Aran Islands are to Ireland, or maybe what the Pacific Northwest is to the US—rugged, stunning landscapes where the old ways of life have not yet entirely died out. Well, at last the long-awaited trip arrived, and now I can say that not only was it one of the highlights of the program, but it was one of the best trips I´ve ever taken!

I am entirely at a loss to describe the Westfjords. Even my pictures don´t capture how amazing the land is. The road skirts the coast, weaving around every fjord (and there are many!) so that you can see the place you´re trying to reach but you know it will take you two hours to get there because you have to drive around this massive body of water in order to reach it. The villages are few and far between—in fact, even Ísafjörður, the biggest town in the Westfjords, has only 2500 people, and the village where we stayed for two nights, Flateyri, was so small the owner of the local swimming pool was able to track us down an hour after we left in order to return a pair of gloves someone had forgotten!

We spent four days driving in this bleak, stunning, practically untouched subarctic fantasy land, visiting saga sites and archeological digs, as well as touring a museum of magic (the picture is a magic staff for changing the weather), a maritime museum, and a fish factory owned by our program director´s cousin. In fact, everything in Flateyri seemed to be owned by a cousin of our director—it´s that sort of town.

It is still winter in the Westfjords—in fact, it was hit or miss whether we would be able to complete the trip as planned because there is a high mountain pass that is closed in bad weather, and there was a real possibility of snow. Actually, there was a snowfall the day before we drove through that pass, but it wasn´t bad enough to cause the road to close. For the most part, though, we had very good weather, and we were very conscious of how fortunate we were in that department!

On the one hand, it´s unreal to stand at the top of a mountain pass and say, “Here, on this very spot, on this same road, a saga hero decided to ride to his doom.” It was especially unreal to hike down to the site of another saga hero´s famous last stand, and find it to be a peaceful and deserted mountain slope now, with no evidence of the violence that occurred there a millennium ago. (This hike, by the way, was not for sissies—it was very steep with loose rocks most of the way, and a patch of dwarf birch forming such a thick undergrowth that we were quite scratched and bruised by the time we wrestled our way out of it.)

On the other hand, it was really wonderful to get a sense of daily life in the Westfjords now, something we couldn´t have done without the knowing aid of our program director. Towns get wiped out by landslides, farms will be isolated for months on end when the roads close, there is only one real grocery store in the whole of the Westfjords, it is winter until June. It is a hard life, especially for the farmers and the fishermen, and it is fast disappearing as people leave the old farms for an easier and more profitable life in the city. Most of the towns in the Westfjords are made up primarily of summer homes, populated only a month or two each year. The depths of winter must be incredibly bleak—but while we were there, we experienced as close to the “midnight sun” as most of us will ever get!

Driving back on Saturday night, seeing Reykjavík rise out of the ocean as we came south, we realized what a big city the capital is. Some 100,000 people may not seem like much in terms that the rest of the world uses, but when you´ve gone for three days without seeing another car on the road, and when you run into the same tourist twice because there are so few places for tourists to stay…Reykjavík suddenly looks much, much bigger.

Summer Comes to Iceland?

Gleðilegt sumar. Njótið snjósins og öskunnar (Happy summer—the traditional greeting on the first official day of summer—Enjoy the snow and ash.)

It seems that every time Iceland makes international news it’s for something bad—either because the country owes more than it can count to the UK and Holland, or because its volcanoes are causing travel chaos all over Europe. Best joke I’ve heard about the volcano at Eyjafjallajökull: There’s no C in the Icelandic alphabet, so instead of paying back the Brits in cash, they’re paying them back in ash. For all that, Reykjavík hasn’t seen any ash fall because the winds tend to blow it east instead of west, and Keflavík airport is still running just fine—the flights are getting cancelled on the continental end, not the Icelandic one.


We have, however, had plenty of snow leading up to Iceland’s first official day of summer, which is today. (Iceland doesn’t have spring: until today, it’s been winter.) Today it’s trying to get above freezing and we have a little sun, but two days ago we had a snowstorm, though fortunately it melted right away. They tell you in the guidebooks that Iceland has winters pretty much like Virginian winters. This is true. What they don’t tell you is that these winters last from September through April. But as we’re now getting daylight from 5a.m. to 10p.m., I suppose we do have a few advantages over home!

Last week I was delighted to have my Californian friend visit me along with two of her friends, and we had a lovely time, though unfortunately I had to beg off on a lot of the fun because it was the last week of classes for us. Still, I got to see the Golden Circle with them again (Þingvellir, Geysir, Gullfoss waterfall)—and it’s different every time you go—and on Saturday, after our other two guests had left (one of them even making it safely to England, right before the eruption!), my Californian friend and I braved the cold to go on a tour of Snæfellsnes peninsula.

I’ve written about this place before, back in October when I went on a day trip with my friends, but it was much better weather this time and we saw things we wouldn’t have seen without a guide. We stopped at the Gerðuberg basalt column cliffs, the Djúpalónssandur black pebble beach, and Arnarstapi harbor.

I actually liked the black pebble beach we visited in October better, but this place was lovely as well. It was the site of a shipwreck in the mid-20th century, and the rusted metal remains on the beach as a memorial, but the beach itself is full of dramatic rock formations and pebbles so smoothe they seem like they can hardly be real.

In October, Snæfellsjökull (the glacier where Jules Verne set the beginning of Journey to the Center of the Earth) was being shy and hid its head in the clouds. But for this trip, we got amazing views of this most famous of Icelandic glaciers. The entire peninsula is too beautiful and dramatic for words, but the glacier itself stands like a king over the mountains around it.

Last time I was on Snæfellsnes we couldn’t spare the hour it takes to walk the sea trail between Arnarstapi harbor and Hellnar (which, to the best of my knowledge, is little more than a collection of summer homes for wealthy Icelanders), but this time we were able to do that, and what a walk it was! The shore is piled with cliffs, crags, and outcroppings of lava and basalt, some of them forming incredible arches and walls with huge holes in them. Birds that I was told were oyster catchers (my take: seagulls) are already nesting there, and when they were disturbed by our walking too close, their cries and calls echoed on the cliffs like sound effects from a pirate movie.

We drove right through the Berserkjahraun lava field (the story goes that two berserkers fell for a Snæfellsnes farmer’s daughter, and in order to earn her they built a road through the lava field, only to be killed by the farmer as they relaxed in a sauna after finishing the job), and we ended our day with a trip to the Bjarnahöfn shark museum.

Yes, there is a museum dedicated entirely to the hunting and putrefaction of Greenland sharks. The old fellow who runs it, Ólafur, was a shark hunter in his youth, as was his father, and he gave us a personal tour (translated by our guide) and favored us with samples of his famous “delicacy.” I learned a great deal, actually, but I felt that my first taste of hákarl in February didn’t particularly need an encore.

It was truly wonderful having my friends visit me, and I’m very grateful to the volcano and the Gulf Stream for allowing their flights to go out safely, but now my little vacation is over, and it’s back to work on finals and the thesis. Such is the life of a student!

Random Fun Facts

Ég heiti Krístin áttaviti (My name is Christine the Compass).

One of my friends here joked that I’m the navigator for our group (not always an accurate or efficient one, true, but I usually find the way eventually), so I decided that that was going to be my Viking name. I think it’s a lot better than Ketill Trout or Thorolf Twist-Foot (no kidding, these are people’s historical names)! So, souvenirs I’ll bring back from Iceland: a taste for chocolate and licorice combinations, a new sweater, and a Viking nickname. What more could you ask from a year abroad?

Having spent all last week on work for my classes and my thesis, I have nothing important to write about this time around, so I’ll blog up some more “notes on life in Iceland”—which, let’s face it, are probably more interesting to folks than my vacation pictures.

About the sweaters: I don’t know if I’ve really mentioned them before, but they are a hallmark of Icelandic daily life. Every Icelander (guy or girl) seems to own at least one, usually made by their mothers, and they wear them like jackets, even when it’s in the depth of winter. Icelandic wool has more lanolin in it than most other sheep’s wool (if you can believe what they tell you), so it’s more water-resistant and warm—serious pluses in this country as you might surmise. Tourists who don’t have the benefit of having Icelandic mothers buy them from the Hand-Knitting Association in such quantities that sweater production probably single-handedly keeps the Icelandic economy from dissolving into anarchy.

The Icelandic sweater typically has pretty patterns around the yoke and is called a lopapeysa. Lopi is the kind of wool, and peysa means “sweater.” Funny folk etymology of the term “peysa” that my Icelandic instructor shared: when French merchants started trading in Iceland, they would see the farmers coming down to the harbor in these lovely warm sweaters. Freezing their little French derrieres off in the Icelandic spring, they naturally wanted to buy some of these sweaters from the locals. So, not speaking the language, they would go up to folks in town in hopes of buying a sweater, asking the person if he was a farmer by saying, “Paysan?” Naturally, the Icelanders assumed this was the French word for “sweater” and somehow it stuck.

Another folk etymology, this one for the word appelsína, which means “orange”: when the first oranges were imported from some more tropical exotic clime, the Icelanders looked at them and said, “Oh, they’re apples from China”—appel, sína. I don’t know if either of these etymologies is true; I’m particularly dubious of the appelsína explanation, given that the Icelandic word for apple is “epli” and the word for China is “Kína”—but good stories are more interesting than facts either way.

What I do know is true, though (cue awkward segue) is that Icelanders have a strange affinity for pear flavor. Now, pear is a nice flavor, but who ever thought it would be a good idea to combine it with dairy? Yet here you can get pear-flavored skýr (Icelandic yogurt), pear-flavored smoothies, and pear-flavored “thick milk”—an rather interesting drink that’s about the consistency of melted ice cream and almost as sweet. (I think this may be a Scandinavian invention, if not pan-European, but I’d never seen it before I came here.) None of these are bad, by the way; I quite like pear-flavored skýr especially. But still, it’s unique.


What’s not so unique (I’m all about the corny transitions today) is that Icelandic, like all the other Scandinavian and Germanic languages with the exception of English, does not have a W sound, just a V. This leads to perpetual confusion between the two letters when people learn English. Last semester I had a very hard time determining whether my Icelandic teacher was saying “word” or “verb” because she always switched the initial sounds. But it’s rarely confusing and instead leads to fun little Engrish errors like this sign I found on the main shopping street, advertizing “Owen-baked pizza.” My question: Who’s Owen?

And a final absolutely random note: people leave their babies outside stores here when they go inside. They tend to have these hermetically-sealed baby strollers that zip up like luggage with the baby inside (to protect them from the wind and rain—but can the poor things breathe?!), and when people are out with their babies and the door to the store isn’t wide enough to accommodate the stroller, or they’re not planning on being inside for long, they just park the stroller outside—baby and all—and go on with their shopping! It certainly speaks to how safe a place this is. Apparently they do it in Denmark too; I heard a story about a Danish lady who parked her baby outside a café in New York and was arrested for child neglect. Some customs just don’t travel well.

This coming week is the last week of classes, to be followed by some hectic weeks of choir concerts, finals, friends’ visits, and class trips (and supposedly thesis research?), but I hope everybody Stateside is having a nice spring! It might, MIGHT have decided to stop snowing here….

Easter Up North

Gleðilega Páska! Hann er upprisinn líka á Íslandi. (Happy Easter! He is risen in Iceland too.)

It’s fascinating to experience the holiday celebrations of another culture, and I’m glad that Easter came after I’d been in Iceland long enough to have some (tenuous!) handle on the language—at least enough to appreciate some of the subtleties of the season.

First of all, Easter is a pretty big deal here—much more so than in the US. Not that people are particularly religious (though everybody seems to acquire some religion for themselves around the big holidays, out of nostalgia if nothing else), but because Lutheranism is the state religion, it was law until fairly recently that all businesses had to be closed on Good Friday, East Sunday, and Easter Monday. It’s no longer law, but it’s more or less still part of the culture. Grocery stores, bookstores, many restaurants—all closed those three days, and many of them closed on Saturday too. The library and university take this to an extreme and are closed from Holy Thursday all the way through Easter Monday—which was a serious problem given that this is our spring break and all of us in the masters program were counting on spending the whole week holed up in the library working madly on projects and papers. But for the people who work in these institutions, it really is a nice enforced vacation to spend with their families…sitting around home doing nothing because nothing is open.

Like Easter in America, though, Easter in Iceland has been candified. Principal exhibit: the Páskaegg tradition. Apparently this “Easter Egg” is customary all over northern Europe, but I’d never seen it before I came here. Big (sometimes giant) chocolate eggs, filled with all sorts of candies like a piñata. You can get small ones, but I’ve seen them bigger than soccer balls, and I just imagine the visions of sugar plums that dance in the heads of children when they see those at the grocery store.

I’d like to throw in a side note that the palms they use here in church for Palm Sunday are unlike any other palm I’ve ever seen. They look more like hedge trimmings that someone picked up from the yard. But then, this is ICEland—what do they know from palms?

I had the opportunity to sing with the choir at a Lutheran service on Holy Thursday (Skírdagur here—which to the best of my understanding means something like Cleansing Day, related to the word for baptism but probably a reference to the washing of the feet at the Last Supper). I’d never been to a Lutheran service before and was so touched to see that it was strikingly similar to a Catholic one—I felt right at home, in fact, even though it was all in Icelandic.

Then on Good Friday (Föstudagurinn langi—Long Friday, because you’re traditionally not supposed to eat or do anything fun!), we experienced another Icelandic tradition: Páskasnjór—Easter snow. It came in a heavy wave right around 3 o’clock, darkening the sky like a reference to the Gospel and dropping at least half an inch of snow on the poor crocuses and budding bushes. I think it’s indicative of the climate that the Icelanders have a special term for snow that falls right at Easter time. (I think it’s also indicative of the environment that they have a special term for a flash flood caused by a volcano erupting under a glacier—jökullhlaup—but that’s another story.)

In the Middle Ages they called Holy Saturday “Páska aptann”—Easter Eve—but I haven’t heard the term used in a modern context. Just like in the US, poor Holy Saturday gets rather overshadowed by the two momentous days on either side of it. We spent it navigating around the icy patches and snowdrifts.

But Easter Sunday itself was magnificent. Icelandic weather threw a party to celebrate, giving us bright sun and 40-degree temperatures that had the Icelanders turning out in droves to sport their spring fashions (open-toed shoes! Here!) and to let their children play outside. The funny thing was, I felt that it was warm too—so warm that I took a walk into Laugardalur, a lovely park area in a suburb to the east of downtown.

It was lovely to see the churches all decked out for Easter, ringing their bells like mad and garnering the biggest crowds I’ve ever seen at services. Funnily enough, around here they don’t decorate with lilies, they decorate with daffodils. I suppose this is because lilies probably need a warmer climate to grow, but then again, maybe the Icelanders (and, I’m told, all of Scandinavia) don’t know what they’re missing, because their term for daffodil is, in fact, “Páskalilja”—Easter lily.

And today is Annar í Páskum—the second day of Easter, when everything remains closed and parents try to keep their children contained as they recover from the effects of those giant chocolate Páskaeggjar. By the way, is it just me, or is it kind of odd that in Icelandic, the terms for both Christmas and Easter are plural? I can’t figure out how that happened.

So this was my experience of Easter in Iceland. It was really a lovely celebration and not at all diminished for having conducted in a language I can’t actually claim to speak. Such is the power of the holiday. I hope you all had a very beautiful and blessed Easter, however you celebrated it!

What a Trip

Velkomin til Íslands. Við vonum að þið njótið brottflutningsins ykkar. (Welcome to Iceland. We hope you enjoy your evacuation.)

For months and months I’ve been looking forward to my family’s visit to Iceland--playing tour guide to an appreciative audience in a country I have come to love very much is only slightly less exciting than the simple fact that my parents and sister actually braved the crazy weather to fly out to the middle of the North Atlantic to see me! And it was quite a visit, I must say--perhaps more remarkable than we had hoped. Certainly more remarkable than we had expected.

With a little over a week to spend in and around Reykjavík, we made the most of our time--visiting the famous flea market in town just a few hours after my poor family stumbled sleepily off the red-eye and trudged back to my apartment in the wind and on-and-off rain (which, by the way, accompanied us practically the whole time they were here).

We hit the Blue Lagoon the next day--the geothermally-heated pool in the lava fields (which I had visited in January but hadn’t swum in until this visit). It was so wet and foggy when we first got in that we couldn’t see the far side of the water--in fact, we couldn’t see each other if we got more than ten feet away. It was all very mystical, once we got over the strangely primal fear of being in water up to our necks, isolated from everything familiar and solid--and we stayed in the water for five hours, squelching our toes (and, let’s be honest, our hands too) in the soft silica mud that coats the bottom of the pool and is bottled and sold for big bucks in town.

The next day, it was the Golden Circle (Þingvellir, Geysir, and Gullfoss--the Parliament Plains, the geyser park, and the waterfall)--another obligatory tourist activity. I had been there on a big bus tour the same day we attended the sheep round-up in September, but we rented a car this time and practically had the whole of Þingvellir to ourselves. Not only was the experience more personal, but it was significantly easier to line up a picture without getting strangers’ elbows in the shot.

After that, there was of course a horseback riding trip for my sister and me--the 'advanced rider' version this time, though we couldn’t figure out why you had to be advanced to take this trail, unless it was simply for the fact that we tölted more than we walked. It rained on us the whole time and my sister gallantly called it an “epic” experience, but weather notwithstanding, it truly was intoxicatingly exciting to be out on the river delta, splashing through the water on our sure-footed ponies and feeling very much like the first settlers of an uninhabited Iceland. My pony, for the curious, was a big-boned, fuzzy black fellow named Nekvi, and he was a terrific tölter; my sister’s chestnut pony, Frísa, was less of a tölter but a real sweetie. (Google “tölt” if that means nothing to you--I’ve written about it before, the first time I rode here.)

During the week, my family was very accommodating, entertaining themselves (to say nothing of sleeping on my floor night after night!) while I ran back and forth between being with them and going to classes. We saw just about all the interesting museums in Reykjavík--and a few that weren’t so interesting--and experienced some nice traditional Icelandic foods too (we’re talking lamb stew and flatbread, not putrefied shark or pickled ram’s testicles--what kind of hostess do you think I am?).

Then, this past weekend, we rented a car again and drove down into South Iceland to visit Skógar one day and Vík the next. We saw three absolutely stunning waterfalls (Seljalandsfoss, Gljúfurárfoss, and Skógafoss) and drove across the heart of saga territory while I regailed my very patient family with stories from the sagas. (Over there you can see the place where Gunnar’s wife let Gunnar die because he slapped her one time years before...oh, and over there is where Njal was burned to death in his own home. Oh, and did I tell you the story about Auðr, who bopped her enemy in the nose with the bag of coins he was trying to bribe her with? That happened in the Westfjords, but it’s a good story anyway.) I must say that, even beyond the beautiful waterfalls, it was an entirely strange experience being in South Iceland because there are simply no real towns. Once you pass Hvolsvöllur (itself a town of maybe 1000), it’s just small farms widely separated from each other, dotting a truly vast landscape, until you get to Skógar--and even that is little more than a hotel and a museum of curiosities (which, by the way, is very entertaining). It was almost unreal to realize that there was absolutely no place to stay the night--not even a place to eat!--for mile after mile of deserted road. It was more like driving in parts of the American West than anything--mountainous Utah on one side of the road and pancake-flat Illinois on the other, until you reach the sea.

We doubled back from Skógar and stayed the night at a farmer’s house near the Bakki airport (remember I was saying how the tradition of hospitality lives on here? It’s true--I can attest from first-hand experience!). At least, that is what we intended to do. A little after midnight, we were woken up by the farmer, who told us we had to evacuate to Hvolsvöllur because a volcano had erupted under Eyjafjallajökull, the glacier a few miles away. Needless to say, we didn’t argue. In fact, when we got to Hvolsvöllur, we just kept going and drove all the way back to Reykjavík, watching the red glow on the clouds--the reflection of the volcano in the sky--disappear in our rear-view mirrors. The farm where we were staying was in the flood plain, and they were worried less about lava and ash than they were about flash flooding from glacial melt--but then, it IS a volcano after all, and who knows what might come out of it? It turns out it hadn’t actually erupted under the glacier but beside it--a much safer event, if anything involving lava can be called safe. If you haven’t yet seen pictures of the eruption, check out this video, and practice your Icelandic at the same time: http://vefmidlar.visir.is/VefTV/?channelID=STOD2&programID=d93d6ddc-f3df-4c27-90e2-28d49738f306&mediaSourceID=47b8d1b3-4c40-41b3-8d5d-aa2280563582&mediaClipID=96771c94-1541-493b-84da-c3cc9f729912

So there was no Vík for us--a disappointment, to be sure, as the area is famously dramatic and beautiful--but we do now get to say that we were four of the 450-some people evacuated due to the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption of 2010. My parents and sister were very good sports about it all. (Can I just say, though, that it WOULD be my luck to take my volcano-paranoid family on a trip in South Iceland when a volcano that hadn’t erupted since 1821 suddenly decided to open up and spew molten lava all over the place?)

And THEN, as if the volcano wasn’t enough, on Monday when my family was supposed to fly out, the mechanics at Keflavík Airport went on strike, causing such chaos and delays that my dad just rebooked for Tuesday. Not that I objected to having a bonus day with my family, but first of all, I think they were rather tired of sleeping on the floor every night, and second, they had kind of "finished" Reykjavík and we were hard-put to find anything entertaining to do for that extra day they were here! But the strike ended Monday afternoon and the volcano wasn’t putting out enough ash to close the airport, so my family was able to make it out Tuesday evening.

I miss them already, and I hope they’ll remember the fun parts of their visit--but really, Iceland? A volcano AND a strike? What kind of sense of humor does this island have?!

A Jaunt in Denmark

Græsset må ikke betrædes (The grass may not be betrodden—the amusingly formal Danish way to say “Keep off the grass”)

Where to begin after a week-long trip around the beautiful country of Denmark? I simply can’t detail everything we saw—there’s too much, and you can read a guidebook for a more accurate report on the attractions of Scandinavia if you really want to. So perhaps a brief overview, then some thoughts.

I flew into Copenhagen last Wednesday with a friend of mine who also happened to be presenting at the Århus Universitet conference on medieval Iceland. She had brilliantly discovered that Kronberg castle in Helsingør is just a train-ride away (it sounds like Elsinore because it is Elsinore!)—so naturally we two Shakespeare buffs had to take a quick detour to see Hamlet’s castle.





We got there just in time to see the courtyard and the casements (the terrifyingly labyrinthine, pitch-black cellar rooms where soldiers stayed during sieges), but it was so worth the trip.

Then it was back to Copenhagen to catch a different train to Århus where the conference was held. After getting over the shock at discovering that Århus has a population the size of all Iceland (about 300,000 people), we came to like the cozy, quaint city very much in the few days we were there. The conference, by the way, was terrific—all graduate students and therefore lots of free exchange of ideas, with none of the intimidation that can accompany full-fledged scholars when they sit in the back of the room with their arms folded as you stammer through your paper.

It was quite chilly in Denmark, but we were lucky and had very good weather while we were there. We missed our bus-stop going to see the Moesgård Museum outside of town and so ended up walking a half-mile on a country road through the snow-covered hills (and trees!) of Jutland. The walk was almost as great as the museum itself!

On Sunday, we reluctantly parted from Århus and took the train southeast back to Copenhagen (which is on the island of Zealand—something my geography-impoverished mind never picked up on until the train passed through an underwater tunnel to get there). Because all the museums are closed on Mondays, we raced through the National Museet (so many artifacts that my Old Norse Religion class refered to—it was like meeting celebrities!) and the Statens Museum for Kunst (the art museum—some lovely Danish paintings by artists whose names I will never, ever remember).

We explored Strøget, the world’s longest pedestrian shopping street, drooled copiously over the 17th-century books the antiquarian bookstores just had lying around on their shelves, and tried our best not to let our jaws drop too far when we realized how much food costs there. If any place can make Iceland look cheap, it’s Denmark with its 30% sales tax.

On Monday we walked all over (and I mean ALL OVER) Copenhagen, visiting the Rundetaarn for a bird’s-eye view of the city and seeing the famous Den Lille Havfrue statue (the Little Mermaid statue in the harbor). We managed to find the graves of Søren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen, and also the smørrebrød sandwich shop that my grandmother ate at when she was in Copenhagen some 40 years ago. Some good things never really change. The only thing we missed was Tivoli Gardens, which, sadly enough, are closed until April.

At last, it was “hej hej” to Denmark (pronounced “hi hi”—a very cute Danish way of saying good bye), “hæ hæ” to Iceland (pronounced the same way—a less creative Icelandic way of saying hello).

We got back on Tuesday and were pleased to find all the snow washed away by a week’s worth of rain! Enough of the virtual tour; I could go on and on, but I’ll curb my enthusiasm and move on to a few thoughts on my first impressions of Denmark.

First, every single corner of the downtown area of Århus and Copenhagen is photograph-worthy. There are so many charming red or yellow brick houses and churches that they don’t even bother to name them all on the maps. You turn a corner and ta-da—there’s an 18th-century church right in front of you. It was so overwhelming, in fact, that we walked right by the royal residence of Amalienborg palace and didn’t even distinguish it from all the other beautiful buildings. Copenhagen has its sketchy side too, of course, and its architectural monstrosities from the 60s and 70s when the world lost all artistic sensibility, but on the whole, it still feels like Hans Christian Andersen’s hometown.

Second, Danish is a bizarre language. The joke among Scandinavians is that it is impossible to understand a Dane—a stereotype I thought had to be exaggerated until I heard the language spoken for the first time. This is not my own analogy, but it’s accurate: if a person tried to speak with a mouthful of hot porridge while at the same time trying to blow on it to cool it off, they would give a fair impression of the sound of Danish. Where Icelandic is clear, articulated, and on the tip of the tongue, Danish is throaty, full of vowels, and short on consonants. An example: in trying to find the cemetery, I asked a fellow at a 7-11 (which, by the way, are far fancier in Denmark than in the U.S.) where the street called Kapelvej was. “What street?” he asked. I showed him on my map. “Oh,” he said, “Gawewai.” Yes, that street, thank you. I’m sure it’s a lovely language to those who know it, but to me it sounded like it was only spoken by people half-asleep or perhaps intoxicated.

Third, since Iceland has made me a bit of a hotdog connoisseur, I have to say that Danish hotdogs are more satisfying than Icelandic ones. They come in funny buns like half a hollowed baguette, so the hotdog is enclosed all the way around and about half of it sticks out from one end of the bun. The condiments are squeezed in between the bun and meat, usually overflowing from the top. Quite unique, I have to say—but the flavor just about makes up for the fact that you pay twice as much for a Danish hotdog as for an Icelandic one.

Fourth, Icelanders are everywhere. After the conference in Århus, we all went out to dinner and, toward the end of the meal, there were some toasts made in Icelandic. The folks in the next table over suddenly cried, “Eruð þið íslensk?”—Are you Icelanders? Because they were. And not only were they delighted to run into several of their countrymen, it turns out they knew one of the folks in our group! This led to much rejoicing and a spirited round of some Icelandic folksongs. (For some reason, one of the Icelanders from the other table pointed right at me and said, “American.” I must have a tattoo on my forehead or something that I didn’t know about.)

Fifth, it’s lovely to be back in Iceland where I can at least distinguish the words people say to me even if I don’t know what they mean, and where I know how things work and can do my laundry and enjoy all those comfort-of-home niceties.

Sixth, I hope I can get back to Denmark someday soon….