A Tribute to the Horse, Or: The Anatomy of an Obsession

I believe it’s an Arab legend that says God took the wind and shaped it into the first horse. To non-horse-people this probably makes about as much of an emotional impact as saying God took the Slinky and shaped it into the first cat. To horse-people it is the stuff of ecstasy. Could there be any myth more fitting than one that harnesses the wind into the arch of a neck, the toss of a mane, the thunder of hooves? Human beauty may inspire more poetry, but I think equine beauty would inspire better, if only somebody more talented than myself would write it. That’s a sidelong apology for waxing poetic as I always do when the subject turns to horses, but this post is my way of explaining myself, if I can.

When it comes down to it, I think no language has a term for the horse that is beautiful enough to suit that prince of animals: horse, cheval, caballo, certainly not the unfortunate pferd—who came up with that one? At least Icelandic’s hestur has something of the rush of wind in it, and Latin’s equus has a liquid, flowing beauty, if only it weren’t for the word’s recent association with a Daniel Radcliffe play. So, beautiful or not, horse is the term we have, but the thing itself is so much greater.

It’s not just that the horse is the most beautiful creature God put on this earth (me? Biased?)—though I seem to harp on aesthetics more than anything else. What makes the horse’s beauty so unique is that it is that rare kind of beauty that man can touch without spoiling it. There are few things as wonderful as a horse and rider working in tandem, both loving the ride, both supporting and encouraging each other. If dog is man’s best friend (and it’s true that a dog on a bad day is more effusive than a horse on a good day), horse is his only partner, in everything from farming to warfare. That partnership has too often been abused, and it almost always falls short of perfection (have you ever seen a rider take a header when his horse decides he doesn’t feel like taking that jump after all?), but I’m an optimist, and I refuse to be deterred.

I’ve always been a lover of all things with fur. I gravitate toward animals at social gatherings the way some people gravitate toward children or the open bar. But horses, horses are special. Through no fault of my poor parents, who don’t like the creatures themselves but very kindly indulged me, I have been madly obsessed with horses ever since I can remember. Collecting toy horses, drawing horses (I was forbidden in middle school art class from picking horses as the subject for any more projects), taking pictures of horses, reading about horses, watching for horses on every drive through the country. And, of course, when the opportunity presented itself, riding horses.

I must admit I am not a particularly good rider—I have barely enough leg muscle to make myself go, much less a horse, and my balance is questionable at best (as evidenced by my remarkable tendency to slide right off the saddle at the slightest provocation). But what kind of obsessee would I be if I let that stop me? Whenever I’m around “real horse-people”—people who own horses, are in “the business” of horses, grew up in the saddle—I inevitably reveal myself to know very little about horsemanship and to be capable of even less. (Witness last weekend, when I was given multiple sets of instructions on how to lead a lazy horse faster, all of which completely failed in execution. YOU may be able to lead a horse to water, but it remains an open question for me.) But what does that matter to one obsessed? I make myself useful mucking stalls and sweeping aisles—anything to be near to horses, to have the sweet smell of hay and saddle leather around me. I think it’s a very good thing that horses are entirely unimpressed by admirers, because if they were any more impressionable sort of being I think I would prove to be a terrible sycophant.

Now, it’s hard to be romantic about horses when you’re covered in dirt and working with the average old nag you find in most barns—maybe that’s why “real horse-people” tend to make fun of their horses more than they boast about them—and any horse can be just as exasperating and uninspiring for a horse-person as a screaming toddler is to a kid-person. They bite. They kick. They roll in the mud right after their bath. They stretch their necks out and drag their feet so that they amble like cows. They run you into fenceposts when you’re riding. And do they really have to drool so much when they pull their heads out of the water bucket? But then, a magical moment will happen all of a sudden between a horse and his human—he’ll arch his neck and throw his shoulders into his trot like a dancer showing off for the audience, he’ll prick his ears and look just like the most beautiful study Leonardo ever dreamed of, he’ll rest he face against your chest and sigh softly into your shirt. And those are the moments that even down-to-earth “real horse-people” secretly delight in and come back for, again and again.

So I remain unabashedly obsessed, and unabashedly romantic. In fact, when I see movies I’m usually more enamored of the hero’s horse than of the hero—give me Silver and you can keep the Lone Ranger; give me Tornado and…we’ll negotiate about Zorro. When Shadowfax materialized on the screen, unearthly and breathtaking, I sincerely forgot that Gandalf and Legolas were even there. I think it brought tears to my eyes.

It has become a joke with my family and my friends that I turn into a five-year-old whenever I see a horse: whether it’s onscreen or out the window, I have an embarrassing tendency to squeak, “Horse!” and point him out, even if he’s nothing more than a spot in the background. I try very hard to suppress this in professional situations.

Looking over this post, I know I haven’t done justice to my fixation, or indeed to the poetry that is a horse at his best—horse-people will know what I mean without my being able to articulate it, and non-horse-people can just smile and shake their heads. I can’t make someone not already inclined to it catch their breath at the flare of a nostril, or go lightheaded at the sound of hooves on turf, or skip with excitement at the thought of getting to pet the pony at the petting zoo. For a horse-person, no horse is too average to invoke the ideal, and no contact is too trivial to set the heart racing.

If you don’t believe me, stop by my apartment: it’s plastered with pictures of horses cut from old calendars. They may be the most convenient and economic method of covering bare wall space, but I’ve been known to spend long and happy moments just admiring whichever picture my eye happens to fall upon, no matter how often I’ve seen it. Such is the way of obsession, and long may it live! We should all have such things that set us thinking of beauty and joy in a world that’s got far too little of either.

The Ricecapades: Confessions of a Haphazard Chef

(As promised, some lighter reading this time around!)

I love cooking. And several people in my life (my mother, my grandmother, even my first boyfriend) went to great pains to set me on the right track and instruct me in that mysterious art of turning raw eggs, dry beans, and baking chocolate into omelets, soups, and cakes. In fact some of my most cherished moments past and present are exchanges of recipes and cooking secrets, but sometimes I do get the feeling I’m probably the most recalcitrant student who ever entered a kitchen.

You know how everybody jokes that if you put a sign up next to a red button that says, “Do not push,” you’re effectively guaranteeing that the next person who stops by will reach right out and push the button? I’m rather like that in the kitchen: let a recipe say, “Fold, do not stir,” and I’ll immediately start to wonder, “What would happen if I stirred?” And so I do. Of course, if the recipe had said, “Do not stir or your meringues will turn to toffee,” I would have folded. I learn either by thorough explanation or by (sometimes calamitous) experimentation—those are apparently my only two methods.

One of the reasons for my cavalier attitude toward instructions, I suppose, is that following them does not guarantee smooth sailing. Take, for instance, the instructions on the rice bag: “Fluff with a fork.” The first time I tried that I hit a pocket of steam that burned my knuckles. Instinctively I pulled my hand away, with the fork still in my grip, thus flinging sticky rice ALL OVER THE KITCHEN. I was cleaning rice off the stove, the floor, the walls, the cabinets, and even the window for a week. Laughing the whole time, by the way. More recently, an attempt to pour rice one-handed out of the bag and into a measuring cup resulted in at least half a cup of rice scattering in all directions across the counter and the floor. Hence the title of this post. At least it wasn’t sticky this time. Apparently I should just be forbidden from cooking with rice—though I have to say I never burn it to the bottom of the pan!



But my other reason for disregarding instruction is the sheer joy of experimentation. I’m like a kid with a chemistry set, only I get to eat what I make (if it’s palatable) instead of just having to clean it up afterwards. What’s the fun in following a recipe when you think you might have a better (i.e. tastier, or maybe faster) way of doing it? Sometimes your way turns out to be the wrongest way possible, but you never know until you try.

Therefore, I substitute shamelessly, and I measure with the precision of a chimpanzee. My excuse for the first is that while I lived in Philadelphia and was cooking on a shoestring budget, it became a bit of a game of mine to substitute or completely replace at least one ingredient in every recipe I made. My excuse for the second is that when I was in Ireland I had no measuring cups or spoons and learned to cook using the hit-or-miss “eyeball” method. One steers clear of messing around too much with the chemically reactive ingredients, of course (yeast is yeast and baking soda is baking soda, and neither—I have discovered—is the same thing as baking powder), but everything else is fair game! Real cooks will no doubt be horrified by my propensity to substitute a tablespoon of “Italian Seasoning” for pretty much any savory spice I don’t have on hand or have never heard of. “Use 1 C butter, not margarine.” Why not? In goes the Country Crock! I should note that I have never had a disaster caused by substituting margarine for butter. “Add a dash of cayenne pepper.” Is a dash bigger or smaller than a pinch? Shake the spice bottle over the pot until something comes out. I should also note I’ve never had a disaster caused by using a pinch instead of a dash—though shaking spice bottles without a shaker lid can, indeed, cause catastrophes.

Here, for your entertainment and not necessarily for your reference, are some substitutes I have tried in recent memory, for better or for worse:

Honey is NOT a satisfactory substitute for syrup when applied to pancakes. Syrup, however, can be a tasty substitute for molasses in bread dough.

Italian Seasoning, however flexible, is NOT good in three-bean salad that calls for fresh basil.

Skim milk CAN stand in for whole milk, whatever they tell you—nothing is going to blow up or fail to bake because it’s got less fat in it. It may turn out less thick or less moist, but that’s what you’ve got to expect when you’re cooking with milk-flavored water instead of the real thing!

Likewise, I’ve never, ever been able to tell the difference in baking and cooking with non-fat sour cream as opposed to full fat. Though maybe I’m a philistine.

Canned chicken works just fine in pies and chicken salad—any dish that has enough other flavors to disguise the slight tuna-fishiness that the can leaves behind.

If you’re going to substitute cocoa powder for baking chocolate, use shortening and NOT vegetable oil if the chocolate is supposed to set (like in icing)! I had a very droopy cake result from using oil instead of shortening. Think of that scene in Sleeping Beauty where Fauna the fairy decorates the cake before she bakes it.

Blueberry pie filling is NOT the same as canned blueberries. Pie filling can, however, make a very nice pancake or bread loaf—but it will turn out the color of Barney the Purple Dinosaur. So will your teeth.

And of course we’ve already established that salt and baking soda do not accomplish the same thing when added to boiling pasta. (See my blog from last September.)

I make myself out to be a real dunce in the kitchen, but I promise I actually make very tasty things—or at least they’re tasty to me. And I’ve only given myself food poisoning once! How else are we supposed to discover new things? (Though suddenly I’m foreseeing a precipitate drop in the number of invitations I receive to potluck dinners….)

Going Medieval

I wrote this essay awhile ago in Iceland, but I was reminded of it by a recent discussion of periodization in our grad student medieval colloquium. (Yes, medievalists are so enthusiastic that they need a colloquium to share the thoughts that spill over when class time runs out.) It turns out my views here have already been expressed by Hegel (go figure), but I hope I’m at least more readable than he is.

Disclaimer: avert thine eyes if a little Catholic dogma will offed thee! Check back next time when I tread more neutral grounds. I am contemplating a post entitled “Ricecapades.”

Some Modern Medieval Thoughts on History

As a budding medievalist, I had always been puzzled by and old question posed by some of the foundational scholars of literary studies: when did Western culture develope a sense of history? The reason I was so puzzled is that scholars traditionally answered this question by saying “in the Renaissance,” and this tradition, transmuted into Core Principles, has become a persistent if often disputed pillar of academic thought over the past hundred years. But this answer made no sense to me. Had those making this claim never read Chaucer, with his comical aside that “we don’t court today the way Troylus and Cresseyde did back in Ancient Greece, but they got along well enough in love anyway”? Had they never encountered the pervasive sense of nostalgia that cast the eyes of medieval thinkers back upon the Classical era as one of nobility and prelapsarian achievement from which their present day had fallen? Did they honestly believe that the entire medieval culture existed in a Freudian infantile state, not knowing that “then” isn’t “now” and “now” isn’t “later”—that humanity had collectively not yet reached the Lacanian mirror phase and learned to distinguish “I” from “Other”? The notion struck me as ridiculous.

The notion IS, in fact, ridiculous, and it took me a very long time to realize that this is not what those scholars (or at least the good ones) were suggesting. In fact, scholarship of the past twenty years has pretty well booted that old answer out the door—the thing is, many scholars still speak (and worse, teach) as though the Renaissance is when history came to be. But on a personal level I have recently discovered that the question itself had always seemed odd to me because those who asked it were speaking from an entirely different perspective than mine. I had never felt that the medieval sense of history was infantile or primitive because, in fact, I share it.

When medieval thinkers reflected on the past, it was with a sense that the past was still a part of them. All the figures of history had some significance for the present, whether as precedent or symbol. This attitude is the founding principle of typological readings of the Bible—indeed, the interpretation of all history: David was a prefigure of Christ and the Vandals who sacked Rome were a prefigure of the Vikings who raided Northumbria. Nothing in the past was entirely remote from the present. This is the attitude cultivated by the Communion of Saints. The dead were no longer “here” in a physical sense, but the physical was all that separated them from the present and even that barrier was permeable; they interacted with the “now” through miracles, they were accessible by relic and by prayer. Sometimes, they even sat up in their corporeal bodies and spoke! Even with such extremes set aside, in a time organized around saint’s feast days and a geography organized around pilgrimage, Peter and Paul were no more remote than a father or a brother who died last spring.

Granted, the medieval sense of what actually constituted history was significantly different from what has counted as history since the Renaissance; legend and myth were just as potent as factual events, and for much of the medieval period only the most penetrating and exacting minds drew strict lines between them. As it turns out, there’s much to be said for such a broad view of reality—but that’s a soap box for another derby. The definition of history is not what those foundational scholars I mentioned were primarily interested in. If it was, they would have asked instead when Western culture began to define myth as a genre. And even then, the answer would not be “in the Renaissance,” because such thinkers as Bede and even as far back as Augustine had a clear sense of the fantastic as opposed to the factual. What our scholars were really asking about is when Western culture began to encircle the individual in his discreet moment with a fence that segregated him from everything that was not “I” and “now.” Essentially, they are asking when the Communion of Saints died.

And now we can understand why the answer has so often been “in the Renaissance.” With the rise of humanism, man began to see himself as a remote being, unconnected to the past, separated from the future, and cut off from all the other remote beings floating in space around him as if by a cosmic accident. This at last is the “individual” that scholars of early modern literature have held that the Renaissance “discovered.” I believe that current critical thought would say instead that the Renaissance CONSTRUCTED it—that is, this perception of individualism is a cultural phenomenon and not a natural one or even the only one to which a civilized person might adhere—but the old ways are deeply ingrained in the academy and the old thoughts refuse to die. I myself would side with the “construction” rather than “creation” of the individual, of course, but not just because I am a scholar. Rather, because I am a Catholic. “Catholic,” by its very nature, encompasses universality—not an artificial conglomeration of discrete parts but an organic whole of creation. No man is an island, no moment is independent of what came before and what will come after. There is still a train of thought that holds Peter and Paul at no greater distance than a departed father or brother. The Communion of Saints has not died at all.

But, in some circles, it has been forgotten. When scholars of fifty years ago looked blandly back on the past and sought the moment in history when history itself came into being, they were on a quest that would have been incomprehensible to medieval thinkers, and it has resulted in the relegation of medieval thought, at least to some, to the realm of childish credulity and simplicity. But the notion should be incomprehensible to a Catholic thinker as well. The reason I did not understand the answer is because I could not understand the question: the medieval sense of history, in its fundamental form, is my own. One of the most encouraging trends in the academy is an increased awareness of the intellectual validity and productivity of viewpoints other than the disinterested and narrowly scientific, and the academy will be all the richer if this more flexible thinking permeates the foundational structures that underly university scholarship and instruction: it will open higher learning back up to seeing this innately Catholic viewpoint as more than a mere relic of the era before history began to be.

No Thanks, I’ll Walk: Thoughts on Being a Pedestrian

I have never had a car. I have a driver’s license (and it cost me a great deal of stress to obtain it, which is why I don’t let it expire), but I have not driven in almost a decade. I was a terrible driver back then and I have no reason to believe I’d be any better at it now. So I have hoofed it through college, a job in the inner city, two lengthy trips abroad, and going on four years of graduate school. So I think I have some claim to the self-professed title of “consummate pedestrian.” But sometimes, I think the title ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

At the top of the list of Reasons Why Sensible People Choose to Drive is the safety factor. I’m not talking about being mugged, though I suppose you’re more likely to attract a mugger while on foot than while zooming by in an SUV (I should note I lived a whole year in one of the worst parts of Philadelphia and never met a pickpocket or mugger—people are usually more harmless than we’re led to believe). I’m talking from the perspective of the girl who got hit by a minivan while crossing the street four years ago. Okay, I was jay-walking, but still, somehow I think the damage would have been less if there’d been a car surrounding me at the time. I still got a ticket for the incident, so clearly it’s all the same in the eyes of the law.

Second to safety, I suppose time is the next factor. Everything takes more time when you have to walk or take the bus. Grocery shopping is particularly epic. Harris Teeter is less than three miles from my apartment, yet I have to walk to campus to catch the bus, wait for the bus (which never runs on time), take the bus all the way to the end of its tortuous and ambling route, do my shopping with a hand-basket instead of a cart to make sure I’ll be able to carry everything back home, and then repeat the whole bus process in reverse. All in all, it usually takes over two hours, door-to-door-to-door to get a half-gallon of milk into my refrigerator every week. One guaranteed way to exasperate me is to ask me to bring a watermelon to a dinner party. I tried it once. It was exhausting. And I don’t even like watermelon.

Another consideration is what walking does to your body even if you DON’T get crunched up by a minivan. The possibilities of heat exhaustion, sunburn, and (at least in Iceland) windburn become serious considerations in whether you decide to attend functions or not. Temperature dictates when you leave the house; I remain a little bemused by car-owners who complain about having to run errands “in the heat of the day” when for 90% of the time they are enclosed in a nice, comfy, air-conditioned vehicle designed to prevent them from working up a sweat. Besides all that, my feet are half a size bigger now, after a decade of walking, than they were when I graduated high school. I can’t maintain a pair of socks longer than a month because I walk right through the heels (other people apparently walk through the toes—I guess I’m strange in this). In fact, I walk right through my shoes as well, and have been known to eke out a few more weeks’ of wear by shamelessly duct-taping the pair I’ve got until I can mooch a ride off somebody to a shoe store.

Because of course the whole culture is working against you as a pedestrian. In college you get along well enough, but once you hit “real life,” everybody just assumes you have a car. Sure, that apartment is perfect for you, but you’re going to pass it up because how would you commute when there are no bus lines and it’s a five-mile trip, without sidewalks? Have a dinner at a professor’s house ten miles from town? Better find a car-owning buddy in your class fast. Have a college alumni association event in the next county? Got to skip that one—no other alums in the area to drive you. Want to meet out-of-town friends at the State Fair? Plan on getting up at 5 in the morning to catch the bus to Richmond where you can meet your friends to drive the rest of the way. And coming back, just don’t expect to get home before midnight because that’s how the buses run. Need to go to the hospital in the middle of the night? Better hope you’re not too sick for the half-hour walk.

And then it rains.

People who have cars, particularly if they’ve had them from high school on, don’t often think about these things. People who don’t have cars think about them all the time. But there is some good too, things that might even outweigh sheer cowardice in my continued refusal to join the car-owning coterie. I like walking. You can do all sorts of things while you walk that you can’t properly do while driving. You can listen to music, or say your prayers, or recite poetry (a favorite of mine), or stop mid-stride to take a picture of a squirrel. Do that in a car and you’re likely to get rear-ended—and probably run over the squirrel to boot.

When you walk everywhere, you notice a lot more of the world than when it’s flashing by at 40 miles an hour. You notice when the bush on the corner first buds in the spring, and you notice when the honeysuckle comes out even before you see it, because you can smell it. You learn to identify birds based on their songs, and you figure out when garbage day is for every neighborhood you walk through. You become a walking almanac, noticing the first hints of autumn simply because it feels cooler walking into the shade; when it’s really Virginia-style summertime humid, it makes very little difference whether you’re under trees or directly out in the sunshine. You become a pretty decent weatherman because you need to know whether to walk fast (or run) in order to get home before the thunderstorm.

And then there are the health benefits, not just to you but to the environment around you. If you walk to and from the gym instead of driving, you get an extra 15 minutes’ mild cardio workout. Do that a couple times in a day and you can skip the gym entirely. And I like knowing that, when I go to class or to church, no one is the worse for my travels—there are no added carbon emissions into the air, there’s no extra noise pollution, no heat, no fumes. I like not caring what gas prices are, and I like not having to worry about that wad of bills with the googley eyes that represents “the money I could be saving with Geico.” But most of all, I like knowing how the earth feels under my feet, whether it’s frozen or parched dry. I like knowing the contours of my neighborhood the way some people never even know their own yards, and feeling every rise and fall in the road as I go, like the earth breathing under me.

Someday, in fact someday soon, I will inevitably get a car. You can only mooch rides off your friends for so long, and free bus passes only last as long as you’re a student. But I hope I won’t ever forget what it’s like to be a consummate pedestrian—for good and for ill. In any case, for right now at least, no thanks: I’ll walk.

The Blogger Paradigm Shift

Hello to my blog-following friends! Forgive the long silence: I promise I did nothing of interest during that time that hasn’t been better reported on elsewhere.

Since I’m no longer a traveler, it seems appropriate that I make some changes to my former travel-blog. Let’s face it: the only people who find life in grad school noteworthy are the grads who live it. So for the sake of making this blog worth the time it takes to read it (I hope), I intend to start putting up occasional little reflections and essays, sometimes formal, sometimes not. (I discovered recently I like writing essays—not academic stuff but meditations and commentaries like Chesterton and Lewis used to write.) And if something interesting happens, well, I’ll comment away on that too! I hope it offers—if not much meaning—at least some amusement. It is “nearly nonsense,” after all.

So in that spirit, here is my first reflection, on Moving:

Two days ago, after a wonderful summer at home, I moved into my new apartment in Charlottesville for the start of the fall semester. It took two trips in a packed-to-the-gills van from D.C. with my saintly parents; it was over 90 degrees both days, I live on the top floor of a three-story building, and I have a LOT of heavy stuff. Keep in mind my dad did all this heavy lifting with a missing fingernail, and my mom did it while recovering from a long-term injury to her shoulder. Like I said, saintly. But all that schlepping aside, the boxes are unpacked, the dishes are washed, and (134 thumbtacks later) my pictures are on the walls and I am starting to feel settled.

It’s odd what sorts of things make you feel at home. Pictures on the walls help (even if they’re cut-out calendar pages put up with tacks, dormitory-style), but I realized this weekend that what does more for me than anything else is carpet. Maybe it’s because all my childhood homes were carpeted, but I feel more at ease in this place, more apt to run around without my shoes on, than I ever did in my previous two apartments, both of which had hardwood floors. I guess there’s just something about bare feet that says “home.”

For interest’s sake, I’d like to make a few notes on some of the odd design elements in this new place. For one thing, the front door has a peephole that is six feet in the air. What six-foot-tall person even NEEDS to check a peephole before opening the door?!) For another, the outlet in the bathroom shuts off whenever the light is off, forcing me to keep my charging electric toothbrush in my bedroom, of all places. Classy. In addition to that, every outlet is installed sideways except that one in the bathroom, meaning I only have one choice when I need to recharge my camera batteries, which have to be vertical. See previously mentioned problem with this outlet. Three cheers for keeping the bathroom light on for eight hours straight? But hey, I know (and deeply sympathize with) a couple who are currently itinerant because their condo has been uninhabitable for months due to an invasion of mold. So I guess things like giant-height peepholes are nothing to complain about. I’m just commenting on them, because they’re weird.

Oh, but it IS strange moving back to a town after having been away for over a year. It’s a little like trying to have a conversation with an old friend who doesn’t remember you. You walk around recalling shortcuts and favorite haunts and no one knows you from Adam (or Eve). The shortcuts are gone because of construction, and half your old haunts are something completely different from what they used to be: there are new eateries, bars, and fast-food chains in their place. It’s not all bad, of course—I’d go for a Dunkin’ Donuts over Rita’s Water Ice any day, and Bodo’s Bagels is still on the Corner, so the world hasn’t ended—and every now and again I recognize the face of a fellow grad or even a former student (whose names I never remember), but it IS an unsettling sensation. It feels like trying to put on a shoe that fit last year but just doesn’t anymore. Sometimes you’re not sure whether it’s the shoe that’s changed, or you.

I’m pretty sure it’s the shoe; how much could I have changed in a year? After all, I’m not the one who underwent a facelift called the South Lawn Project. I know what rotten shark tastes like and have a newfound appreciation for the cornucopia that is an American grocery store—but that’s about it.

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.