Sabbatical over, perhaps

I thought I´d drop by and say hi and comment on the weather and the lengthening days in Iceland.

Snow showers and sun are alternating, toying with my optimism by offering the carrot of spring and then slapping me in the face with another unnecessary helping of sleet, snow or a howling gale to blow me off my not-wintery-enough shoe-clad feet. This second there is sunshine, blue skies and a dusting of snow on Esja.

Jóhann Ísberg´s photo of Esja looks similar to the view today.
Perhaps it will all change tomorrow.

I´ve been busy thinking about ceilidhs but just now we are searching for a drummer to allow us to continue getting up on stage and making a lot of noise for folk to dance to. If you play the drums and live in or near Reykjavík please get in touch.

On top of that I´ve been dreaming.. of books and book stores and sitting in continental cafés for hours alternately burrowing my head in a good novel, sipping a hot chocolate and watching the world go by. One day I will open a good book store where I would want to spend time. I will serve homemade fruit loaf and let people pick their own mint from a pot in the window to make their tea. I dream of folk gathering to knit of an evening in the cosy atmosphere or to talk about their latest books chosen from the theme of warm sunny countries in winter and long starry nights in the summer and exchanging reading rights to students for book reviews in Icelandic.

Recently, I read an interesting blog about a woman in Scotland setting up her own book shop, not far from Edinburgh (Inkspot and Silverleaf Booksellers). One of her recommended book stores is Shakespeare and Company, set on the left bank of the Seine, looking over to Notre Dame de Paris. This is a key indicator of her wonderful taste and hopefully bodes well for the future and atmosphere of her new shop. Shakespeare and Company is perhaps the best book shop in the world.

Shakespeare and Company, Paris

Meanwhile I am actually actively and busily employed on a variety of projects in geology: learning how to tame the technology of ArcGIS to make beautiful, useful and accurate hazard maps, which can be clever enough to lend a hand at analysis to give the pocket calculator and map pens a rest; collecting information for a database on all people and projects to do with marine geology around Iceland which is proving a fun way to meet new people here and is turning up a few gems of knowledge that apply to my other work and interests; modeling volcanic ash fall from the majestic volcano Hekla. Day in day out I sit at the beautiful wooden, carved desk that Sigurður Þórarinsson once sat at, studying the ash of Hekla and the great eruption of 1947 among many other things including penning a few lively folk songs and I hope some of his wisdom, breadth of knowledge and great motivation to publish will seep into my veins. I take heart from his song-writing times that mixing folk music, ceilidh dancing and geology can be good for the soul and general productivity.

Ceilidhs to warm us up, up here

We played ..
Photo taken by Jonas Damulis

I´ve been gone for a while from here but thought I´d drop by. The ceilidh world in Iceland has become busy this month with Vetrahátið (winter festival) and various yearly festivals among companies trying to find something novel to do this year to cheer up their winter-weary employees.

Vetrahátið was primarily marked by .. snow, storms, crazy wind .. well, winter really, and a proper winter at that. Yippee.. there have been so many weeks of snow here that I have lost count. I need 4x4 to get the little jeep out of the car park by our house because it has been covered in ice for weeks. Maybe we should call it Fossvogsjökull. I think that could be an excellent address. Last weekend the winter decided to really kick in and be festive (for the festival). Big snow drifts piled up against the house and frost rimmed the doorways.. we had to break into our own home! The police even asked people to stay at home, quite something for a country where folk head out into the highlands in January in crazily big jeeps or where 25 metres per second is a mild breeze.

So, on the most wintry night of the winter we headed into town, against the advice of the police.. to our first big venue.. The Reel Thing played at NASA! Woohoo! And people danced!

..and they danced at NASA.
Photo by Jonas Damulis.

So, the next one is on Friday 22nd. If you´re in town come along, we´ll be just by the pond at Iðnó, at the gap in the ice where the ducks and swans and geese are hoping for another bit of bread. Poor things. You can walk right across the pond just now. I want to go skating but maybe I´d need a small snowplow in front.

Hopefully I´ll drop by here again at the weekend with some snow pictures before it all melts, once I´ve got all the Dashing White Sergeants and Gay Gordons from spinning around my head.

First days of winter

Saturday was the official first day of winter... and sometime during the evening I poked my head out through the curtains and the world had turned white with big, soggy flakes of snow falling. It has been snowing almost continually since and the hedge outside my living room window is encrusted with snow, with leaves that look like sugar-coated sweeties and reminding me of Christmas cards.

Kjótsúpa .. picture from Morgunblaðið

Free Icelandic meat soup was given away in the streets on Saturday and African dancers took to the streets with cool drum rhythms. Tonight I go back to bellydance class. Time to get back to hobbies that remind us of warmer climes.

Sheep in the fold

Last Friday we went away for the weekend to get peace and quiet, to read and to sleep. We set off too late of course, after work on Friday, met with a friend in Akranes en route and I tried her yummy chicken and rice soup.

By the time we were heading into the country, leaving Borganes and its two greasy burger joints behind it was really really dark. I was surprised. Not so long ago it was almost 24 hours of daylight.. then I sat with a friend in a hot tub at 2am and watched the faint brush of the northern lights in the dusky sky .. and then suddenly it is dark at 8pm. Okay, maybe it was more like 10. Anyway, this must mean I´ve spent too long inside and I feel like despite a glorious summer with wonder continental weather I have let the summer slip by.

Hestfjall in Borgarfjörður, picture taken by Halldór Eiríksson

I am glad now though of the change in season. It all happened on Friday with the darkness. We drove and drove, skipped the turning for the fisherman´s huts, passed the summer houses and between the cliffs, round the bend and down the hill .. then passed the big rock by the road (sure home of elves), goat rock and up the hill through a flock of sheep all eyes gleaming evilly in the headlights, up the hill and into the darkness away from all the lights. We began to wonder if we missed the cottage that we were told we couldn´t miss.

Then, two small lights appeared in the distance and the narrowest road bridge I´ve ever come across with a two tonne limit.. how heavy is the car? Less than one ton surely but when you add in the rucksacks, the tins of beans, bottle of whisky and us.. I chickened out and reversed in to the path of a van (but not quite) racing up the hill, so feeling like stupid tourists we thought we´d ask directions. Well, not a lot of help .. in that there was pretty much nothing further on in terms of warm cosy cottages.. but I am still wondering what a guy travelling alone with a suitcase in the middle of the night was doing driving into the wilderness. Óli assures me that the suitcase was too small for a body. Is the habit of exiling people to the hills still in existence here?

Well, we turned back.. passed the dark lake we´d missed on the way up, passed goat rock, the elf house rock, the freaky-eyed sheep, the cliffs, the summer houses and back to the main road. So we´d missed it again. We turned back. This continued for some time.

Once found the cottage was unmissable, inviting even in darkness and cold and a most thoroughly welcome shelter from the wind that was gathering. And it blew, and it blew and it blew all night, through the morning, the afternoon, the evening and the next night .. and when we drew the curtains on the next morning there was snow on the mountains and a bite to the air and winter was there. Perhaps the man with the suitcase was somehow responsible.

The farmers on horseback spotted the weather change before us and went to get the sheep (maybe the suitcase man was delivering whisky to farmers rounding sheep up in the hills?) and as we left they brought at least 300 sheep, white, black, muddy and fluffy, small and scruffy down the hills, along the road, passed the narrow bridge (not more than 2 tonnes of sheep at once), along the shore of the dark lake, alongside goat rock and all around the elf house, up the hill, passed the summer houses, through the cliffs and into the fields of home.

On Sunday night we settled back in to our little flat in town and thought of the party being had to celebrate the round up in the country and we shared a whisky in celebration of the start of winter and the coming of the snow.

Storm

Storm rising by Pamela Theodotou

A storm is coming. The shadows of the trees are battering the windows. It feels like winter, and there is a chill sliding in through the window and covering the bed with an icy blanket. I am sat wrapped up in wool with a fluffy pillow under my arm as I type, cheerful colours about me. The shadows are on the edge of my vision and are waiting for me to go to bed.

19:00, 3rd September 2007

It seems a night for mysterious things to be about out there. I am reminded of the elf houses we saw this summer in Hellisandur. And one elf there perhaps..

IL at Gúfuskáli, Hellisandur

Spoke too soon

The sun has gone and we have drizzle and haar or Scotch mist .. or Icelandic normal summer weather. It is a relief, in a way, to know that the world has not gone mad and swapped the norms of life around too much. The air smells clean and fresh with grass and flowers. The school children outside tending the gardens around the University are not impressed and walk like zombies in their green rubber outfits. I feel sorry for them, and slightly less than amused that today was to be my first day of fieldwork this month.

A strange bright light in the sky

My family have been visiting us in Iceland. We live in a matchbox so they have been moving around, staying in my bed while Óli was away in Denmark teaching Strip the Willow to Icelanders and Danes, being looked after by Óli´s folks in Kópavogur and now with my sister trying out the Hotel Cabin.. each with a cabin sized room.

The weather has been glorious, we´ve sat outside most days to eat, my sister can´t sleep because of the light and we gave up trying to sleep through the bright nights and finally bought some blackout curtains. It took some time to find some without blue trains or pink fairies but I made it in the end once the sales assistant realised I meant they were for me, a funny foreigner who wants to cut out that light and sleep through the night rather than party in the 24 hour daylight.

There is something strange going on in Iceland. We´ve had sun .. real, warm sun, sit in your smallest little summer dress type sun, get pink shoulders and a silly pink tip to your nose type sun.. for weeks and weeks. I don´t want it to go away. It is of course now too hot to sit inside our matchbox house with no ventilation but we are living in the garden, which I like.

Wind

There has been sunshine for weeks. Blue skies. I even got a pink nose one day doing fieldwork in Þingvellir.. which means it is summer. Yesterday things changed... which means it is Iceland.

The wind started to whistle through the ventilator in the bathroom and our open windows created a pressure difference between the flat and the hallway which sucks the door shut behind you if you step out for a minute. That is pretty spooky. The door to the cleaning room in the communal area bangs as if a little child is playing in there. The blinds are rattling and I can hear the trees swirling around. Still the wind is warm. It is ten degrees C outside, raining and there is an 10 metres per second wind (22.4 miles per hour). It is also almost 00.30 and you can still the weather on the webcam from Veðurstofnun.

Although the house makes spooky sounds I find it rather friendly. It reminds me of lying in bed in the wood-clad bedroom I shared with my sister and hearing the little window rattling in the wind. The swirling trees outside sound bigger than they are and that is nice .. it is like being back home with proper big trees in motion. The odd sucking of the door also reminds me of home and opening the curtains one morning after a storm to find that the wind had taken the slates off the roof of the little byre and stacked them neatly at the foot of the wall.

The weather change is maybe because we are thinking about wind in the flat and Óli particularly has been dreaming of soaring on thermals. We both started paragliding classes today. It will be weeks probably before we even get the wing to sit above our heads and perhaps take a little foot-high hop off the ground, but it is step one. Unfortunately you can´t paraglide when the wind is more than 5 metres per second (11.2 miles per hour) or when there is rain.. so I wonder how often we´ll fly in Iceland?!

Some other useful info on the Icelandic weather situation:
Veðurstofnun´s nice new webpage,
BBC´s 5-day forecast for Reykjavík which is more reliable than Morgunblaðið´s veðurkort
and .. my favourite .. Do I need a jacket.. in Egilsstaðir.. I wonder how often the answer is "Yes".

Just wait a minute..

So they say if you don´t like the weather, wait a minute. I thought things got silly in Scotland but we´ve had fun here in the last few days. Hail, snow, rain, sleet, sunshine and blue skies. Then I drove home after belly dancing and had to stop to take pictures .. there were the most amazingly dramatic, purples and greys, blacks and blues; anvil-shaped clouds hugging the mountains all around leaving Reykjavík underneath an island of blue mediterraneanesque (well one can dream!) sky. That was all on Monday.
Today was pretty much the same but I sheltered inside and looked up through the big windows at work .. each window had a different type of weather.

I´ve been inside the last few days though planning ceilidh fun, whistling and fluting and listening to lots of music. I´ve also been trying out my Icelandic skills and pushing them as far as I can with letter writing. The joy of getting a response in Icelandic back from an email sent by me in my "special" Icelandic is immeasurable. Understanding it is cloud nine. Turns out that everyones' tolerance for poor grammar here is much better than I had thought and I can just go for it and talk like a baby. I had underestimated the tolerance for funny sounding Icelandic and was keen on using it as my favourite excuse to avoid trying to speak. Oh well no excuse now.. Gagagagooo woohoo!

Sun and books

The sun is shining today in Reykjavík. It shone through much of the night last night too. It always takes me a little while to get into the long daylight hours, though I look forward to it greatly. To start with it just makes me tired, but happy. From my office I can see two children bouncing high into the air on a trampoline in their garden. The world around is getting greener, spring has sprung. Perhaps winter will jump back in for a finale in the next month.. probably tying in with my planned first fieldwork trip of the summer.

Well, it´s not really the weather for sitting inside reading and it is probably a little too cool for sitting outside reading, but it is a good time to venture out of the house and perhaps meet some new people and thinking about books for rainy days. I thought some weeks ago that it would be good to swap books in person in Iceland as a way of recycling books and perhaps meeting new people. I still think it´s a good idea but any complex signing-up book swapping community based on the internet just might not work. So, I am proposing a once a month gathering in Kaffi Mokka of anyone who wants to swap books in whatever language. If like some you have rooms and rooms of books grab a random few, stuff them in your bag and set off downtown. If you´re in or around Reykjavík even just for a visit bring a book you have read or are tired off, have a coffee, yummy hot chocolate or even better Belgian waffle and leave with some new reading material for a rainy day or a long bus trip. Hope to see you there.

Gleðilegt sumar - Happy Summer

One spring where I grew up

Today is the first day of summer in Iceland and I understand there is sunshine to celebrate the event. What I want to know is "was it frosty last night?" A frost on the night between winter and summer brings the good luck of a good summer and I want one of those please.

Reykjavík weather

Today in Reykjavík. Blue skies and sunshine. Veðurstofa Íslands, the Meteorological office have a webcam at their office on Bústaðarvegur and update the picture every 5 minutes. Check before packing your bags, but remember weather can change every few minutes so you might miss the snow storm between two images. Webcams for road conditions are available from Vegagerðin, the Roads Administration.

Spring snow

We have snow in 101 Reykjavík! The view from Askja, where I work.