Final Snippets from Iceland

Back to Iceland, because I'm still processing some of it in my head.

First, the following postcard, which I picked up at the airport, though the series is also on billboards, advertising the Landsbanki, which was involved in Iceland's current financial crisis:

What is even more compelling is the note on the back:

So never tell more than one person your secrets; preferably keep them to yourself altogether, to be on the safe side.  News and gossip have always travelled fast among the small population of Iceland.

*cough cough Rusyns cough*

While we're making comparisons of Icelanders and Rusyns, I'll post the following, especially for my aunt who has made this alternate history narrative in which Our People came from Scandinavia on their way to the Mediterranean to escape the long cold winters and got stuck in the Carpathians.

For finding the Icelandic branch of our family.  No Italo-Icelandic branch exists.

And finally, while we're thinking about escaping the long, cold nights, while my mum insists it wasn't dark at all when we were there, I'd say it was dark, just not while we were awake.  Here's the May page from the 2011 Icelandic Almanac:

So on the day we were there, it was dark for only about 4 hours.  It would seem that if you're not used to it, it really does kind of mess with the old body clock.

Moby Dick on a Stick

Minke Whale

 Before we left, I did some research and found this restaurant.  It's exactly the type of place I like to eat: local, hyper casual, and specialized.  This could explain why my last Pittsburgh meal was a Saturday night Primanti's ham, egg and cheese - it fills all of the criteria: local, hyper casual and they do one thing exceptionally well.

So when I found out about Saegreifinn, it seemed like the right sort of place.  It's in among a few rows of buildings that look kind of like warehouses right along the Old Harbor -- when you walk in, it's quite small with 3 long, narrow tables and barrels with cushions to sit on.  On the left, there's a refrigerated case with skewers of fresh seafood: cod, halibut, salmon, minke whale...  That, and soup are the only things on the menu - and so you point to the skewer you want, and that's what you get.

The other specialty of Saegreifinn is lobster soup.  Apparently people come from all over just for this lobster soup, and it was great.  Nice pieces of lobster in a cream-base buttery soup with just a bit of onion and red peppers.  Like lobster, in soup.  Simple, and definitely a heart attack in a nice big mug. 

We ordered and paid, and then sat down, and shortly thereafter they brought out the soup with fresh warm bread and butter.  Then a bit after that, our two seafood skewers. 

The minke whale was cooked rare, and I confirm it really is similar to beef - or maybe another lean lean lean meat, like venison or other game.  It had a very faint fish taste, but mostly it was like eating really good meat cooked perfectly.  We always joke in our family about overcooking meat, and so when I'm not home I like my meat to be cooked in such a way to, as Tom Colicchio would say, "honor the product." It was served with a small cup of mustard, which I tried, but didn't enjoy as much as I enjoyed the whale on its own.  I would've liked to try the cod skewer, because I love cod and it's like the national fish here, but the salmon was also great and cooked nicely. 

Salmon above, Minke Whale below

The skewers were served on styrofoam plates with plastic utensils, so by the end of the meal my plate looked like a massacre happened with all of the bloody knife cuts.  Hyper casual - I mean, we were sitting on barrels. 

The decor was nautical casual (fishing nets draped everywhere - you've been to the same place at every East Coast Atlantic Ocean beach town), but the coolest thing was a mounted eel kind of sticking out dynamically from the wall, next to a seal also mounted.  Eels are really pretty amazing and interesting creatures, really intense and full of energy and power, so much so that they can continue to move when they're freshly dead.

Between the generous serving of lobster soup and this rather huge skewer of whale meat (and a chunk of salmon), I was about ready to explode when we left.  Totally worth it, and it made it nice to walk off the meal around downtown Reykjavik afterwards.

Laugardur: The Geothermic Municipal Swimming Pool

One of the things I was most looking forward to before our trip was visiting one of the geothermal pools.  It's something I've gotten to do a few times in Hungary and really enjoyed.

A friend of ours had been to Iceland recently and went to the Blue Lagoon, which is the largest and most famous of these places, especially for tourists.  But when I looked on the map, it turned out that the Reykjavik municipal pool was only a 5 minute walk from our hotel.  So when we got to the hotel, we took our stuff to our room, had a quick bite to eat, and went to the pool.

If (when!) I come back to Iceland, I'd like to go to the Blue Lagoon, but I think Laugardur was definitely the more native, local experience.  It's not fancy, and it was mostly people coming after work (by the time we got there) to swim for exercise or team sport -- but it is very clean and well-organized (like it seems most things are here).  The pictures from the Blue Lagoon look amazing as well, and I'm sure it's much bigger and maybe a bit fancier.

It was clear to me before going that there's some sort of procedure for using these pools, but as much as I looked all over the internet, I only found one quick article about it.  The man at the front desk was really helpful (considering, and considering the relative standard of helpfulness we experienced here) and told us what to do, and then we rented towels (which nearly doubled the entrance -- we could've just snagged hotel towels for this outing), scanned our receipt at the turnstile, and began this ritual -- which is really what it feels like.

In a hallway, outside the locker rooms, there are benches lining the walls and a shelf for shoes.  You put your shoes on the shelf, and walk into the locker room in your socks.  The locker room is like any other locker room I've ever been in -- lockers and benches and hooks.  The lockers all have keys attached to bracelets on them, so you just strip down, put everything in your locker, put the key on, and take your suit and towel into the shower room.  The shower room has rows of showers, and you put your towel in a cubby and take a shower.  There are automatic soap dispensers and signs everywhere explaining that it is very important to wash before and after without your swimsuit on and the signs also explain where you need to especially wash yourself -- this is important because I don't think the water has many chemicals in it, which is nice.  I'd rather prance about naked and get into more natural water than go into a pool where the chlorine can knock you out.  There are also signs everywhere saying that photos are not allowed, which is nice because everyone's walking around completely naked, but it would also be impossible to take pictures anyway unless you had a waterproof camera.

No one has sandals on, and what we didn't realize was that you don't carry your towel out to the pools -- because the wind might blow them away.  The temperature outside was hovering around 40°F, and the pools are between 36-42°C.  So after showering and putting on your suit, you run outside barefoot and try to get into the pool as quickly as possible.  Once we got outside, there was no place to put towels anyway.  The first pool we got into was pleasantly warm, but it was certainly the cooler pool, so we moved to the smaller pool which was much warmer -- like perfect bath water temperature.    Had I been more motivated, I would've moved back and forth between the different pools more, which is more invigorating.  But after all of the delays and everything, it was exceptionally pleasant just to sit and get pruny.

The small, hot pool had seats and volcanic rocks to sit on.  Clearly, it was a really social thing, with groups of people sitting and chatting, young people with friends, business guys, some people on their own, parents with their small children.  People just kind of sit down right next to you and move around and it's all very chill and democratic because everyone's just in swimsuits.  The beautiful thing about it is that there's no cell phones, no nothing except the perfect temperature water.

When finished, you run back into the locker rooms, strip out of the bathing suit and shower again.  This time, it's really important to dry off well because it's apparently also huge faux pas to leave a puddle in the locker room, because at that point, you can slip easily and also who wants wet socks?  The nonchalance was super amazing, some women were getting dressed to go out on the town, others in regular clothes, everything was just very normal.  Then we walked back out to get our shoes, and at the end of the hallway there's a row of tables with mirrors and professional-strength hair driers, which added to the civility of the entire experience.  Girls were braiding each others hair and I gave myself a quick blow dry before putting on my hat.  We dropped our towels off at the exit turnstile and headed out into the non-sunset -- when we left around 6:30PM, the sun was still high in the sky, though it was cloudy so it wasn't sunny.

After all of the airplane delays, and minor stress of not knowing whether we'd be able to get out of EWR (actually, that's a large stress, because the goal is to get the hell out of EWR as soon as possible), I really felt relaxed after leaving the pool. 

Inside outside

Starting from the premise that 24 hours is not long enough to be somewhere to even begin to understand the mentality of the people, the vibe here is considerable enough to discuss.

It would seem that people really leave you alone -- unless we asked a direct question, no one really spoke to us.  It doesn't feel unfriendly, and everyone we came across was very helpful, but it's certainly not the loud, outgoing atmosphere I'm used to.  I'd think it leaves a lot of room for individuality and independence, because it all feels very non-judgemental, and that's very nice.

And of course everything's really nice and quiet and orderly -- even when we were at EWR, and then on the plane, I was thinking about how there were so many people and quite a few little kids, and it was so quiet.  If this had been a plane going to anywhere in southern Europe, it would've been the complete opposite.  So the things that can drive you nuts about the Mediterranean or Eastern Europe just don't happen here: people line up nicely, don't approach you in stores or restaurants, no one's yelling, but if you say thank you, no one says you're welcome...

And it's true that we're from a city of people a lot like us, where almost everyone is either southern or eastern European, and gabby, which is certainly not the case everywhere in the US.  So I'm wondering if actually what we've experienced here is what Garrison Keillor has been talking about all these years.  Maybe good preparation for this trip would've been to go to the prairies of Minnesota.

I'll excerpt from an article I read in The Rejkjavik Grapevine about stages of expat integration:

You know that the locals, once they see how much you love this country, will welcome you as one of their own and that you'll have loads of friends within a week's time. You can't wait to take photos of yourself to send back to your friends and family, who are unfortunately deprived of the blessing you have received to be living here.

In our case, visiting here.  But nonetheless - rather interestingly accurate.

Volcanic Eruption in Grimsvotn, Iceland May 21 2011 from Jon Gustafsson on Vimeo.

An auspicious? beginning

NASA satellite image of the first day of Grímsvötn's 2011 eruption

Here's how all of this begins: Early Sunday morning I opened Google News, and the top picture was this.  Not another Eyjafjallajökull, but Grímsvötn caused some nervousness yesterday and this morning and depending on the weather and ash cloud movement, it still could create some interesting situations.  Our flight was delayed coming from Iceland, so now instead of leaving at 9:3PM we're scheduled to leave around 1am and arrive in Iceland around 10am local time.

This morning we took the Megabus from Pittsburgh to New York City, and I'd definitely take it again.  Double decker bus, free wi-fi in theory, reasonable breaks, and an overall good experience.  Most excellently, we were able to bump into some of my dear friends who are moving abroad and so it was wonderful to chat a bit by the NJTransit waiting room in Penn Station -- such are our lives, that we rarely meet somewhere normal, and so today was no exception.

The train ride from New York Penn Station to EWR was uneventful, but once we got to the security checkpoint in Terminal B, where the TSA folks, who are used to people who can't/don't/won't speak English, found my mom's cans of tomato and pineapple juices that she tried to pass through the checkpoint.  So no Bloody Marys for us while we sit here waiting for our plane.  It was rather wild to watch the guy talk to my mom like she couldn't understand.  I was simultaneously offended and amazed, at both of them.  I'd like to think the Steelers sticker on my laptop helped to diffuse some of the tension farther down the line.

So now, we wait.  I just want to get to Iceland and see what it's all about.

The good news is that my mummy will be Guest Blogging -- if we can convince her.  So please leave some comments or send some e-mails encouraging her so that we can all benefit.