Fush and chups

Last night I went to an "organic bistro" that serves fish and chips. I mentioned it in this blog before. I ended up having catfish, tarragon and white truffle skyronnaise, crispy potatoes and a glass of Pilsner with 4.5% alcohol, which used to be the only beer Icelanders could drink (though at 2.2% alcohol) during prohibition. What kind of prohibition is that? So far I'm noticing that the tourism here loves to attach little stories to every little thing in order to sell it. Nothing wrong with that - gotta make money, right? But I'm learning to be more choosy in light of this insight.

A couple of other interesting things from last night;
Who doesn't need a horse lamp?

And some Bill Murray graffiti:

The Reykjavik International Film Festival started yesterday and I went to see The Banishment, a Russian movie. It was pretty depressing, but the cinematography was pretty nice. Tonight I'm going to see a bunch more movies, but the best will be Heima; a documentary made by Sigur Ros about a tour they did of Iceland last year. Watch the trailer below! If it turns out that you don't like the music, the trailer is worth watching to get a feeling for the landscapes here. Last night was the premiere of the film, but it was sold out and when I picked up the ticket for tonight's screening, I was told it was the last one!


After watching the trailer for Heima, I realized that I can only now watch bands play outside. And not just anywhere; I mean outside with beautiful landscapes and backdrops.

Tomorrow, I'm going to a screening of Jaws, underwater! A sound and screen system has been set up inside a pool so that the only way to see or hear the movie is to swim under water!

Perlan

This afternoon I went to Perlan, which turned out to be a bit of a let-down. Sometimes my impression of Reykjavik is the same impression I had of Thunder Bay: a small, isolated city surrounded and criss-crossed by highways full of happy drivers. When I'm walking anywhere, the sound of traffic is maddening. That must sound strange coming from a city-person, but it's not a stop and start sort of traffic, it's just continuous traffic. This is a picture of Perlan (not taken by me). Perlan is pearl in Icelandic by the way. Those cylinders hold hot water.

Hafnarfjörður and the little people

According to my Lonely Planet, Hafnarfjörður "hides a parallel elfin universe" and "is believed to lie at the confluence of several strong ley lines (mystical lines of energy) and seems to be particularly rife with these twilight creatures. In fact, construction of roads and homes in Hafnarfjörður is only permitted if the site in question is free from little folk."

It's also the home of Iceland's smallest mountain. I don't have a clue how this sort of thing is measured and when we asked a local if a particular mountain happened to be this very mountain, we were met with annoyance at such a thing, but it's all there in black and white in the town's own tourist brochure!

Me having a grand old time in Hafnarfjörður .

Some of the little people?!

Riff and Aurora Borealis

Last night I saw Northern Lights for the first time! At about 11pm I went outside on the grass in front of my building to see swooshing red and green lights across the sky; beautiful! It looked magical.

Also, I just bought a pass to see all the movies I want at this year's Reykjavik International Film Festival. I think this is my first film festival ever. I intend to see as many movies as I can; to be in a cinema for as many hours as possible. All the movies are either in English or have English subtitles; perfect.

Lobster soup and some hot pots

For lunch today I had lobster soup at Saegreifinn, also known as The Sea Barron. It's a quaint little place by the harbour and everyone sits at little stools along two long narrow tables. At 750 ISK, it's a good deal, but if you want to understand how expensive everything is here, check how many CADs that is! For a bowl of soup! Along with soup, The Sea Barron also has skewers of fish to choose from which they'll cook up fresh for you. Among the choices are minke whale (which I'll try next time I go) and cormorant, which is the darkest, most foreboding meat I've ever seen, and which is also what I'll try next time. Here is a NY Times review of Saegreifinn which describes the cormorant as "resembling squab in taste, color and texture".

Tonight I went swimming for the first time in Reykjavik. I went to a pool nearby called, Vesturbæjarlaug. It has a 25 metre pool and 4 "hot pots" which are hot tubs, without jets (but maybe some hot pots have jets?). Each hot pot is a different temperature, the first being 36-38° C, the next 38 - 40° C and so on. The idea being to start in the least hot and work your way up. It was a wonderful way to spend a couple of hours. At a cool 6° C outside, it felt wonderful to sit in a 40° C hot pot and look up at the stars! These hot pots are supposed to be a big part of Icelandic culture, where people come to socialize before and after work. I'm going to try to visit every pool in Reykjavik!

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Gullfoss, Geysir and Þingvellir

Huh, I was going to start adding maps to this blog to show you the places I've been visiting, but Google doesn't provide ANY details on the map of Iceland! My descriptions will have to suffice!

Last Saturday morning at 8am, I got on a bus and headed for a farm that was doing it's annual réttir. This is when all the sheep that have been wandering the high lands all summer are gathered together in a huge pen so that individual farmers can collect their own (each sheep has a tag on it's ear to show who it belongs to) into smaller pens attached to the middle pen. Once the sheep have been collected into the smaller pens, they are herded onto trucks and driven to their farms. So, it's supposed to be a huge social occasion where many families gather to wrestle with the sheep to get a good look at their ear tags and shove them into the smaller pens. The big middle pen was full of kids trying to ride the sheep while all of us tourists sort walked along the tops of the walls.

The next stop was the Gullfoss waterfall, "the queen of Icelandic waterfalls". Seeing as it was sleeting heavily, I was wearing soaked jeans and I was freezing cold, I had no patience or interest in getting near the waterfall. It isn't particularly inaccessible, so I may visit it again. Look here for someone else's photos of it. If it had been sunny, I would have gotten closer, but my parents live in Niagara Falls; so you know...waterfalls don't always do it for me.

After Gullfoss, we stopped at Geysir. I was so incredibly soaked and cold that I wasn't sure my interest in seeing a Geysir would outweigh my desire to sit in misery with a hot coffee in the restaurant, but I went to see the Geysir nonetheless. This Geysir's been going strong for hundreds of years, but after countless rocks and other junk have been thrown into it, along with old age, it's not as active as it used to be. The postcards I bought were more impressive, but watching the water boil and bubble in preparation for a great big explosion of steam and hot water was neat. I'd say it now erupts to about 15 metres.

Finally, we went to Þingvellir, which is where it finally stopped raining, snowing, blowing and sleeting! The views were beautiful! Þingvellir is where Iceland's oldest parliament was founded and met regularly starting way back in 93o. I didn't see any evidence of this, but I was also freezing cold (have I mentioned the rain really comes down here? And that the wind really blows?) and was really just looking forward to coming home!

And come home I did. I enjoyed some leftover Pâté Chinois I made for an international pot-luck of sorts that we had last night in my residence and ordered some waterproof trousers and hiking boots from mec, because it's actually cheaper to pay for shipping than to buy the stuff here! Which means next time I travel the Golden Circle, I'll be a lot more comfortable!

Was I the only one who didn't know?

I've been a Sigur Rós fan since ( ) came out in 2002. Until just now, I figured, naturally, that the songs on ( ) were sung in Icelandic, the band being from Iceland. But I just read that they were all sung in "Hopelandic" which is what the singer, Jón þór Pirgisson, uses when he hasn't written the lyrics for a song yet. He just makes sounds that sound like a language and that fit the song, but it's not an actual language. Apparently a lot of singers and bands do this. Once they'd finished all the music for ( ), the band decided to leave the lyrics in Hopelandic and never wrote or sang the songs in any other language. It's really beautiful! My favourite track on ( ) is Njósnavélin which translates to, The Nothing Song.

Sigur Rós, by the way, is the name of the singer's little sister. It means "victory rose" and is apparently a popular girl's name here, though I haven't met anyone by that name; pretty nonetheless.

All this time I've been singing along, thinking someday I'll have to find a translation for the lyrics and now I've learned it's all in Hopelandic.

My Address!

Of course, everyone is welcome to send me all kinds of treats, letters and postcards! And if you do, you're guaranteed to get treats, letters and postcards from me!

Michelle Paquette
Gamli Gardur - 214
v/ Hringbraut
101 Reykjavik
Iceland

Grammar and pronunciation

Today, I decided to stop taking an Icelandic Grammar class I was enrolled in.

Naturally, being a language teacher, I knew I would probably judge my teachers more harshly than other students, but I wasn't prepared for my reaction! But I quickly got over it when I gave the whole situation more consideration. I know that when I first started teaching English, I wasn't very good. And I know that through my years of experience, I have gotten better at realizing what students feel and expect from a language class. So when my very inexperienced teachers handed out reams of photocopies and told us to learn, I finally was able to forgive them!

I was originally enrolled in three classes: Icelandic Language, Conversational Practice and Grammar. The grammar is the problem! Borrowing a little from Wikipedia, here are a few differences between English and Icelandic which makes learning Icelandic so difficult!

1. Icelandic is inflected with four cases. Basically, words have functions in sentences, each function is a case and these functions are things like subject, possession, object, etc. In English, for the most part, no matter which function a word is fulfilling in a sentence, it doesn't take a different inflection. For example, whether the word "cat" is the subject or the object of a sentence, it doesn't change its spelling. In Icelandic, with four cases, this means that words can have four different endings.

2. Add three genders to the mix, masculine, feminine and neuter, and you then multiply the amount of endings. A masculine noun in the nominative case has a different ending than the same noun in the genitive case.

3. Among the three genders is another separation: weak and strong, which also take different endings.

These three issues mixed with a very traditional teaching style make learning it very difficult for me! My grammar teacher stood at the front of the class and lectured and lectured and lectured and told us to memorize everything. All of the books for the course are in Icelandic, so I don't understand the instructions, nor the example sentences. Because I've only just started learning the language, I don't have enough vocabulary to practice the grammar!

I am finding the pronunciation fascinating though. In Icelandic b, d and g aren't voiced and are different from p, t and k in that p, t and k are aspirated! It's an exercise in muscle-control trying to pronounce a non-aspirated unvoiced "b".

Studying Icelandic though, is really showing me what kind of teacher I'd like to be in the classroom. I see the value in really, REALLY teaching the basics, in spending time teaching the alphabet no matter how basic it feels. There are a two letters in Icelandic that I'm finding hard to even write, so I can a little how some of my students feel when they must learn entirely new characters. I also see the lack of value in using too many fillers in class. I can see right through it when my Icelandic teachers are doing it. The other students appear charmed, can't they see through it too?

The other two classes I'm taking might sound boring to you, but are extremely interesting to me! One is The Ancestry of the English Sentence and the other Syntax and Argument Structure. I'll bet some of you reading this, you know who you are, would love to have a great big discussion about argument structures! Why can we say, "Helen broke the window.", "The window broke." and "Helen hit the dog." but not "The dog hit."?

Horses and streams

I spent today horseback riding! Icelandic horses are special for a few different reasons, but the one that I found most interesting is the particular gait they are able to do. It's called the tölt and when the horse is doing it, it feels like you are floating in the air. It takes skill though and through a combination of squeezing my legs and holding the reigns just the right way, I was able to get my horse to do it for only seconds at a time. One of the leaders of the tour told me this gait means that the horse always has at least one foot on the ground at all times. Icelandic horses are also smaller than other horses I am used to, but don't dare call them ponies!

We rode through some mountains and at times we were riding along really sheer cliffs! We stopped for lunch a the confluence of two streams, one freezing and one very hot so that you could choose to sit in very hot water or lukewarm. It was so relaxing to be in the mountains, at a chilly 8 degrees and soaking in a super hot stream.

Today I took a ferry to Videy Island. What a day. This morning the weather proved very lovely but as they say here (as in almost every other country I've visited), "Just wait 5 minutes and it'll change." and change it did. It went from sunny to misty to drizzling to pouring which is what it's still doing. Buses here run only every half hour. Combine this with getting three people with varying schedules together and I didn't make it to the Videy until 16h30. The building in the picture below has a lovely restaurant where I enjoyed "Icelandic meat soup" which was made with onions, carrots and lamb - a little salty, but nice for my first Icelandic lamb.

Walking around the island was nice, but it was so chilly and wet that I didn't enjoy it much! I wasn't really dressed for the weather though. We shared the ferry with a group of school kids who were about to enjoy some kind of viking game. We ran into these three who were part of the game...
This is Marie-Michele and Elina enjoying the rain.

A rock, ha. Iceland is wet. No doubt about it.

Hot dogs and a church.

I finally have internet in my room, so now I can post regularly. I hope this blog keeps you interested!

Despite not having the actual Student Visa in my hands, I was allowed into Iceland and finally have registered for the multiple identification numbers required to function in this country!

So far, I have met lots of nice people; particularly a Finnish woman named Elina and a Quebecois woman, Marie-Michele.

Today, I enjoyed another free hotdog (pilsur); hot dogs are an institution here. They put crunchy dried onions on them, very good. I've had two so far, and probably that is all I will have. There are some particular foods I would like to try, like skotuselur (monkfish), hardfiskur (a snack of dried haddock with butter) and lundi (puffin!).

Today I visited Hallgrimskirkja Church.

Here are a few views from the church tower. My camera isn't wonderful, but try to appreciate how colourful Reykjavik is. I think if it weren't for all the colourful buildings, it would be quite depressing, considering the gray weather here!

In this next one, you can see where I live: I circled it in black. I live right next to the university.

Oh, and on Sunday I'm going horseback riding and swimming in a hot pool. Here is a link, but I'll post photos when I get back!

No visa and counting.

Tomorrow I'm off on my adventure. A bus trip to Boston, a plane to Reykjavik and then 4 months of ice, lagoons and the unknown! Problem: no Student Visa. Apparently, I can get through customs in Iceland by just telling them the Visa's been granted to me, we'll see. My next post may be from a cell at Icelandic Customs! At least I'll have my duty free purchases!