Perland revisisted

Yesterday I took a walk to Perlan, my second visit. You may recall my first somewhat disappointing visit. I decided I need to have a coffee with a nice view. Before:

And after:
That little glass cup of pink sweetness was strawberry mouse. Many cafes have them in a variety of flavours, including chocolate and pistachio. Here are a couple of views from the observation deck at Perlan:


Last night also marked the occasion of our first "Second-floor-get-together" in the "common room". The "common room" is a big room where the hotel guests (this residence operates as a hotel during the summer) have their free breakfast. This is Theo and Camilla deep in conversation:

And here are Lucas and Todd:

That oval dish with the white things on top was made by our only Italian exchange student, Claudia. It was delicious. Those are eggs on top. It's Sardinian and called pane frattau. It's made with a crispy bread called carasau. The bread is dipped in steaming water, laid on the platter than covered in tomato sauce and parmesan for about 6 layers, then the eggs are placed on top. Claudia went back to Sardinia during the school break and smuggled back the bread, cheese and some delicious Sardinian sausage. Yum!!

I forgot to talk about something Mark and I did while he was here: our swim in the Blue Lagoon. From Wikipedia:

"The warm waters are rich in minerals like silica and sulfur and bathing in the Blue Lagoon is reputed to help many people suffering from skin diseases such as psoriasis. The water temperature in the bathing and swimming area of the lagoon averages 40 °C (104 °F).The lagoon is fed by the water output of a nearby geothermal power plant. Superheated water is vented from the ground near a lava flow and used to run turbines that generate electricity. After going through the turbines, the steam and hot water passes through a heat exchanger to provide heat for a municipal hot water heating system. Then the water is fed into the lagoon for recreational and medicinal users to bathe in."

It's really a huge hot bath. There are little stations where you can scoop out handfuls of silica mud and rub it all over your face and body and then just keep floating around and rinse it off whenever you want. We stayed until closing; the air temperature was 0 degrees and we couldn't see 5 feet in front of us because of all the steam. Those little islands with the grey boxes on top are where the hot water is pumped from, so the closer you get to them, the hotter the water is; so hot I couldn't float within a foot of them for very long.

And finally, here is a video for Hello Seahorse's song I Won't Say Anything - it's really catchy and the whole album was mixed* by Mark!



*what is mixing? mixing is when the volumes of different instruments, voices and other sounds in a recording are balanced to sound good (good could mean anything to any different person though). after something is recorded, it doesn't necessarily sound very good, the instruments' volumes are all out of balance. the singer might feel her voice is too quiet for example and so the mixer must adjust it.