(which felt like more than day two, because it hadn’t gotten dark yet. the whole not getting dark thing made every day feel like many more days!)
this morning we woke up in the parking lot to the grocery store, which now was reasonably full of cars. the grocery store building was a large building, kind of like a mall, but in the way it was laid out, much more like a department store; it was, also, more vertical than horizontal. i remember a sports clothing store, a furniture store, a bakery/cafe, and the grocery store – there may have been more. before we went shopping, we wandered around to find the bathrooms to get cleaned up.
from our travel journal, which we wrote in together each night:
katja wrote:
krónur, the grocery store, has ALL the stuff, even snowpeas. that was a little weird. also weird was that a lot of the stuff was american, or was stuff that is sold at stores in boston, like the exact same brand of golden berries they sell at whole foods. a lot of stuff was british, and also a lot of dutch/scandinavian, less german. we shopped for supplies and left with some: pomegranate juice, water (i worried it would not be enough), almond milk, raisins, dried cod (which i’d discovered i love on day one) and dried haddock, carrots, and a few apples, 2 hard boiled eggs, 2 avocado, a fresh rhodiola from anna rósa, and a bottle of champaign from the awesome folks at Happy Camper.
this is as good a time as ever to explain harðfiskur. basically, it’s just dehydrated whitefish – kind of like fish jerky. now, i’m not a fish person. as a kid, “fish” came deepfried and served with hushpuppies, and that just doesn’t fly these days. for a good while now i’ve been trying to become a fish person, with quite a bit of success lately, and in iceland i discovered a new fish i really love: monkfish! but also the harðfiskur: it’s fishy as all get out, but it’s chewy and dried and somehow not only delicious, but extremely satisfying! i guess it’s the sort of thing that tastes good when you’re on the trail, or uh, in a happy camper, but i brought a bunch home and i still love it, so…
in iceland, they often eat it smeared with butter, but i just eat it plain.
anna rósa said the attitude here is, we have all these resources, we might as well use them! they say it is so expensive to live here, but it doesn’t seem so in comparison to boston. housing costs seem fairly similar to new england rural and city, except you’re never really far from city here. clothes are expensive, but they don’t have junk clothes and much of it is local/handmade or performance/athletic wear that may be made in china, but it’s made to icelandic standards. it’s good quality, and i think the prices are fair. i think the cost just reflects that stuff made here is priced at a living wage cost. they pay a lot of taxes, i think nearly 50%, but the schools are good, the universities are extremely cheap (like, $400/year), the hot tubs are subsidized (a little less than $5/visit), the farmers are subsidized (though that’s not without some problems).
this is something i’d like to look into now, especially as i’m reading independent people, a book about life in iceland in the 1930s. farmers don’t much farm grain in iceland, as for the most part it doesn’t grow without a great deal of coaxing. there’s one farm i saw with grain, but it seemed more a novelty crop than anything large scale. i heard a few bits here and there about the plight of small farmers and the move towards larger, industrialized farms, which is familiar and a bummer, but also i saw a lot of agri-tourism, like in vermont: small farms who are able to keep going because of guest houses or tourist activities (or both) that help them pay the real bills. this is a problem everywhere, but at least my initial impression is that some of our other agricultural problems like chemicals, GMO, and grain monocropping, doesn’t seem to be happening in iceland – go them!
the symphony and arts are subsidized too, and they’re good. heat and electricity is really cheap. these are the things people can do when they aren’t paying for bigger, deadlier weapons.
iceland doesn’t have a military, though they do have civil defense, which is mostly dedicated to search and rescue – many icelanders like pretty extreme hiking and off-roading – and volcano stuff.
i apologized for being a tourist and not speaking icelandic, but the fellow at 12 tónar said, no! there are not so many people here, and we like visitors. it gives us new people to talk to! that seems pretty great. i could totally live here, really. ryn and i have already decided to come back. we realized we can only see a small section at a time, so we’ve cut down our travel plans quite a bit. it’s a good idea.
initially we’d planned to drive all the way around the island. which, you can in fact do in about 15 hours, ya know, if you don’t stop. planning here at home, we thought, sure, that’s fine, we can drive some and stop some and we’ll make it all the way around! but in conversations with folks there we realized there was just no way that would work. so we decided to keep it really simple: visit the allþing, and a few other touristy things in that area, try to find some hotsprings we’d read about before we left that were also in the area, and maybe make our way to vík where the black sand beaches are. but first we needed to spend a day in reykjavík: i realized i’d forgotten my jacket, and it was darned chilly there. so i needed some wooley thing, and ryn wanted some music at a music store he’d been reading about and which came highly recommended. he’d researched some restaurants too, so off we went…
today was: wake up, realized the parking lot had filled and we hadn’t noticed, get washed a bit and get not really many groceries at krónur. then in to reykjavík to shop for wool – i wanted it ALL – and music. had kjötsupa (delicious!) at Gamla, and GF/DF cake which she gave us as a wedding present! also bought the owner’s icelandic folktales CD.
we also stopped at the – we thought it was a health food store, like a coop. it was really actually like cambridge naturals with a small selection of food as well – heilsuhúsið. we were excited to see anna rósa’s book prominently displayed, and a whole section of shelves dedicated to her herbal goodies!! we were also very excited to find some orgran crispibread, which is a gluten free version of a quintessential european cracker, something sort of like a very large triscuit, only, i hate triscuits, and these are awesome, so clearly not really exactly like a large triscuit. you can get crispibreads in america, but i haven’t seen the gluten free kind. (and anyway, it’s not food we’d usually eat, but, for a treat, it’s fantastic. i can’t believe i’m classifying a giant triscuit as a treat…), some dairy free nutella (!!), and some prunesmoosh (jelly/jam stuff). this made for very delicious desserts on our trip!
we walked around the shopping district, peeking in windows and hugging a giant polar bear, and some other shops – many with wooley goods. iceland has some really fantastic woolystuff. there’s quite a business in handmade icelandic sweaters and socks and other wonderful woolies, and the folks who make each item usually put a tag on the item with their name. there are clearly some traditional patterns that are repeated, because you can often find the same sweater pattern in several shops, but they’re all beautiful. at this point, i wanted something that would be warm and that i could wear on top of basically everything i’d brought with me (since i was basically wearing everything i’d brought with me, cause it was colder than i thought 50 degrees would be!), so i chose a charcoal shawl that i’m very excited it’s almost fall and i can wear again. very quickly it seemed completely normal to be walking around in a few layers with wool on top and a wool hat in the middle of summer: doesn’t everyone?
we also stopped and got some postcards for our thankyou notes, and found some very amazing fancysalts: icelandic seasalt, one with herbs mixed in and one with crowberries. and of course ryn stopped for music, but that comes later.
lounged at hottub #9 – laudnes-something? (laugardalslaug) by the big sports complex. they have a seawater hottub!
this is the fanciest of the hottubs we visited, and it’s extra fancy, for ya know, a facility (later we went to some more primitive ones, which were also extra fancy, but differently). there’s a whole thing about hottubbing in iceland: first, everyone does it. it’s a whole culture. second, EVERYONE does it: babies, grandmothers, everyone in between. which is excellent, because when you go get changed and shower, you see it all: cute little baby butts, flat and saggy old lady butts, whatever. i think this is tremendously healthy and something we really REALLY don’t do here: the only bodies we really see are the ones hollywood shows us, and that’s just not healthy for anyone. america could use to see real bodies at real ages. america could also use more hottubs.
there’s a whole thing about showering before hottubbing too, which is done without a bathingsuit, and which i guess americans are often uncomfortable with if the blog articles are any indication, but it seemed pretty logical to me. the only real problem is that you have to shower naked (cause how else will you get clean??) and it’s hard to put on a dry bathing suit when you’re wet. but really quickly i observed the way around that: soak your suit first. turns out, it really does make it easier! they have these big posters with no actual reading required which made it clear exactly where you should wash, which are amusing.
then towards þingvellir (thing-vet’leer). stopped at a cool cairn field,
which had no particular explanation, so it must be the elves. or perhaps campers?
pictures are worth more’n words, here, so:
and followed a road to the lake in the distance. now it’s pouring rain, but we’re snug in for the night. tasty fish, carrot, rhodiola, avocado and fancy salt dinner plus tea and treats. reading maps, drawing, writing thank you post cards, etc tonight (er, it’s like 9:45. looks, even with rain, like 5pm.)
ryn wrote
today we weren’t terribly efficient, but we had a great day! reykjavik is a nice town and even though laugarvegur is the main shopping drag, it has lots of character. turns out you can’t get meat at heilsuhúsið, and gló is raw vegan, but it also turns out that lambsoup is GF and delicious enough to eat every day. 
by which he means, the happy camper has regular tires like a regular car. it’s just that iceland sometimes requires tires bigger than that…though ryn thinks they were actually smaller than the subaru tires.
but it’s a nice spot and a quiet road and if it’s not raining tomorrow, the view of þingvallavatn (thing-vat’luh-vat’en) will be fantastic. i found music i was looking for and nice music i wasn’t looking for; 12 tónar is a great little shop! inuit postfolkrock and eivør and islenska gayboy folk and an album about being happy despite all the fog and grey fisherman life in the faröe, and that salt song album from mammút. songs to explore to!
12 tónar was pretty amazing. i’d gotten my wooley wrap (having tried on a good many wooly things in the process), while he went there to look for music. warm and wool-wrapped, i found him there, and he was super content in a place that seemed built just to be there waiting for him, so i walked back to feed the meter on the happy camper. i got damp, but i had my wooley so i didn’t mind. i also got just a little bit lost, which was great, because i found this little jeweler and stopped in. he sold, for the most part, jewelry made with volcanic rock, which i’d seen around and thought was very pretty. and in fact, i bought one from him, and then we chatted for a while. he was in his late 50s and was originally from vestmannaeyjar (sort of something like “vest-man-yay”), the island (island group really, but there’s one bigger island that is the main one, many of the others are quite small, more on that later) where the volcano eldfell erupted in 1973. he was telling me about some nice places to visit, and also about the volcano erupting: he was in 6th grade at the time. he told me about it, how it woke him up in the night and it took a while for his family to figure out what happened, how they got onto the boats and escaped, and what it was like going back later to get their belongings from their home; they lived in iceland for some years while vestmannaeyjar was rebuilt. i asked if anyone was killed, and he said, nono. well, one man was, but he was only killed because he was trying to rob a pharmacy, so he deserved it.
when i found my way back to ryn at 12 tónar, he was happy on an old velvet couch with giant headphones on, listening to music…
ryn: the thing is, you can open any CD in the shop, pop it into an old boom box with headphones plugged into the back, spin it up and listen for as long as you want. the shopkeep offers you coffee. they have a section for “American” and it’s about a foot long; everything else is from Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and the rest of Scandinavia.
on the Icelandair planes there’s a media browser in the seat display, where they highlight Icelandic artists. i spent most of the flight trying out different albums and songs – that’s where i heard about Mammút, and wrote down a bunch of other names i wasn’t able to find. but i browsed around, judged a bunch of albums by their covers, built up a stack and sat down to listen. by the time lady came back i’d whittled it down to a half dozen or so. they were good companions on the road for the rest of the trip!
here are a few more pictures of where we ended up parking for the night:
oh, and it wasn’t raining the next day, if i remember right, and the view was fantastic, but more on that later.
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