Ert þú íslending?

Okay, so maybe it was rude to laugh, especially since the person who asked if I was Icelandic waited patiently until I said 'no'... Okay, so that took 4 months and 29 days. And so it seems I've reached that very dangerous point in language learning where my accent is passably Icelandic and my mumblings are heard as the proper forms of nouns, adjective, numbers, demonstratives, god everything... This is a dangerous point to be at, cos I still have lots to learn, but I now know why people have been talking faster and faster at and around me - they're assuming that if I can sound Icelandic, then I can understand it too. Oh dear.

Went in the Háskólahlaup (uni fun run - 60th anniversary of the Sports Centre) today. Did the 7km jobbie, in a shade under 40mins. Why so slow you ask? Well, for about a K there was one of those winds that you have to bend into, and when it stops suddenly you nearly fall over, and for about 3 K the wind came from the side and so my legs kept hitting each other. The kind of wind one avoids when one can, like in trainings...

Had guests on Monday night, a friend from uni and his Dutch girlfriend. Every time I opened my mouth to speak Dutch it came out in Icelandic, and every time Heimir looked at his girlfriend his English switched to Dutch. Luce and Yolanda were the only ones who could speak a Dutch-only sentence from one end to the other, and it made for very entertaining facial expressions and cries of exasperation - the kind of entertainment that one doesn't get in Australia very often at all!

So, tomorrow's another public holiday and I'm hooking up with Erla & son for a parade, I made a friend to go running with today, I bumped into several salsa people after my seminar yesterday (a couple of whom actually CAME to my talk on Australian English!) and have started getting email addresses to go dancing more often, and it's all feeling like home. Except that Luce went to Switzerland yesterday and I watched December Boys and Brent sent pictures from Arapiles and the Grampians and so I'm also all wistful and yearning for TREES and kookaburras and magpies and proper sunshine, not this woossie stuff... *sigh* Comments and emails gratefully accepted!!