OMG, Icelandic food

Sometimes it really doesn't pay to let the bloke do the shopping for dinner. Tolli came home with hrogn and lifur - roe and liver. The roe was still all wrapped up in the sacks it was in when it was inside the fish - all veiny and looking like brains, that spilled out into pale red sandy stuff. The liver was like lumps of yoghurt that had been left outside for a year and gone all grey and shapeless. It's sooo mushy *shivers*. Okay, so in their defence, they were both pretty tasteless, pure texture-food. I imagine if you did something with them, like mush the liver up into a sauce and have something with them to hide the lack of flavour and weird-arse consistencies, they'd be edible. I did eat some, together with fish and potatoes, which was more than Rósa or Helga did, but still! I think my poor tummy is still churning, and dinner was 5 hours ago!

A chess victory

At the start of November, Luce & I finally started using the chess board my dad made for us for Christmas last year. I won the first game, then Luce promptly won every game for the rest of the month. Being the competitive types we both are, I obviously cracked it with him and we didn't play for about a month. For Christmas this year, I requested that my dad play a game against Luce, just for the satisfaction of seeing him beaten by anyone (seeing as how I seemed unable to repeat the feat).

However, we started playing again after New Year's, and I am thrilled to be able to report my first victory! A clear checkmate, still in the relatively early stages of the game :) (I'm ignoring the fact that he was reading stuff on his computer the whole time cos I take so long to move and he gets bored!)

In the next game I made a couple of bad errors and resigned, so we 'undid' a few moves and continued. I then mated him, we undid the last few moves, he mated me, we undid the last few moves, and then I got the next 6 mates, ie, even with undos, he was still unable to recover. :D This is the major reason I'm looking forward to going back to Iceland: to be able to practice with Ási and then completely whup Luce on a regular basis. Or at least to make him pay attention to our games... ;)

RIP Francoise

Well, our first little embryo didn't make it :( And she was even at the 7-cell stage when she was squirted in. Poor little Francoise. I will forever wonder what you would have been like.

Farewell daisy, hello tom!

My poor darling daisy, a 4 and a half year old Acer Travelmate 3000, suffered a few heart attacks earlier this weeks, and finally, on Thursday morning, completely carked :( I had just gotten back into full swing of work, which may have contributed to her demise. So I spent a panicked 14 hours on Thursday researching new laptops, and found NOTHING that exactly suited me. So instead, I've opted for a netbook for all my travels, and the uni in Iceland is going to get me a workhorse computer for my proper work. So, this is my first blogpost from tom, an acer aspire one d250 10.1" black netbook. Tom had to be black, cos my dad already got the blue one! Great minds... (Except his won't be specced up with twice the RAM and three times the hard disk space ;) .) I am so skypable now - tom's inbuilt webcam and speakers are truly impressive!

A windy tale to rule them all

Okay, so I've had some stories to tell about the wild wind here in Iceland before, like trying to jump in a puddle, but getting blown off-course and missing, being unable to walk under a bridge because the wind just blew me backwards across the ice, being blown sideways off the bike-path, and 2 weeks ago getting caught in a particularly forceful gust at the wrong moment in a pedal (one up, one down), and being blown backwards on my bike. (Okay, that was my own fault for trying to take a short cut over the top of the Perlan hill instead of going around the cemetery)... But this just takes the cake. Fair dinkum, surely this will drive home to you just how ferocious the wind here can be: So, our uni foreigners' 'coffee meeting' group went on a walk about Reykjavík with a guide today. So that I could see the statues and so on, I tied my hair back out of my eyes. And... wait for it... THE WIND BLEW THE HAIR ELASTIC OUT OF MY HAIR!!!! Seriously, that can't be in the rules! I say, that's simply not cricket!!

Hottest day on record!

Reykjavík and Iceland continued the heatwave that is this summer, by smashing all previous temperature records across the country. Reykjavík's 26.2 degrees yesterday broke 2004's record, while at Þingvellir Parliament Plains it soared to nearly 30°!!! (Read the Icelandic Review's article here.) Thankfully it's back to a pleasant 16° or so again now, although it might gear up again for this weekend's National Holiday Weekend or whatever it's called.

Training for the 10km in the Reykjavík Maraþon* is going well, especially since I just found the results of the 5km Midnight Run - in my age/sex group I came 9th out of 106, while Luce, who admittedly ran half the run by my side, came 24th out of 63. So, I'm really rather pumped to keep training and beat at least the 2 women who were only 6 seconds in front of me!!

We're about half-way through guest-season, and are doing quite well. We're taking all our guests on hikes up different mountains, so we've been ticking them off as well, putting increasingly more terrible poems and limericks in the guestbooks on each peak. It's fun looking at the hills around Reykjavík now, and being able to think, "Done it, yes, been there, doing it tomorrow..." :) So far we've ticked off: Esja, Vífilsfell, Grímannsfell (with the midnight waterfall swim at the end), Húsfell and Móskarðahnúkar, with Helgafell over Mosfellbær this weekend. Photos will appear on Picasa very soon!


*hehe, how many of you read 'maraþon' as 'marapon' instead of 'marathon'? ;)

Earthquake!

Just had our first biggish earthquake, about 6.1, epicentre about 100km away. It is certainly a strange feeling watching the building you're in sway and jump about! My first thought was to press control-s to save my current document (only afterwards did I realise I had forgotten the 14 other open documents!), while Luce sped out of the house just in case the two upstairs floors also became ground floors. As for me, if the upstairs became the downstairs, I was just going down with it.
link to news article (in English)

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!!

Swimming!

Wow, 2 posts in 2 days. Well, I just went to Laugardalslaug (Swimming Pool Valley swimming pool), and it was awesome, I cannot believe I didn't go earlier! Something to do with never having anyone to go with, so I finally gave up looking for a swimming buddy and decided I could do it alone. I met a Russian woman, because she wondered where I was from that I was swimming in the wrong side of the lane :) And then I met a Newfoundland woman and 3 guys from Longbeach, California, and we went down the waterslide 3 times learning how to go faster each time except when the Canadian followed me and the water stopped so I also came to a complete halt, then we cooked ourselves in the 44 degree hotpot, then finished off in the normal, not-too-hot hotpot. Aah, Reykjavík - I love it here! (Especially when you get to drive to the pool...)

buses: the saga continues

So, today I added another item to the list of 'Oh my god, let me tell you about my bus trip today' things. My bus route changed today. Not in a 'Please note, we're announcing a change to bus route #1, and it'll now travel down Vatnsmýrarvegur instead of Njarðargata' kind of way, but in a 'I'm sick of sitting behind these cars waiting for the green left-turn arrow at these traffic lights at Njarðargata, when the straight ahead people get to go, I want to go that way too' kind of way. I'm completely serious. We *were* waiting in line, to turn left. You know, to follow the usual route home. But then suddenly, out we pulled, and off we tootled down the Hringbraut, to the next set of lights instead, where there were no cars waiting to turn.


Vis større kart

Yes, we did join back up with our route, and no, I don't *think* we missed any stops, but that's not to say we wouldn't have if there had been a queue at the lights at Vatnsmýrarvegur too. I'm wondering now if this is one reason why I had trouble the first few weeks working out where I was on the bus. And I'm also wondering if this has ever happened to anyone else?