Category: Iceland

And I’m alive, don’t worry! I barely survived, let me tell you. I almost lost the muscle control in my feet while in Rome, and I definitely lost feeling in my nose a few times while in Iceland. The woes of travel (which are far outnumbered by the thrills).

..

As I’ve had one of the most ridiculously packed and fabulous and exhilarating and exhausting and busy (in the best, homework-less, studying-less way possible) weeks of the semester to date, I feel as though I cannot fill you in on every corny detail. (Is that the phrase? Or is it “every hairy detail”? I like corny better, anyway, regardless of how long it’s been since I last shaved my legs.)

..

Instead, I will do a two-parter, possibly  three if I feel adventurous (unlikely). This first part will include my writings and musings of travel, and the next will contain a multitude of pictures. How many pictures, do you ask? Well, I’ll try to keep it to a miinum, but as I took over 1700 in Rome, and I have yet to count the ones from Iceland, it could end up being quite a few. Or maybe I’ll just choose my absolute favorite (impossible) and slap that up here. We’ll see.

..

All right. Wow. I guess I’ll do a bullet-point-and-comparison thing here. Yeah, that sounds fun. I have two essays looming ahead of me over the next few days, and I don’t feel like thinking about paragraph structure.

..

In order of appearance:

..

ROME:

• It smells… dirty. Like car exhaust and motorcycle exhaust and vespa exhaust. So many vespas. The vespas of Rome are like the bicycles of Copenhagen. And they smell.
• Everything is so old! Sometimes in a beautiful way, sometimes in an off-putting way. The ruins and the ancient buildings are gorgeous, obviously. Plus, I went with a class (Classical and Renaissance Rome), so it was fun actually knowing what I was looking at and understanding a bit of the history surrounding me. Had I not taken this class, I would have been relatively clueless in Rome. I would be wandering around with no idea what to see besides the Colosseum. I hadn’t even heard of the Forum before this class. Thank goodness for DIS.
• Because things are old, some things are relatively shabby. Everything just seems a little back-corner-of-the-city, if that makes any sense. Especially the cobblestones. So many cobblestones. Believe me, there have been cobblestones in every city I’ve visited so far in Europe, but these ones were old and had deep, deep trenches in between, and my feet felt it. I mean FELT it. All that extra muscle movement really takes a toll, especially after walking 48 miles over four days.
• Because of the walking and the heat and the walking and the walking and the walking, people got tired. There were only eight of us, and the first day went swimmingly. Everybody was in a great mood, the sun was out, we had left our winter jackets in closets in Denmark, and we were in Rome, for goodness sake. But Day Two was a different story. And Day Three. And Day Four. With each step, people got more and more tired. Which put people in bad moods. Which put me in a bad mood. Okay, scratch that. It tried to put me in a bad mood, but I tried really really hard to stay in a good mood because I was in Rome and it was beautiful and I was having a fantastic time, but the attitudes and the fatigue was getting to me. They even tried to rush through the Vatican on the last day! Ugh. It was rough. It was beautiful, but it was rough.
• The pasta was delicious, as is to be expected. My favorite meal of the trip: Penne with Seven Sins at the Seven Geese restaurant. SOooooOOOOoooOO good. So good.
• It was a tourist trap. There were so many tourists. The whole city was flooded with them. Only on one occasion, when we went to the edges of the city to see a quiet little graveyard the old meat-packing district did we escape the tourism. Tourist shops. Tourist stands. Men walking up to you with handfuls of selfie sticks. Men walking up to you with 20-packs of postcards (I bought one). Men and women selling paintings of the exact same thing that they had clearly not painted. It was so strange. Never have I seen so much pushiness. It was relentless. Even the restaurants lining main streets and side alleyways had waiters and waitresses posted outside, begging you to come in and try the delicious, cheap food. Everybody was so pushy! So that was weird, and slightly unpleasant. But I don’t think it took away from the trip. I think it added to it, because I’ve never seen such a spectacle. (I did invest in some paintings, but they weren’t like all the rest. They were being sold by a tiny, elderly Italian woman wrapped in scarves with paint on her nose and under her fingernails. She was working on another as we walked up to her, and the ones on display were bright, unique, imaginative, and fresh. You could see the oil paints sticking off the canvas, see the mistakes, see the inspiration. I bought two.)

..

ICELAND:

• I’m going to start with a disclaimer: words cannot describe the wonders of Iceland. Pictures cannot describe the wonders of Iceland. Excited hand motions and wide eyes and repeated, disbelieving shakings of the head cannot describe the wonders of Iceland, though I have tried all of these methods. It just cannot be done. You have to go there. And you should. Because it is amazing.
• I managed to pack only five kilos in my one backpack for four nights and five days, because I am a cheapskate and that is all WOW Air allows before they start charging extra. I didn’t wash my hair aside from the first night, right after the Blue Lagoon, because my hairbrush didn’t make the wight limit. I didn’t pack a second book and had to borrow because an extra wouldn’t make the weight limit. I had to wear the same set of tights-leggings-long-underwear for three days in a row because a second set would not make the weight limit. But I did it. I succeeded. I feel like I can do anything now, travel anywhere with nothing. I am a woman of the world!
• The colors were… I can’t. I can think of not a single word that will adequately describe all the colors. The land isn’t just green, or brown, or white, or yellow, or blue, it’s all of them. It’s everything. Somehow, moss and pines and birches and dead grass and brown shrubs and black volcanic rock and snow and blue sky and teal ice all mix together seamlessly everywhere. The world is full of color! I couldn’t handle it!
• Instead of talking about history and buildings like on most tours (they did that too, just not as much), the tour guides on our day trips discussed the history of the land, the way the rocks formed, the way the curves and mountains and rivers were shaped. They talked about the last volcanic eruptions and the next volcanic eruptions and the last Ice Age. It was so refreshing.
• We didn’t see the Northern Lights. The other girls wanted to (Tessa from UW, Abbi from Rome, Erin from Abbi’s core class), but it clouded over every night we were there. Fingers crossed that I’ll see them in Norway in a couple of weeks!
• Everything is ridiculously expensive. More expensive than Copenhagen. More expensive than Stockholm. More expensive, more expensive, more expensive. On our first night there, we went to a 24-hour grocery store down the street to buy some basic breakfast and lunch supplies: yogurt, apples, muesli, a loaf of bread, milk, ham, cheese, spread. It was only enough to get us through the next day, when we could go to a bigger, slightly cheaper grocery store. The bill was about sixty dollars.
• Our lodging, on the other hand, was cheap and perfect: an adorable studio apartment with a queen bed, huge futon, giant TV, fully-stocked kitchen, and bathtub. I took a bath on our last night there. It was wonderful. And it smelled of sulfur.
• There are only about 330,000 people living in all of Iceland. And they all speak Icelandic, Danish, and English. If they go to grammar school (kind of a high school/ early college hybrid for 16-20 year olds), a fourth language is learned. Why? So they can talk to people who don’t speak Icelandic, of course. Crazy Sauce.
• Of those 330,000 people, over 200,000 live in Reykjavik, the capital. It is also the only real city in the whole country. The rest is made up of villages and towns. On our bus tours, we would often hear the guide say, “And this is the small town of….” We would look out the window and almost miss it: eleven houses, all with colorful roofs, under the watchful eye of a magnificent waterfall and surrounded by sheep.
• The sheep are everywhere. And they are adorable. Not the gigantic, long, Puyallup Fair sheep I am used to, but tiny little fluff balls who sprinkle the green countryside. It reminded me of the wool cards in Settlers of Catan. We had to stop once to let a bunch of them cross the road.
• Icelandic wool is a big thing. Nearly every store had its fair supply of Christmas sweaters, hand-made in Iceland. I wanted them all, until I felt how scratchy they were and saw the price tag (usually around $250, sometimes more.)
• The nature. The nature. The nature. Waterfalls, glaciers, rolling lava fields, bubbling hot pools of water, soaring geysers, black-lava-sanded beaches with ice dotting the shoreline. I’m so tired of using the same words, but I can’t think of any more. Gorgeous, beautiful, amazing, breath-taking, eye-opening, magical, wonderful…. They all sound ridiculous compared to what I actually saw. None of them are enough. But I think the closest one is “magical.”
• At the base of one waterfall in particular, Seljalandsfoss, the water came over the edge of a cliff and plummeted, free-fall, into a wide pool below. It was such that we could walk all the way around and behind it, out the other side. Because of this, as the water came down and hit the surface, instead of just continuing on in a river, rushing past, it came slamming down like a needle of pure power, sending sprays and winds in all directions, 360 degrees from its center. It looked exactly like Elsa’s powers when she stomps down in her ice castle and the wind and ice fractals emanate from the center of the building.
• I’m not sure about the rest of the movie, but I know for sure a lot of it has to be inspired by Iceland! For one, Kristoff’s family is definitely made up of Icelandic trolls, which are apparently a thing. I would know. I saw an Icelandic troll penis with my own eyes. (We’ll get to that later). Also, Kristoff calls the wise old man grandpabbi, and pabbi means “dad” in Icelandic! I know this from watching an Icelandic movie with English subtitles on the plane to Iceland and from watching American dramas with Icelandic subtitles in our apartment.
• So yes. While in Reykjavik, I went to the world’s one-and-only phallological museum. To save you the google: it was a penis museum. Tessa made me. And the other girls helped with the peer pressure, though they didn’t attend themselves. It was one of the most uncomfortable hours of my life. I was expecting… well, I don’t know what I was expecting, but I certainly didn’t brace myself for viewing actual penises. Not human, of course. Because that would be weird (sarcasm). The small set of rooms was filled, and I mean FILLED with tubes and containers, some the size of a test tube, some reaching nearly floor to ceiling, depending on the species of course. And each container was filled with fluids and held a dead and removed crowned jewel, though not the type I got to see in Rosenborg. Uck. It was so gross. There were other things too (literally). Bones, photographs, stuffed animals with extra appendages. There was also a letter from the man with the to-date recorded, world’s longest penis. He explained his history in the locker rooms of high school and promised the museum the right to his manhood upon his death. It was accompanied by a nude photograph. I cannot un-see it. There was also a folklore room, which contained the pride and glory of countless mythical creatures: Icelandic troll (pretty sure it was a rock), elf (empty jar filled with water, apparently they’re invisible), merman (moss covered rock), wood nymph (literally a stick). This place was weird, man. So weird.

..

Okay. Sorry. I just can’t really think of anything else to say about Iceland now that I’m reliving that unforgettable museum trip. I’ll come up with more anecdotes for the picture post. Sorry you had to read that. I hope you are accompanied by no small children.

..

But despite the pain, the fatigue, the expense, the lack of hair-washing, and the uncomfortableness, I had an unforgettable and remarkable week. I loved my travel buddies, I loved the sights, the sounds, everything. Doing Rome right before Iceland was the coolest thing ever, because they were just so different, beautiful and wonderful in completely unique ways. And I have a new nickname! “Baby puffin.” Apparently that is my spirit animal. (:

..

Venlig hilsen/ best regards,

Lizzy-wa