Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

Whereas it took us five months to get the photos of our summer trip on-line, it’s taken us only a week to prepare the photos of our most recent trip to Iceland. It definitely helped that there were several thousand fewer of them.

More than ever before, Sarah and I felt very comfortable in Iceland on this trip. It’s very easy to imagine living there at some point in the future. The language is the only major obstacle, but that, too, is surmountable, of course.

In fact, I purchased a couple of books from a Reykjavík bookshop to help me learn Icelandic. I already knew it to be a difficult language, essentially unchanged from the Old Norse spoken 1000 years ago, but now I’ve seen the grammatical evidence. With its multiple genders, declensions and inflections, Icelandic is going to be a major challenge to learn, especially at a distance (where I have no opportunity to speak it or have my mistakes corrected). It remains to be seen whether I can summon enough discipline to dedicate enough time to the endeavour.

It took quite some time, but I finally finished preparing the photos of our summer trip whilst in Providence. If you have any interest in visiting Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary or Austria (well, Vienna, anyway), you may be interested in looking at these.

I have removed many of the poorer ones, but I should probably prune the collection down a lot more. We were gone for two months and took a huge number of photos.

Our final day in Reykjavík was suitably lazy; until the evening, that is.

At 19:30, we were picked up for from the hotel and driven to another bus for the start of our [Northern Lights](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(astronomy)) tour. We did vaguely get to see the lights, but they were so faint that our driver said he didn’t really count it as a sighting.

That was a real pisser. The driver, a really nice expatriate Englishmen, drove us half the way to Þingvellir to get us away from the city lights of Reykjavík and improve the conditions for viewing. Up there in the hills, it was bloody freezing, about -16°C with wind chill factored in. A thick Icelandic jumper, thick jacket, scarf, hat and gloves left me feeling as good as naked up there. I was chilled to the marrow of my bones, all for naught.

Eloïse, on the other hand, tramped around happily in the snow, snug and warm in her new jumpsuit and balaclava, both of which had been purchased just a couple of days before. She looked entirely suited to the conditions.

Speaking of the conditions, they were actually perfect for viewing, we were told: freezing cold, clear skies (no moon, but starlit so clearly that I can’t remember seeing a night sky like that before) and a place far from the city lights. Such conditions give one a 90% chance of significant activity, but we were fated to fall into the other 10%. Oh well. There’ll be a next time.

With no Northern Lights to view, there wasn’t much else to do, except chat to the driver and gain his perspective of Iceland as a foreigner living there. It was very interesting to hear what he had to say, and he answered many of our questions about the society, its politics and the language.

We didn’t get back to the hotel until after midnight, which, after packing, allowed us about three hours of sleep before we had to get up again for the bus ride to the airport at Keflavík. Getting up at 04:30 is no fun at all, especially when one has to lug big, heavy bags back and forth, soothe a cofused baby, change buses, etc.

Our flight took off on time at 07:50 GMT and got us back to Amsterdam at 11:50 CET. We were outside our front door by 13:00, so we made very good time.

The weather here is strange. It was 13.2°C today, a full 23°C (or 41°F, if you’re still in the dark ages) warmer than in Reykjavík. Whereas my thickest layers of clothing weren’t enough to keep me warm last night, I’m removing layers here to stop myself sweating. Coming straight after Iceland, it feels like spring here.