Peregrination Information

Missing Swedish post

2012-01-18T10:32:00.001-08:00

I found this post in my computer, guess it was when the internet was dead and I just forgot about it later.

xxx

Today we went to downtown Uppsala and then to the mall. Uppsala seems full of old buildings that all look the same and the shops are more American sized although there's still plenty of specialty shops.

We wandered around and went into a bakery because I saw a star-shaped dessert that I thought looked cool, eating it was disappointing though because it was more like the Icelandic laufabrauð (leafbread) than anything, thin, crispy, and not tasting like much. I thought it would be more like actual bread, thicker and softer.

We heard some music that Jox said wasn't the best but I thought it was festive, I got a short recording of it and can upload it in a bit then edit this post with it. We wandered around into craft stores, book stores, and design shops. I bought a few things that you can see in this photo:

Then we went to the mall and looked around there. They had expanded it since Jox had been there last but we didn't go through the entire mall. There was a videogame I wanted that we had seen in a store somewhere earlier but thought was expensive, but when we went into a few other stores that sold games they didn't have it at all.

After we were done there we went to an electronics store to get me a new camera. I ended up getting a camcorder because Jox has a good camera and I always just end up disappointed with the video quality. The bad thing was they really didn't have much info on what the difference was between the camcorders. I've tested mine out now and I think something's either wrong with it or with how my computer plays videos from it, because the sound keeps skipping. I'm going to look up if anyone else has had problems with this, maybe it's just a setting on the camera or something I have to change.

Tomorrow we're going to wander around Stockholm all day and just see what we find there.

Swedish I learned:
Klar - prepared/finished
Kveld kvisk - evening snack (literally "evening twig"), used to mean sometime after dinner time and late in the night. Can be used for sometime before around seven in the morning too.
jordbogber? - strawberry
mål - meal

Last Swedish post

2011-12-18T12:03:00.002-08:00

http://i958.photobucket.com/albums/ae69/JuicyPuffin/Sweden%20trip%20december%202011/P1220447.jpg
This is a runestone with old Norse stuff on it, there's a lot around Uppsala. Jox said when he was a kid they had to learn the alphabet used on the runestones and then they walked around outside and were supposed to copy down and "translate" what they could understand from them without actually studying much else.

Key to the runestone.

20% off for all in the store (or something like that).

Payphone.

We tried one of those star-things, it was dry and thin and crispy.

You can buy special stamps and put it in this box and then the post office ensures that it gets delivered before Christmas.

On the right is a traditional Swedish dress.

Saw this in the basement floor of a secondhand store.

In a secondhand bookstore. I looked for a price but it didn't have one on it so I thought it wasn't for sale.

We bought some of these, not from this store though. We have Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and some other random ones.

Bus transfer ticket.

The long one to the left is a round-trip train ticket.

We got to ride on this real train, it runs on train tracks and everything! And someone even came around to check our tickets after it started moving! It was super cool.

We found another Christmas market and walked around it. More photos in the photo gallery!

We ate at a Chinese buffet (they don't have these in Iceland) and it was basically the same as American Chinese food, the only difference I noticed was there was really no spices or spicy sauce or anything available.

This is the screen for a ticket vending machine, we bought our bus tickets here.

A recipe for rice porridge on the back of a milk carton! Jox and I eat rice porridge all the time.

Christmas beer(?) can, I saw this in the sink and thought it had a cool design.

I forgot to take photos of Swedish money until we were in the car on the way to the airport, sorry!

Children's play area inside the Swedish airport.

Skansen photo post

2011-12-18T11:01:00.003-08:00

These are photos from the day we went to Skansen, a zoo that also has a bunch of old houses.

Stairway in Jox's house. The house used to be super small and Jox's parents have expanded it and fixed it up a lot.

Pajama drawstring pants I bought.

Dining room window.

This is the biggest hunk of cheese I've ever seen! To the right of it is pomegranate juice.

Dining room window.

Dining room light.

The milk cartons have a lot of stuff on them, like jokes, recipes, the meanings of obscure/new words...

At Skansen with the Christmas market, there was this little tram thing that you could ride. We didn't go in it though.

"The Santa happy and nice fetches everything.
Eve for everything
Eve for Christmas baking"
Eve is apparently that product down below, maybe it's flour?

Some kind of tobacco machine in the middle of the street, I don't know if it actually had anything in it or was just for decoration.

"Open"

"The Big Swing's Christmas food"

"Stockholm's City Savings Bank"

(to the left) "Turkey"
"Spices"
(on the spice jar) "Wormwood"

More Christmas goats.

"Christmas presents"

Two ladies that I bought something from, wearing traditional clothes.

Sign on one of the booths.

"Waffles with jam and cream"

Marzipan pigs are pigs made out of marzipan and they dip half of them in chocolate. The pigs are traditional for some reason, but we saw a lot of other figures too.

I bought the blue and white one with swirls on it for my great-grandparents. You fill these with candy or nuts and hang them on the Christmas tree. You can still see these in a lot of shops in both Sweden and Iceland. The ones at this stall were based on old designs and use fabrics and ribbons that are from around the same era.

"Reindeer meat
Salted, dried and smoked lamb meat" (all-in-one smoked, dried, and salted - not separate types)

"Christmas presents"

Sugar-roasted, pan-fried almonds. I really love these, they have them in Iceland too. I want to learn how to make them.

Dried reindeer meat stall. This lady is wearing Sami (Lapp) clothing, which is like the clothing of "native" Swedes/Norwegians/Finns and in some parts, Russians. Sami were like nomadic people who herded reindeer and followed the reindeer as they migrated but now their population is small and the people who speak the Sami languages are even smaller than that, in part because the government makes it really hard to learn Sami languages and even harder to be officially recognized as Sami (you have to fulfill a lot of requirements to be recognized as Sami, such as speaking Sami and owning reindeer).

"Christmas's pantry"

"Coffee
Glögg
Buns"

"Cheese lottery". I won a mini cheese grater here.
Everyone has this kind of "babywagon", or baby carriage in both Iceland and Sweden. It looks pretty old-fashioned to me, but I like them.

"Sausage/hotdog lottery"

"Food basket lottery"

You could pay a little and ride in this horse carriage around the zoo.

Both Sweden and Iceland used to have a lot of turf-roof houses.

These "Wild Chips" are made of various kinds of meat like horse and reindeer I think, I sent a packet to a couple of you guys. I think they taste good but I didn't like the dried reindeer meat that I also sent to a couple of you. On top of the brown bag is sugar-roasted almonds.

This is the stuff I bought at the Christmas market. There's some matchbooks with blue-tipped matches, a metal drum ornament that you can open, a paper book ornament that you can open, the mini cheese grater I won... the brown thing in a long, rectangular box is something I sent to my great-grandparents along with the candy/nuts cone. It's a Christmas tree decoration that looks like the candy they used to wrap, the fabric is from around the same era as the design is and it's all recycled stuff in that way.

Jox's family had a cow sandwich griller! No, we didn't buy this.

Day three

2011-12-12T02:37:00.003-08:00

I was going to post this last night but something happened to the ethernet cord and we haven't been able to get it to work with my computer anymore, it's not fixed yet so right now I'm just borrowing Jox's mom's computer for a short while. This means I can't upload photos either, but hopefully we can figure out what's wrong tonight when Jox's dad gets back from work.

xxx

Today we went to the Christmas market and zoo at Skansen, it's also an area where they moved and fixed a lot of really old houses and now they use them as old-fashioned shops and cafés. We took a lot of photos and I bought some stuff but I'll edit this post with the photos later.

They had a lot of booths selling various things. Mostly handicrafts, Christmas decorations, meat, and cheese. There were booths selling knitted items and sheepskin items, one booth sold "home brew" in a big vat, some just had coffee and bread products, and some sold the traditional Christmas drinks like glögg and Julmust and such.

I paid for a five crown (73 cents) raffle ticket and the ticket won a mini cheese grater. I also managed to buy some dried reindeer meat (totaled something like 225 crowns or $33), "meat chips" which is just various types of meat like deer in small, dried bits (four for 100 crowns or about $15), some Christmas decorations, some matchboxes (5 crowns each), and we bought a "mystery gift" but it turned out to be a glass spice container for holding food and stuff so we gave it to Jox's parents because we don't need it.

There was music playing at one point, and I think all of the shops set in the old houses do things traditionally, so there's bookbinding, bakeries, glass-blowing, I think there was also carpentry or metalworking or something. We saw a squirrel climbing up and down a tree and got a short recording of it, and bought some cinnamon roll things that were freshly baked and really good except for the pearl sugar on top.

I got some photos of some of the people I bought stuff from because they were wearing traditional clothes, and most of the booths had old-fashioned signs too so I got a lot of photos of them. I didn't really get photos of what the booths were selling though because there were so many people around that it was impossible.

My feet got really cold as we were walking around so once we stopped in an old house that was set up like how people used to live (you could see a kitchen and stuff but it was roped off) and they had a fire going in the fireplace but no other source of light. So I sat down there and warmed my feet. Couldn't really take any photos as it was too dark inside.

We also stopped inside a café in the end and I got hot chocolate, it was pretty disappointing though because it was just powdered chocolate mix that you mixed yourself and it was in a disposable cup. I think it was 25 crowns or about $4, but Jox's dad paid for me.

As we were trying to find out way back to the car (it was around four or five and already dark at that time) we wandered into the zoo section and glimpsed some mooses and one was making some funny sounds so we got a short recording of it that I can upload later. We also saw some tame reindeer but it was really too dark and they were too far away for me to really see anything. We saw some seals too. We're going to go back again, probably on Wednesday, to see the regular stuff they have. The Christmas market is only open on the weekends so we mostly went to see that today.

I learned a lot of Swedish today!
tamren - tame reindeer
väska - bag
jacka - jacket
kan du ge mig... - can you give me...
ren - both reindeer and clean
papper - paper

Day two

2011-12-10T16:08:00.003-08:00

Today we just stayed around the house. We slept in a bit late and then looked for the Sleeping Beauty DVD that Jox's family had (we had been searching for it for some time in Iceland and hadn't been able to find a copy of it, but Jox's family had one with a Icelandic dubbing) and they found that eventually, so we watched it. Then Jox and I took a nap.

At some point we walked around Jox's yard and they have a newly-built shed, an older shed, an outhouse, a greenhouse, and then various planned plants and things. They have three or four apple trees and a plum tree plus some berry bushes. It's all a bit messy but it could look really nice if it was just cleaned out and the stuff inside the sheds was sorted through. The newly-built shed, someone could actually live in there if they wanted, it was built that way although it's not completely finished yet. They're thinking about building a second shed and then connecting both of them via some doors and a passage to make the whole thing bigger.

After the nap, two of Jox's Aunts came over and we had a mini Christmas party. I forgot to take a photo of the food table but I think one of Jox's relatives might have one that I can ask for later. We had reindeer, ham, meatballs, shredded cabbage(?) for salad, plum sauce, lingonberry in yogurt sauce, pineapple, more thin bread, some other types of bread, gravad salmon with dill on it and smoked salmon, potatoes...

You eat the ham with the pineapple or with the plum sauce.
Reindeer goes with the lingonberry in yogurt, on top of thin bread.
There was no desserts, but afterwards we drank some glögg (it didn't taste so good, kind of orange-y, but it smelled like cloves).

Then we passed out presents. Instead of giving one present out, waiting as the person opens it, and then getting another, they just passed all the presents out at once and after they were all done everyone opened theirs. I can take photos of what we got in a bit, but from what I remember we got candy, money, two glittery dinosaur Christmas ornaments, a Moomins book in English (which was great!), a mobile-like Moomins tea candle holder thing, a Sleeping Beauty book in Swedish (that's the only Disney movie I really like except maybe 101 Dalmatians!), a book about Norwegian trolls in Japanese, two Hello Kitty compressed handtowels, two little cat keychain figures, a great book on the 200 or so most common Swedish verbs... I had no idea I'd be getting anything at all, that was really nice of them! I even got stuff from Jox's Aunts!

We talked a lot about various stuff again and when one of Jox's Aunts decided to go home we walked to her apartment with her and saw the inside (she just moved in recently and hasn't unpacked much yet). There was a really cool elevator where it didn't have any metal door that closed, instead on every floor there's a regular door that you pull open and then when you're inside you can see all the floors go by! I'd never been in one like that except the glass elevator in the Seattle Space Needle, but that's a bit different. Jox thinks that the elevators with the metal doors are like "Disneyland elevators" and that the one we saw today is a normal (Swedish) elevator.

Then we basically started going through more of Jox's stuff. He has a LOT of stuff, probably more than I've owned in my life! Well, that might be an exaggeration, but certainly more than I've ever owned at one time.

Tomorrow we're going to go to Stockholm for a Christmas market that's only open during the weekends in December, and maybe look at electronics because my camera's broken.

Some Swedish I learned today:
Jag vet inte - I don't know
Sill - herring (similar to Icelandic)
Jag är hungrig - I am hungry
trött - tired, similar to Icelandic too
Hejdå - bye ("hi then")
Kan jag få...? - Can I have...?
Kan du ge mig...? - Can you give me...?
I forgot the rest...

Friday, Dec. 10 in Sweden

2011-12-09T17:03:00.008-08:00

Image gallery for this trip is here.

An Icelandair plane! Each seat has a tv and if you bring headphones you can watch movies or tv episodes and listen to music. They had everything changed a little bit for Christmas.

Flight from Iceland to Stockholm was about three hours, the weather was cloudy and rainy so we didn't see anything from the plane until the last ten minutes or so during landing. I can read and understand a little Swedish since I'm learning Icelandic, but only random things.

Fake bus at the baggage claim.

Photos from the car ride from the airport to Uppsala, we drove through the city and Jox's parents pointed stuff out to me but we didn't stop there. The camera takes bad photos when you're moving fast unfortunately. Sweden is a giant forest!

The tall building in the background is a place where they burn trash. Then they somehow heat up water with it to not have the energy used go to waste.

Uppsala photos start here.

We stopped at a grocery store to get food and candy, I also got some sheepskin slippers because Jox's dad said their house is cold and that I should get them. This photo is of the gambling section of the kiosk in the grocery store, apparently they have these plus a Lotto ticket area in many kiosks. The only things they don't have are slot machines, which are only in casinos.

Of course this grocery store is a lot bigger and has a wider selection than in Iceland! If there's one thing I miss, it's that.

The traditional thing in Sweden is a "Christmas goat". To the right here you see Christmas goats made of straw or something, used for decoration. They build a giant one every year and then burn it down.

In Sweden, because of how their grocery stores and rewards plans are set up, it can be cheaper to buy a ton of things at once because you can get random discounts and stuff during checkout based on what you buy and what you normally buy. One of Jox's sisters had her "name day" today, which is something they celebrate where every calendar date has around two Swedish names assigned to it, and on the day with your first name (and sometimes middle name) people will wish you a happy name day and possibly celebrate with some treats or small gifts. With this, the family having a mini Christmas tomorrow because some relatives will be visiting, and Jox and I arriving, they ended up buying a ton of food.

In the bowl at the top is some candy we bought at the Icelandic airport. Right next to the glass is a candy bar with nugat and hazelnuts, covered in chocolate. Then there's a package of four mini apple dessert things that tasted gross, some citrus gum, some fruit pastilles that are also gross but we liked the packaging, and then the long yellow thing on the right is sour fruit chews. Above that is "thin bread", something like thin and floppy naan bread that we were eating by spreading liver pate over it and then rolling it up into a log. Underneath that is a package of what we're assuming is sugar sheets that look like Swedish bills, and then the black things in the container are salmiak licorice bits that I bought at the Icelandic airport.

The bottle of stuff is a Christmas drink, we don't have anything really like it but I don't think it tastes so good. Another Christmas drink is glögg which is like mulled wine but there's non-alcoholic versions too. The Hello Kitty tin is full of Chupa-Chup brand lollipops and to the right in the bowl you can barely see some really gross licorice pieces with coloured marzipan in them.

We arrived at Jox's house and set down our stuff, and I ate the thin bread with liver paste because I have to take medicine with food once a day and I had forgotten to take it because I was on the plane at the correct time. They all speak just fine English, but understandably lapse into Swedish most of the time. I'm trying to learn some Swedish as I go along, so here's some stuff that I've learned from either Jox or them:

Snälla - please
det är gott - it is good, when talking about food/taste (use bra instead of god when talking about people and stuff)
jag vill ha en tesil / ha te - I want a tea strainer / tea
jag ska försöka att... - I shall try to...

We ate pasta carbonara that Jox's dad made (it was delicious!) and drank some elderflower drink from concentrate that we bought at the store (i really like elderflower drinks). My eyes were really dry from the plane but no one had eyedrops so Jox's mom told me to put wet camomile tea bags over my closed eyes and let them lay there for a while... not sure how much that worked but at least I tried it. I talked to Jox's dad for a long time about various stuff like traveling, he's been to a lot of places including the Faroe Islands!

Then I took a bath and Jox and I pulled out a few boxes from storage that were full of Jox's things so we could look through them and see if there was anything we could take back to Iceland with us. Now I'm just writing this before I go to sleep, but hopefully I can update here once a day.

Last Day, Iceland stuff

2010-07-03T21:45:00.003-07:00

Here's my blog for when I'm in Iceland.

Here's a mini photo blog for Iceland too, because I'll probably update that more than the real blog.

Sorry, I took so long to post anything that I forgot most of what we did. On the last day we had to walk all over because the train station was closed for repairs. We got on a bus to go to another train station and after that we found out that the entire line we wanted was closed for a bank holiday. So we took a different line.

After getting to the airport and going through security, we got some lunch at an Italian place. I got a pizza and sandwich (I think).

27th, Thursday

2010-05-28T03:33:00.000-07:00

We went to a makeup shop to check to see if an order Roxy had put in had arrived, and while we were there we wandered into some stores that sold books and pop culture merchandise. We also went into some vintage clothing stores. Afterwards we went to the War Museum, which featured exhibits from almost all the wars Britain has been involved in. Admission was free (it might have only been free past a certain time, I can't remember) and they searched our bags briefly before we went in. The first room has airplanes, tanks, and a trolly while outside the building itself is a giant cannon. I took some photos for a man and his mother in front of one of the tanks. They were from Australia and the man said he had just spent two months in America (Delaware and some other more eastern state) for training for volunteering to help starving kids and that sort of thing.

They had models of houses from WWII, models of clothing, food, toys, and they had simulated trenches (including the smell!) along with a lot of picture and movie exhibits. The trench simulation was in my opinion too short to really have any effect on a person but Aino had thought it was good. However my eyesight is quite good in the dark so I could see everywhere in the trench just fine anyway despite there being few lights (and the lights that were there were flickering). I really liked the models of the houses, it was surprising how small everything was. Even the beds were a lot smaller than we have today.

The gift shop had some nice things like postcards with old photos and some toy and candy replicas, but I was overall disappointed. I thought there would be more clothing replicas and just replicas in general, a lot of it was the same images printed on different things (like a postcard, t-shirt, fridge magnet, and mug). I bought some things for dad there.

After this we met up with some more friends who are also visiting London at the same time and we ate at Pizza Express near Victoria Station. It was good food, but it was a bit expensive and they only cut half of everyone's pizzas into slices, in addition they had immense trouble considering splitting a pizza into half with one half one type of pizza and the other another type. It was also extremely loud and we could only hear about half the table when we were trying to talk.

When we were done we went to Christine's house, who lives nearby, and talked for a while. We eventually caught the last train home but instead of the normal forty-or-so-minutes, the last train takes two hours and it goes to a bunch of stations no one had heard before. Most of the train got off at the first stop because they didn't recognize where it was going, but we stayed on and got home in the end.

26th Wednesday

2010-05-28T03:30:00.000-07:00

We went to The British Museum. It was really big and built like a maze, and had a lot of statues and old artifacts from various countries in it. Snorri and I weren't as interested in the museum as everyone else so we walked around while they looked at all the exhibits. After a while Roxy, Snorri, and I went to a convenience store and bought ginger cookies/biscuits and drinks, while the others continued to look around the museum. I bought a lemon-lime water drink that wasn't carbonated, and the others bought various things, and then we returned to the steps of the museum. They were shooting a movie on the steps of the museum, all the actors were Indian and one of the staff(?) was holding something like a really long mop. There was a lady in a business suit who walked up some of the steps and then turned around to talk to a man, but I couldn't hear anything they said even though they were fairly close.

Erin, Snorri, and I went to Piccadilly to wait for Aino, who I met last year in Iceland as well, (Aino is from and lives in Finland). According to a friend, the statue in the middle of Piccadilly is the god Eros and this place used to be a meeting place for lovers. There are a lot of French tourist groups and classes that go on field trips to the museums. There was one at the museum and there was one at Piccadilly too, and I've also been seeing lots of English classes with students in uniforms at all the museums.

24th Monday

2010-05-28T03:29:00.000-07:00

I arrived at the airport and made it though the American security check just fine, but after I had gotten off the plane in Canada they thought I was suspicious (Because I was bringing two things of luggage for a one week flight) and so they put me in a different area and started to interrogate me. They asked me stuff about where I lived, who I was meeting, what I was going to do in London, had I been out of the country before, et cetera. They were really quite mean about it and after nearly everything I said the staff member said "You know, for some reason I don't believe you."

They told me to write down the names, phone numbers, and addresses of everyone I was going to meet, of my landlord, of Arlene who I visited in Canada a few weeks ago, and of my parents. They asked if my parents knew I was going on this trip (despite me being a legal adult and having already told the staff I didn't live with my parents) and after I gave them my dad's number they left, so I assume they called him. I hadn't memorized numbers or addresses for anyone because I had the important ones written down and all the unimportant ones are in my phone, which doesn't work anywhere outside of the US (not even in Canada), so I hadn't brought my phone. They couldn't believe that I hadn't memorized all of these numbers or that I hadn't brought my phone despite me telling them where all my friends were from (various countries in Europe, hence never memorizing their numbers because I won't need to call for help or call them at all because of the expenses) and telling them my phone doesn't work in Europe or Canada. They kept asking me tons and tons of questions and I had looked down to turn off my ipod because I had been listening to it while I was waiting for them to finish doing something in another room, and they got mad at me for not looking them in the eye when I was turning it off (because I was looking at the ipod itself to make sure it turned off).

They found three things suspicious. One, that I was bringing two bags and that one of those was a bag filled with gifts for friends. Two, that I was bringing so little money (they asked me how much I was bringing and when I told them, they said "You can barely survive one day on that amount" despite it being a lot more than that would take, and I told them I was staying with a friend, eating their food, and not planning to go out and do expensive things and they acted like that was unheard of). Three, that I was meeting up with friends because apparently... friends don't meet up together in Canada. I had a subway map with directions on how to get to the meeting place where Snorri would be waiting and they kept folding and unfolding it, looking at the back as if it would magically hold some clue as to what I was doing wrong despite it having nothing but meeting instructions on it.

After about two hours of this, they went to actually rummage through my suitcases to check and make sure I wasn't packing anything contraband. I had been doodling some pictures about the volcano and how it was disrupting flights, and once they saw that they asked me if I was "going to go to any protests" and if I had "very strong opinions". I told them I wasn't and that I had opinions but they weren't strong and I wasn't going to act on them. Finally they let me go, but I still had to go to the ticket counter and everything to pick up the tickets for my connecting flight... which was arriving in ten minutes by then. I ran through the airport and got to the security check where I was stuck in a line that was going slowly, except most of the people in it were all from Scotland and all friends of each other, and when they found out when my airplane was supposed to leave they all let me cut ahead of them. I kept running because the security check was at about the middle of the airport while the gate for my flight was at the very end, and when I got there they said it hadn't even started boarding yet because the plane had been late.

I went through the English customs just fine, but at baggage claim I found out my baggage hadn't arrived. So I had to file a missing baggage form and use Gunnar's (Snorri's uncle, the one we're staying with) address and phone number so they could drop it off.

I met Erin at the airport, she's from Ohio and she's visited Washington before. From Heathrow we traveled by train and eventually got to Victoria station where we met Snorri. We had a bit of trouble finding out exactly where to go because I mistook a store name in the directions as a street name, but a man who was probably homeless saw that we were lost and helped us out.

From there we wandered around until we settled at Piccadilly, where we were meeting the other Icelanders who were also going to be staying at Gunnar's place. For the rest of the day we basically wandered around some more.

Flight information, general info

2010-04-08T12:50:00.006-07:00

For most of the time I'm going to be staying at Snorri's uncle's house, Snorri's the one I stayed with while in Iceland. Then on the weekend I'll be staying at a hotel because we'll be going to an event in the city that would be too troublesome to go and come back all the time from. A lot of my friends are going to be on this trip, around ten or fifteen of them.

Leave Monday, May 24, 2010
Air Canada 8094
Depart: 1:50pm Seattle, WA Seattle/Tacoma Intl (SEA)
Arrive: 2:39pm Vancouver, Canada Vancouver Intl (YVR)

Change of planes

Air Canada 854
Depart: 5:05pm Vancouver, Canada Vancouver Intl (YVR)
Arrive: 10:15am London, United Kingdom London Heathrow (LHR)

xxx

Return Monday, May 31, 2010
Air Canada 851
Depart: 1:15pm London, United Kingdom London Heathrow (LHR)
Arrive: 3:35pm Calgary, Canada Calgary International (YYC)

Change of planes

Depart: 5:30pm Calgary, Canada Calgary International (YYC)
Arrive: 6:03pm Seattle, WA Seattle/Tacoma Intl (SEA)

2010-03-30T21:02:00.009-07:00

Today was the last day.

The night before Arlene's mom had given me bags of barley and brown rice because they hardly eat it. She also gave me a jar of home-made miso and some prepackaged miso, bonito flakes, and a one-dollar Canadian coin with the olympic symbol on it. I took these home with me. That morning we had food waiting for us on the kitchen table because Arlene's mom was at work, so I put some in a lunch box to eat on the Greyhound later. It was potato salad, breaded chicken, breaded pig heart pieces, and rice wrapped in seaweed with a filling that I don't know the name of.

We went to Metro Town (the mall) and played the arcade game Pop'n Music (the link isn't the same version as the one I played, ours was newer and two-person instead of one) one last time, and went to TNT which is a mostly-Chinese food store. I bought a lychee green tea drink, youkan which is a Japanese snack, and dried fish. People tend to stare at me when I go into those stores because I'm white and out of place.

Then we went to the Greyhound station to drop off my luggage. We put it in the locker but the locker was broken and all our coins got stuck, so we had to run around the building trying to find someone who would help us with it. No one who worked there had accentless English. Eventually we got a refund and managed to get it put in a different locker.

Then we took a bus to Arlene's mom's workplace. We chatted with her for a few minutes and she gave us a bag with a juice box and some Girl Guide (Girl Scout) cookies in it that a coworker had given her that morning. She took a couple photos with us and then we had to go back to the Greyhound station because I needed to leave. Arlene waited in line with me until the bus started loading.

The border went okay. Going to Canada they asked tons of questions and even made me show my school ID to prove I was a student. They also looked up Arlene's address to make sure it was real. But they didn't check any of our bags. Going to the states, they only asked two or three questions but they scanned our bags. I brought food and meat along and you're not supposed to do that but they didn't even ask me if I was bringing any (they asked the people before me but skipped me somehow) and didn't say anything after my bag went through the x-ray machine.

2010-03-29T16:07:00.008-07:00

Today we first went to the "regular" mall, meaning the non-Asian one. We went to the post office, I sent a package and bought some postcards while Arlene sent two letters. There was nothing to do or buy in the mall and we wanted to find pig hearts so we took a bus to the Chinese marketplace to see if they had them for sale. They didn't, so we took a bus to China Town and wandered around until we saw a meat shop.

We bought two hearts for $2.20 and went home. It had been raining off and on all day, but as we were down the street from Arlene's house we heard a loud thunderclap so we hurried home. We cooked the hearts according to the directions in the previous post, it tasted like stew meat only it didn't fall apart as easily as stew meat. We put it in the fridge and we'll make something that includes it tomorrow. I think it's the type of food that needs a sauce or something else to eat it with.

Then I tried natto and rice, it didn't taste good or bad.

Arlene's mom came home and she gave me some rice and materials for miso soup so I can make them when I get back to America. She showed me how she makes miso (letting soybeans sit in a giant bucket for a while, then mixing it with already-finished miso if it's not quite done) because it's a lot cheaper than buying it in the store. She gave me a package of pre-done miso and miso she's made and she showed me how she makes the soup. She also showed me how to read the package information of how much bonito (seasoning) flakes to put in the soup and how much miso and water to put in, et cetera.

Arlene's mom explained their family religion (Buddhism) to me and explained where she works. She works in a government-funded grocery store where the food prices are really low, and the idea is that drug addicts will buy food instead of drugs with their money. There are apartments for drug addicts who are quitting around the store and there is also a nurse's office and a needle exchange somewhere nearby too so they can use clean needles instead of reusing dirty ones and passing on diseases. Arlene said she thinks one of the previous managers of the store stepped on a dirty needle and contracted some form of HIV from it.

2010-03-29T16:00:00.005-07:00

Yesterday we tried to go to a fabric store but they were closed on Sundays, so we went back to the mall. We looked for pig hearts but they were sold out and nowhere we asked knew where we could buy them. Even one of the stores that sold chicken hearts, when we asked "do you sell any hearts?" they said they didn't.

We went to an Asian food store and bought some food we hadn't had before. One thing was Vietnamese rolls with noodles, vegetables, and shrimp with dipping sauce. Another thing was rolls made in swirls as a mix of bread and red bean paste.

We also had shaved ice. The ice was lychee flavor and the flavoring on top was taro and red bean with sticky rice balls. We went to the arcade again and then we went home.

Arlene's relatives came over and so did a friend of her mom's, and we ate a large dinner together. We ate tempura, salmon, strawberry daifuku, rice, and pickled white radish.

2010-03-27T22:58:00.007-07:00

Today we met up with both Arlene's friend from yesterday and two more of her friends. We went to a mall and played in the arcade, I played a game where you press buttons to a musical beat a few times. We got bubble tea and I bought dried fish from a Chinese store, and we wandered around. We took "secret passageways" though various parts of the mall, which were just hallways that the staff normally use. The staff at this mall patrol while wearing roller blades. There was rumours that the mall was going to shut off the lights at eight at night because it was Earth Day, but after waiting we asked some staff members and they said they hadn't heard of such an event.

There's an Asian shopping center across the street from the more regular mall. Although both have lots of Chinese everywhere the shopping center is like you're not even in Canada anymore once you get to the marketplace that's inside. They sell a lot of food I can get in Seattle but there's some things that I either can't find at home or don't know where to find or can't get simply because going home with them would take too long and they'd spoil, like meat.

Arlene's friend from the first day had to go to a birthday party and the mall was closing, so we decided to go back home. We wanted to get pig hearts at the shopping center because I hadn't been able to try them in Iceland, they were about $2 for two, but we didn't manage to get there in time before the center closed. So we went back to Arlene's house and ate dinner which was sticky rice and pasta with shrimp and ginger in it.

I forgot to bring my camera so there's no photos for today, but tomorrow I'm going to a fabric store and I'm going to buy those pig hearts so I'll take photos then. Snorri gave me a recipe for how to cook them:

Clean the meat of fat, sinuses, veins etc.
Cut into bites (not too small).
Roll them in flour with salt and pepper mixed in. A clear plastic bag is a good option.

Brown the meat (don't burn it) on a big pan with cooking oil or margarine and olive oil.
Add water to the pan so it's just floating above the meat.
Add a bouillon cube.
Wait for the water to boil.

Lower the heat and let it simmer for 30 minutes with a lid on.
Stir every few minutes and add water if you think it's needed.
Have a taste too, you add spices as suits your tastes.

2010-03-27T09:10:00.005-07:00

The image gallery for this trip is here. I'll edit images into this post soon.

Yesterday I went to the greyhound station. The website said you had to be there an hour early to check in but I found out that if you're going to Canada you actually don't. The bus itself was pretty full and stopped in a total of five places, the last two with which we got about ten minutes for break. I think one of the stops the greyhound made was in Mount Vernon, and another was at the duty-free for Canada. But the duty-free didn't have anything good in it and the prices were just as expensive as if you bought things outside of it. The greyhound bus took about four and a half hours, apparently we finished a little late.

I met Arlene and one of her friends, and we took the Sky Train - a train that runs to different cities on tracks that are above the ground - to the town near where Arlene is, then we took a bus to her actual house. I met her mom and dad we talked and I was shown around the house. They stuffed me with food (Miso soup, tofu, ham, pineapple, and salad) and we met up with Arlene's friend from earlier to walk around outside a little bit. By then it was around eight-thirty and already dark so we couldn't do much.

We decided to stay the night at her friend's place and that's where I'm at now. We're going to leave for Arlene's house to have breakfast soon.

Bus Information, General Info

2010-03-25T21:12:00.004-07:00

Ticket Info: (I'm taking the Greyhound from Seattle to Vancouver)

Departing SEATTLE, WA - 26 Mar 2010 at 01:35PM
Arriving in VANCOUVER, BC - 26 Mar 2010 at 05:35PM
Carrier: GLI
Schedule: 6516

Return Trip
Departing VANCOUVER, BC - 30 Mar 2010 at 02:15PM
Arriving in SEATTLE, WA - 30 Mar 2010 at 06:30PM
Carrier: GLI
Schedule: 6579

I'll be staying at Arlene's place with her family. Again, I don't know how often I'll update the blog while I'm there.

2009-09-23T13:58:00.011-07:00

Things I noticed or liked about Iceland:

There are automatic doors everywhere! They look more like giant windows than doors, and aren't painfully obvious that they're automatic like ours are in the US. You also have to stand closer to them for them to open than ours.

The cashiers usually only said a few things. "Good day", the cost of whatever you were buying, and "Thanks". If I bought soda in a glass bottle, they asked me if I wanted it opened. If I bought postcards they asked me if I wanted stamps. It was nice, because in the US the cashiers will ask you how you are, if you found everything alright, and all sorts of random questions.

You bagged your own groceries, instead of the cashier doing it for you.

I didn't notice a single person, even wandering around the mall, that had heavy perfume. Stores didn't have heavy perfume (except once, I think) either. I didn't notice music playing in the stores, but it's possible I just forgot about it. All the packaging was a lot simpler and it was really easy to tell what you were buying, usually, even if you couldn't read the language.

The commercials on television were shorter than ours in the US, and the overall commercial breaks were fewer and shorter too. The commercials themselves were more to the point.

Sometimes there were stores that just had blank shopping bags, instead of having a brand name on them.

The tourists from the US were some of the most annoying ones. A few of them didn't know anything about Iceland, and one couple took a long time chatting with a waitress and asking her all sorts of questions, and once some took pictures of some waitresses at the café during a super busy time, things like that. Americans went everywhere without knowing how to pronounce any Icelandic at all, so if Icelanders didn't know English then they would have been completely helpless. The tourists from the other Nordic countries were generally better, in my opinion.

The food seemed healthier, even the pizza from a pizza delivery place, and french fries, and hamburgers. Some things had different flavours or were called different names - "paprika" was a common flavour for chips, and while it tasted similar to some flavour I've had before, I don't eat chips often at all so I have no idea what it was like. Upon researching it, it seems we don't sell paprika flavoured chips here.

The ice cream tasted a lot better than what we have in the US. Hot dog meat was also better than ours, and the hot dogs were a little thinner and longer than what we get. You could actually tell that it was meat instead of whatever our hot dogs are made of.

I saw a package of ham slices that had designs on the back of them. They also sold things like sheep's head, blood and liver sausage, et cetera in the regular grocery store. They had a lot of licorice or licorice-flavoured things.

If you want to buy clothes or books, going to the flea market on weekends or something like the Red Cross second-hand store is a far better way to do it.

One sign said "Take away" instead of "To go" or "Take out" when talking about drinks.

They seem to eat lamb meat as much as a lot of people eat beef in the US.

There were a lot of those things where you take a number and then the employees call out the number when it's your turn. I saw them in the bank, in the post office I believe, in a phone store I think, at a bakery...

Having coins the rough equivalent of a dollar, instead of having bills that much, was really handy. I wish we used dollar coins more in the US.

The bottoms of door frames were higher than what I'm used to, so for the first week or so I was constantly tripping over them whenever I walked in or out of a door.

All the restaurants had menus outside their door, so you could see the meals and prices before you went inside.

Even if you were standing right next to the street, it didn't smell like tons of exhaust. People didn't yell things from cars at people walking on the street. There was almost no trash laying on the ground or sides of the roads compared to here. Stores closed earlier than here in general.

2009-09-23T13:12:00.007-07:00

On Sunday we went back to the flea market, this time with Aino and Kristín. The day was basically spent buying souvenirs for people. I bought a map for my dad, some flags for people, children's books for myself for practicing Icelandic, some traditional candy for friends, and things like that. There was a booth with some really old postcards, and Aino bought some of those.

We hung out with Kristín for most of the day because she has a full-time job, and I wouldn't get to see her on Monday before I left for the airport. We went to the mall and got ice cream, and wandered into some gift shops. I forgot if I mentioned this before, but they have something where if you want, you can get your soft-serve dipped in a second flavour of something. I got strawberry ice cream dipped in licorice flavour one time, and Aino got strawberry dipped in chocolate if I remember correctly.

Kristín in a gift store, holding a plastic axe. I was actually trying to get a picture of the cat by the cash register. She was telling me how people who don't speak Icelandic can still get jobs at places. She said that people will call their friends and either have them walk them through the job application, or fill out the application for them in Icelandic. She said there are some people like that at her job, that learned Icelandic through working, so they know numbers and basic phrases and things like that.

Some graffiti in one part of the town. There were a lot of murals and things like this in various places, I think some of them were actually commissioned by businesses and things but I'm not completely sure.

This was a giant, automatic revolving door at the mall. It has the hours that the mall is open written on it.

On Monday we walked to the post office in the morning so I could mail my postcards and so Snorri could pick up a package. Instead of having self-adhesive stamps, you have to press the stamps into something that looks like a sponge or an ink pad to get them sticky, and then you put them on whatever you're mailing.

We went to the bank too, and both Aino and I exchanged money. I had to pay Snorri back for the day before when I bought all those souvenirs, because I had run out of money and the banks were closed. We also went to a bakery, and I tried something that was basically chocolate Rice Krispies in a muffin cup.

We went to the airport, and Aino and Snorri waited with me while I checked my baggage and filled out the customs slip they gave me. Because I was going to the US, I had to tell them the value of the things I was bringing back from Iceland, and what kinds of things they were. Eventually I had to leave, so after going through security I went to the Duty-Free shops. I bought a lot of salmiak licorice, and another children's book in Icelandic.

On the way to the airport. The striped building is an aluminum factory, and it's pretty famous. It's even been on t-shirts.

This was my boarding pass for the airplane this time. Last time it was glaciers, so it makes me wonder how many times they change the image on the tickets.

This was, obviously, in front of the duty-free in the airport in Iceland.

On the plane, to my left was a Dane who was visiting her brother in Seattle, and to my right was a man I suspected was Norwegian. The Dane made some jokes about how Iceland doesn't have any trees, and asked me if I had tried dried fish.

I got home just fine.

2009-09-17T22:22:00.006-07:00

Snorri, Roxy, and I went to some yarn stores and bought yarn for my grandma, so she can knit some scarves. A bundle of yarn was a smaller size than they sell in the US, but I bought double the amount and it still cost about the same amount as buying some in the US. It was traditional Icelandic yarn, like used in my sweater, and I bought traditional colours.

We watched three movies at the film festival, and then another movie at home. I watched "Parque Vía" first, which had a small twist at the end but overall wasn't very impressive. It was alright, but would have been a lot better if it wasn't so drawn-out. Snorri thinks it would make a better book than movie.

These were near the building where some of the movies were being showed.

After that we watched "The Girl", which I thought was a very sad movie, but Snorri didn't agree with me.

The third movie from the film festival was "Three Wise Men", which had a few things I liked in it. Overall it was a sad movie too, but I didn't think it was as sad as the previous movie. At home, we watched "Kairo", a Japanese movie, and I liked that one a lot. It was one of those movies where you could see it as a statement about society and emotions and such, and it would give everything a double meaning.

I watched some other movies at the festival too, but the links aren't working for some of them. One that I did like a lot was "North", which had some fun jokes and ended in the perfect spot.

In the last few days of my stay, Snorri's girlfriend Aino came over. I'm friends with her too, so we had a good time. We went to see the Golden Circle, which is a series of tourist spots that are relatively close together, and it's common to see all of them at once.

Some of the view on the way, during the trip.

Snorri and Aino looking at a map. We got lost at one point.

A sign on the side of the road.

We went to this waterfall. Going back and forth, I accidentally slipped and fell into a shallow area of water. I didn't hurt myself, but my shoes and one of my coat sleeves got muddy.

There were a lot of paths around that you couldn't actually walk on, probably to save the vegetation. Aino's Finnish, so of course she had to step just barely over the line.

A path next to an area they used to drown people in. There was a plaque talking about how they used to kill them by drowning.

This was a small cave. Snorri said it wasn't very deep.

We went to the place where the famous Geysir is. That geyser is where we got the name "geyser" in English. Geysir doesn't go off any more, but there was a smaller one that still does.

At some point we also went to a giant waterfall. There were a lot of tourists around all of these places, so it was hard to find a time where I could take pictures without anyone else in them.

2009-09-15T11:15:00.006-07:00

Yesterday we went to the mall and looked at children's books in Icelandic for me. Snorri translated some of them and told me which ones he read as a child, et cetera, but they were expensive so we decided we're going to go to the flea market over the weekend and look for books there.

We went to Café Paris and chatted with one of Snorri's friends, and the two of them were drawing. After we had been there a while a Swedish man (who looked kind of like Santa) came up to us and asked us where we were from and if we were artists. He had some trouble understanding us. He left our table and then doubled back, saying that he was an artist too, and showed us a carving that he had done. He was wearing it around his neck.

Today we went to the University and asked them what I would have to do, as a foreign student, to get into the school. They gave me a couple pamphlets and I was going to look through them, but Snorri's friend (who takes classes at the University and who was showing us around) accidentally took them with her. From what I remember from Snorri talking to the people at the school, I'll need to send them my transcripts and they'll evaluate whether or not I can get in. His mom had told me earlier that you just needed to pay a small kind of application fee or something like that, as far as she knew.

We went to a museum on campus and it talked about the history of churches in Iceland, old clothing and writing, old work tools and fashion accessories, et cetera. There were things even up until ten and twenty years ago. They had a photography exhibit, and an old rotating baggage-claim conveyor belt that had items from about 1910 to the 1990's. One of the things they had was old-style clothing that you could try on. It was either all or mostly women's clothing, but there was a men's hat.

There is an old-style map that I've been seeing around, on postcards and in gift shops. It's the one that looks like this:

There was a bigger version of that, and lighter coloured so it was easier to read, on the wall in one area of the museum. They had glued thumb tacks to some parts and you could pull them out like puzzle pieces and see facts about Iceland or some of the things in the museum.

There was a group of tourists who had a tour guide show them around the museum, but we didn't do that. Overhearing the guide, it didn't seem like it was even worth it to get a tour because you could learn everything they talked about by just reading all the things in the exhibits.

I didn't bring my camera with me into the museum, and I didn't take any pictures of the University either, so I can't show you those. We were mostly shown the parts of the University that had to do with science, like biology and chemistry and such, because those are the kinds of classes Snorri's friend takes. In one group of buildings they built walkways connecting them, so you can travel from one building to another and never have to walk out in the rain.

2009-09-14T07:30:00.011-07:00

The other day we hung out with Kristín and some of her friends again, and wandered around town. We ate at "American Style", a restaurant that mostly seems to serve hamburgers and sandwiches. As for being American style, it was alright except for two things. There was a "Healthy Style" something-or-other being advertised, and the back of the booths, where you sit down at, were really short compared to what I'm used to.

Here you can see the back of everyone's heads.

Later Snorri and I went to The Pearl, a museum. You can go to the top and walk around, but the weather was rainy and super windy. There were some statues of jazz players I think it was, outside the entrance.

It has a fake geyser outside. It went off about every five minutes.

Inside, we paid 1000kr (about 8 USD) or so, and got a little mp3 player and headphones. Snorri had Icelandic and I had English, and it was an audio tour through a museum exhibit about vikings and old Iceland. It basically talked about famous people and events.

You can check the photobucket account for a lot more pictures.

At some point we went to the grocery store, and they were having "American Days". As far as I know, they also have Danish days and... some other kind of days, but I think this picture sums it up nicely. They sold a lot of American products and had more America-related decorations than stores in America have.

On Friday we left to go camping for the weekend. Snorri's family rented a cabin about four hours away from their house. Along the way we stopped at a convenience store and I tried a sandwich made of chicken and eggs.

This is part of a bridge that used to be in the area. There was a huge flood from the nearby glacier and the bridge was destroyed. They lifted this out of the mess and put it here just as they found it.

The cabin was really nice. It had a porch, three bedrooms (one with bunk beds for Snorri and I), a bathroom, a television, dishes, a tea kettle, playing cards, a bookshelf with books in it... all sorts of things. On the wall by the bunk beds were small shelves that you could put glasses or a plate on, so I could reach over on the top bunk and put my glasses there, and then Snorri could put something on the same kind of table at his own level on the bottom bunk. The yard around the cabin had a sandbox, swings, and some play toys for children. There were other cabins in the area, and a lake.

There was a "village" within walking distance, at one point Snorri and I walked down to the convenience store and bought a couple things, so it wasn't too far away. We didn't do anything else in the village.

Höfn was featured in a Japanese television show, because at one point it was where the only Japanese person in Iceland lived, or something like that. Someone had been telling me that I should go there and find her and take a picture as proof, but we didn't go to that town.

"A visit to Iceland, a travel log from 1834". There are drawings in the book, and you can see differences in how Iceland was then compared to now. There's an English version too. This was found on the bookshelf in the cabin, and since we didn't take any books home with us, Snorri went to the library later and checked it out. They had the English version too but for some reason you weren't allowed to check it out and take it outside the library.

We went out to see the glacier. It was warmer than in the capital, even though we were right next to a lot of ice and water. It used to be that you could walk up the glacier from where we were, but by now a lot of it had melted so part of it was blocked off by water.

This is the path towards the glacier.

This is the glacier.

There was a building that was part gift shop and part museum. A movie was playing about the glacier, I assume, and there were equiptment from a British climbing team that had been found a bit over fifty years after the team had died on the glacier. There were pictures and explanations about different kinds of things.

These are the same kind of sweaters I bought at the flea market for 9500kr (about 76 USD). From what you could buy at the gift shop, the cheapest sweater in my size was either 12000kr($97) or 12500kr($101), I forget which. They went up to/past 20000kr ($160).

We went to this area, which is basically a bunch of ice floating in the water. A tourist guide said that two James Bond movies have been partially filmed there. There were some tourists going in a boat around the water, they all wore orange lifejackets. One employee would go ahead on the planned path to make sure there were no problems, then come back, and then the actual boat with the tourists would go. The boat was on wheels and so it simply drove into and out of the water, and parked in the parking lot a ways away. The tourists didn't even have to walk anywhere!

We went to the beach!

The sand is black because of volcanic activity. On the ride back home I noticed that from the car, if I saw water with the black sand, the water would look grey a lot of the time.

This is from the ride back home.

We stopped on the way back home and walked behind this waterfall. We changed into rain boots (except Snorri, who didn't have any) and walked up a sort of half stone, half mud path. The path directly behind the waterfall was mud. Then the path on the left side was mostly rocks, until a certain point where it turned into wooden steps, and then there was a wooden bridge.

2009-09-08T13:36:00.012-07:00

Starting now, I'll upload all the videos I take to a YouTube account. Right now it just has the videos from the zoo today, and that's it.

Today we went to the zoo! Everything was in Icelandic so I couldn't read any of the signs, and it was for little kids. All the animals are Icelandic, so there's no zebras or anything, just horses and sheep, et cetera. Most of the people there were speaking Icelandic but we did hear a bit of English.

This sign is basically telling you to walk on the paths instead of the grass because the grass is for the animals.

Notice the little houses!

This is a reindeer. I tried to get a good picture, but there were wasps and the reindeer kept randomly moving from inside to outside of the room.

Snorri and I had been petting this cat, and then a girl saw us and started petting it too. Then it turned into a chase where a bunch of kids followed the cat around. Eventually the cat went into the seal tank and stayed out of reach there.

No, I didn't try this. Most of the people in the zoo were families with small children, but there was one adult couple who were tourists, which we saw in the sort of activity section where this bubble thing was. There was a toy where you scream into it and it gauges how loud you are, those tourists had fun with that. There was an optical illusion toy where if you looked at a die inside a glass dome thing from the side, it looked like the die was on top of the dome. There were some puzzles and things too, and fun-house mirrors. The rides in the zoo were all closed, and the hot dog stand was closed - in the winter the zoo closes at five and we were there at around four-thirty. Snorri told me about how the zoo was when he was a kid compared to how it was now.

There was a viking ship! There was a hole in one of the planks, but otherwise it was alright.

Another viking ship... This one was less awesome.

Snorri says that people used to use these to wash their laundry in because the hot water from underground could be found there. This one was all rusty and another one, in a lot better condition, had trash all inside of it. The zoo overall needed to be cleaned - Snorri was complaining that the last time he came here it was a lot nicer.

After the zoo we stopped by a gift shop to look for gifts. I had been looking for a big, old-style map or something like that.

This is the closest we've found so far.

These things are like a hybrid of cheese slicers and spatulas. They can slice cucumbers and things too. They cut a smaller slice than the kind I'm used to, and they're a bit easier to use. They're handy! But Snorri says they're just the way cheese graters are shaped here, and not that they're spatulas...

Later we went to the movie theatre to watch Reykjavík Whale Watching Massacre. It's Iceland's first thriller movie. Most of it was in English because it centred around a group of tourists, but some of it is in Icelandic. Snorri translated the Icelandic for me as we watched it. The movie is great, it's like a parody of thriller movies.

The theatre itself was only mildly different from the ones I've been to. You buy your tickets inside instead of outside in one of those booth things or outside with a machine. I couldn't see well because there was a huge crowd, but it seemed like you couldn't go into the theatre super early before the movie started playing. I didn't notice a whole lot other than it seemed like there was a lot of people there for ten at night on a weekday, they pretty much blocked my view because I'm so short. There was also an intermission in the movie!

2009-09-08T05:12:00.009-07:00

Yesterday we went to the post office to mail some things, and Snorri's friend who happened to work there was just getting off her shift, so he drove her to her school so she could have more time before her class started. We walked around her school a little bit, looking at the murals on the walls.

We went to a bank in a mall so I could exchange some money because I didn't get to do it on Sunday. Then we looked around in a gift shop to try and find things for my dad. He wanted "something you can hang on the wall" but I haven't really found anything like that so far, so I was looking for an old-style map or something. I bought him a pack of cards where each card has a different picture of Icelandic scenery. We also saw jars with old Icelandic coins, old stamps, lava rock or something like that (I can't remember) and glaciers. You're supposed to put the glacier jar in the freezer because, obviously, at room temperature it's just water. They were somewhere around 800kr each, I think.

We're going to see this movie! It's Iceland's first thriller movie.

We went to the bookstore and I bought an Icelandic-English-Icelandic dictionary. Then we went to Café Paris, where we sat at a table next to a tourist couple from Connecticut.

This was a view out the window from our spot in the café.

They talked with the waitress a lot, and wondered random things about Icelanders and Iceland aloud to each other. The lady didn't know where Finland (or Norway? One of them) was on the globe and her husband tried to explain the location to her. Thanks to them we found out the waitress is half American and half Icelandic, and moved to Iceland when she was three. I almost talked to them but decided I didn't want to be stuck in some two-hour conversation or something, so I didn't.

I forgot to mention this earlier, but when getting off the plane, as soon as we landed a girl a few rows in front of me started complaining about the service. She didn't like that she only got one napkin with her meal, even though she had paid such-and-such amount for it. She made a really huge deal out of it even though she could have just asked for more than one napkin.

I've been snacking on this a bit. Dried fish! It's pretty much what I expected, except that I thought it would have a stronger taste. I'm used to some of the Asian kinds where they flavour them with things, this is better.

The other day when I went on the bus, Snorri forgot to give me some old bus fare tickets he had.

This is the dictionary and some of the cards from the deck that I bought. All the best dictionaries were for Icelanders who were learning English, sadly. They had two textbooks in stock, one was the one I already own and another was for immigrants who were taking classes in Iceland, because there were zero instructions in English even though it was a beginner's book.

This is the children's book I got the other day at the flea market.

This is Snorri's dining room.

This is his living room.

This is in his hallway. The map on the top-left is "the world according to America". It's a bit outdated, but still kind of funny.

2009-09-07T05:36:00.010-07:00

Yesterday I met up with Kristín again, because Snorri was going to a tea party that his friend was hosting. She lives really close to his house, so he drove both of us to the bank because I needed to exchange some money, and then he went to the tea party. Kristín was going to make a new bank account too, but the bank was closed by the time we got there.

We took two buses and wound up at her friend's house, where we stood around for a few minutes wondering what we should do. I suggested that we go outside if they didn't mind the weather (It's been sprinkling every day since I got here) so we walked and took some more buses and eventually met up with more friends of theirs.

The buses here are similar to the King County Metro ones, but instead of an electronic hole thing you put your change into, you slide change into a clear plastic box with a slit in it. There is something that looks like a receipt that comes out of a... receipt maker and that's your transfer, so if you take another bus within the time listed then it's free when you show the driver the transfer. Bus fare for minors is 100kr, about eighty US cents.

These are transfers.

We went to the grocery store and Saizopwns bought strawberry ice cream for me, because the only money I had was change since we couldn't go to the bank. It was good, but I liked the soft serve from the flea market better.

We went to the comic book shop and some of them bought books, and we just walked around for a while. I had to use the bathroom so we went into the bookstore, which it turns out, has a lot of floors! There's a café on one of the uppermost floors, too. We had to ask for a key for the bathroom, which means it was a staff bathroom or something, and when I went inside it was pretty disgusting so I don't think I'll use that one again. I don't know why we didn't just go into a regular café or something instead. We took more buses, and went with one of the girls while she checked in with her mom. She was going to come home for dinner.

At some point we went to the grocery store again and bought soda and snacks, which was gummy candy, popcorn, dried fish, and orange soda if I remember right.

Then we walked to Kristín's house and watched the Futurama movie, which was a little interesting because it had Icelandic subtitles. Some of the girls had to leave, and eventually Snorri came over because he had left the tea party. We ended up watching random things on the television, and eventually stuck on a Danish movie and a movie set in New York in the 1800's. At some point Saizopwns' mom came home, so Snorri introduced himself and myself, and they explained what was going on in the movie at some parts, et cetera. After the movie was over we went home.

2009-09-05T05:42:00.007-07:00

FIRST, SOME SHARK.

Yesterday we went to the mall again, and I bought Icelandic soda. I forgot what kind I had, but I didn't like it.

These were bags we found in the mall. The designs on them mimic the traditional pattern of the Icelandic sweater.

Today we went to Reykjavík again, (from now on I'll probably just say "we went to town" instead of Reykjavík) and we went to the flea market. It's open weekends and has booths with people selling clothes, toys, food, et cetera. Basically it's a ton of people wandering around and looking at stuff in booths and on hangers.

I got a children's story in Icelandic, a wool coat (3000 ISK / 24 USD) and a hand-made Icelandic wool sweater (9500 ISK / 75 USD). After that, we went and both Snorri and I tried hákarl, which is basically fermented shark (see the video I linked in the beginning of the post - that was my first time). Snorri lost his scarf somewhere in the flea market, and was unable to find it again...

This is both the sweater and coat. They're really warm!

We left the flea market, and as we were walking around we saw a protest going on. There was a speech, then a band would play, then there would be another speech. It was about saving certain areas of the city from turning into hotels(?). One of the areas they wanted to save was the place we were standing in, I think, which was a kind of gathering area.

This flag is from Brittany, a region in France. We met a girl at the protest who had this flag on her backpack, and she said she was from there.

There was a soccer match today, Iceland versus Norway. There were people walking around with flags and costumes.

I bought a hotdog, and as I was waiting in line a Norwegian tv crew from TV 2 asked if anyone knew English - myself and two other girls said yes, and then they asked if we knew anything about the football match. I said that I only knew that it was against Norway, so they asked if they could ask me some questions. They turned their camera on and asked who I thought would win and why - I said Iceland, of course!

Later my friend from Norway was online so I asked her to look up the footage of the game to see if I was on there or not, but she was too lazy.

Then we went to the bookstore to look for a dictionary. They're a bit expensive and most of them are for Icelanders learning English, but if I'm going to study I really need to get one while I'm here. I could get two for under $100 (I forgot the exact cost, around $70 I think), which would help me a lot with studying, but if I tried to find them online or in the US I would be paying at least $300 for the same one.

More puffins.

Then we went to the grocery store and I bought a Coke in a glass bottle. As we were walking back to the car I took a picture of the church from the other day, so you can see how it looks when they're working on it.

This is the church.

The sign says "The Danish Pub". The sign in the window above says "Hello daddy, hello mommy, will you house me?"

This is more shark.

2009-09-03T02:50:00.018-07:00

After getting back from dinner I went straight to bed. I had been up over twenty-four hours and was almost falling asleep, constantly, in the car ride home. I woke up at three in the morning but went back to sleep and woke up at eight. Then I plugged in my camera and started uploading pictures to photobucket.com - I'll make thumbnails for things I mention when I have the time and link them to the regular size picture, but I'll have more pictures in the photobucket account.

I wandered into Snu´s kitchen and took a picture because there were newspapers. And I believe Zero said she wanted pictures of his house?

We went to Reykjavík and walked around some more - we went to the most famous church in Iceland, but they're doing renovations on it so it looks pretty ugly right now. We went inside and checked out the main room area. We almost went up to the top with an elevator, but you had to pay money to use the elevator (400 ISK I think it was? I can't remember exactly) and we weren't interested enough to pay for it.

That door is the entrance, I turned around once inside to take that picture.

This is the room once you walk in the entrance. It was really big. There were one or two people sitting on the benches but nothing was going on. It echoed a lot.

We walked to... some place that I forget the name of, and there were little kids playing hide-and-seek from the nearby school. There were statues, and some of them were pretty weird.

That was the weirdest one. I'm sure it's supposed to symbolize something.

There was a thread on a forum about pictures of cats from different parts of the world, so I took these to contribute. The orange cat followed us for a long time.

HERE OPEN NOOLE STATION. Bad grammar and spelling. This was on the window of a shop that hasn't opened yet. The bottom says something about how it isn't just food, it's art. If I remember right.

We went to 'The Puffin' and I took pictures of the inside. Snorri went around looking for postcards, and I just hung out while he answered a bunch of phone calls. He told me some phrases to use when talking with cashiers so I don't have to speak English, although I'm pretty embarrassed and I haven't used them yet.

Iceland loves puffins! They're everywhere in all the gift shops. I'm going to eat puffin sometime while I'm here.

I keep forgetting to change my camera settings when I take pictures inside, so they turn out yellowish. I'll try to remember from now on.

This is what all the city mailboxes look like here! Sans the graffiti. I think they're really neat. A lot of people have mail slots in their doors instead of mailboxes... It might be that everyone has them, I haven't seen something I recognize to be a mailbox yet.

More puffins! For those of you who wanted a puffin stuffed animal, just pick out one that you want from pictures. I've been trying to take pictures of all the ones I saw.

We were wandering around and saw that there was an art gallery showing, so we went to check it out. It wasn't anything special.

There were people playing chess behind some glass(a TON of the doors here are automatic sliding doors, except personally, I can never tell when they are because they look like giant windows. Snorri says they usually have stickers/designs on them if they are.)

Another random thing that I noticed is that the... things on the bottom of the doorframes in Snorri's house, the wood, they're probably higher than what I'm used to because I'm constantly stubbing my toes on them when I go through a door.

When going to check out the gallery, he put his backpack in a locker. We got number five!

It´s the bank..... American style. (Not really, but.) It's funny if you know about the economic situation!

These are what all the buses look like here.

This is a funeral parlour.

This building has the Danish coat of arms on it! Do you know why? Because it's the Danish embassy!

I'll start to take pictures of the Icelandic signs I can read. I didn't get a picture of one of them, but this car says "Tea & Coffee"!

We went to the store at some point, and I bought skyr and orange juice for lunch. I had original flavour Skyr, and it's like thick yogurt that tastes really sour and smells like cheese. It's closer to cheese than yogurt is, though. Next time I'll try a flavour with fruit in it to off-set the sour taste.

We walked to the only comic store in town. I think all the comics I looked at were in English, but I kept to the manga section of the store for the most part.

After she got off work, we met up with Saizopwns and her friend and we walked around town for a bit. I took a video. Snu drew pictures and we all talked for a while, then he and I ordered mozzarella sticks. They were good but a bit expensive - it wasn't a marinara sauce like I'm used to, instead it was a little spicy.

Afterwards we dropped Saizopwns and her friend off, and since they both live pretty much down the street from Snu we visited Saizopwns in her house for a while before she went to bed. She didn't allow us to see inside her room, so we chatted in her living room. I had some things to give her, and she had some things to give me, so we did that - I gave her some candy and American flags, and she gave me some candy and a puffin stuffed animal.

2009-09-02T07:04:00.007-07:00

I checked into the airport just fine. The baggage tags and boarding pass for Icelandair are REALLY COOL! I was so excited as I was writing the addresses on my luggage tag that I was shaking and the handwriting turned out really horrible. The security and everything was normal, then I had two or three hours to kill before it was boarding time. I called my dad, then went to Starbucks and got hot water from them to make tea, and ate a third of one of those giant sandwiches from the grocery store I had bought for the plane ride.

There was a shoe-shining booth at the airport! I only saw men using it, but it didn't stay empty and without customers for long. The customer requested that I take it from the waist down, so I did.

These were all pillars at the Seattle airport.

The plane was about 7.5 hours long, I think. I had the cheapest type of ticket so they didn't serve free food, although the food they did serve looked really good. Snorri says they used to serve free food to everyone and you had to pay for extra drinks, but now drinks are free and you have to pay for food. There was a touchscreen tv thing in the back of the headrest in the seat in front of me, and I could watch movies and things. There was a really nice countdown timer for when the estimated landing time was, and you could read a history of the airlines in Iceland and see how many miles/kilometers you had flown and had left, how far away to such-and-such city you were on the globe, et cetera.

This was my boarding pass. The red thing is just an advertisement for the Keflavík airport that they put my checked baggage information sticker on. I don't know why they gave me that sticker because I didn't need it to get my baggage on the other side.

There were no Icelanders on the plane - there was one Danish guy who had moved from DK to US and was now moving to Iceland. He was always smiling and joking and he had dirty-blonde hair, and wore a white shirt with black pants. When we got to the waiting area before it was time to board the plane, he asked 'Where's the beer?' and went off to drink at the airport bar. I think I saw him later, jogging, when Snu and I were in the cemetary. Apart from the Dane, there was a rather large group of Japanese (who spoke minimal English, like 'latte, yes, no, thank you') and a group of old people who looked like they might have been traveling together. There was a large group of friends who were in their twenties or late teens, too.

On the plane I sat next to a couple who were tourists. They were going to be in Iceland for ten days, and were renting a car and driving all around the country. They were really excited to see all the glaciers and countryside and things like that. They first became interested in going to Iceland when they saw pictures of the geography on the internet. People were saying to go to Iceland now, while the economy was bad and everything would be super cheap compared to how it normally was (super expensive). They're going to Ireland after Iceland. They spoke zero Icelandic and had no idea how to pronounce ANYTHING. I wrote down a pronunciation guide for the letters that I could remember and gave them super basic words 'yes, no, thank you, I don't speak...' to try and help them.

The first thing I noticed after getting off the plane was that it smelled different, and that it was windy. Iceland smells like the sea and something else, perhaps the sulfur. It's cold here, but a different kind of cold. It's perfectly fine when there's no wind.

After getting off the plane, they helped me and we all got to the security check, customs, duty-free and where I was meeting Snorri. We had to go through security again after we arrived because Europe has different standards than the US and Canada and we were coming from the US, but it was the same kind of thing. You put your stuff in bins and they went through an x-ray machine, and you walked through a metal detector. You didn't have to take your shoes off though.

Customs was easy. They asked you where you were going ('Reykjavík' was all I needed to say, they didn't need the address) and how many days, and then they stamped my passport and that was it. The people who sat next to me on the plane had no idea how to pronounce the town name, so they struggled through it and the customs guy had no clue what they were trying to say. They tried to write it but couldn't spell it, so the customs guy guessed at where they were going and they agreed and he let them through.

The duty-free was full of, as far as I could tell, almost nothing but candy and Hello Kitty merchandise. Mostly candy, but there was a section of Hello Kitty backpacks and candy and things. I stopped wandering around in the store when I remembered I hadn't exchanged any money into ISK yet.

Snorri was late but I thought that it was me who was late, so I thought I was in the wrong meeting place and wandered around. My suitcase was twelve pounds and I had my backpack. All the way at the end of the airport, outside, a guy was smoking and he asked me if I was looking for something. I said I was looking for my friend and he said he was in the same boat, and asked if I wanted to call my friend but I declined. Then I wandered back around the airport and as I was coming back Snorri found me, so that worked out just fine.

We drove to his house and I met his mom and dad and was shown the house and things. I took a shower - the hot water did smell like sulfur/rotten eggs but it wasn't strong at all, like I had expected. I saw his sister walk down the hallway when I was in my room, but she didn't say anything to me. Also, their microwave has a dial instead of buttons with numbers and you have to mess with the power and stuff before it lets you microwave anything. I think it's an older style of microwave but he thinks it's quite new.

Then we went to Reykjavík. We wandered all around and went into some thrift stores, and went to the cemetary, and to the pond and he told me about all kinds of stuff about the area and people he knows, et cetera.

This was the first picture taken in Iceland! That building still has the Danish crown on top of it.

There was some music playing loudly, (he knows the song but I forgot the name) and it turns out it´s part of a sort of hazing thing for students, we passed by it. The freshmen were dressed oddly compared to the rest of the kids, and were jumping in place and yelling something as far as I could tell. There was a blow-up slide thing and a tire obstacle course and some other things I forget.

I exchanged money at the bank, then ate at 'Café Paris', a really nice café. My first meal in Iceland was an open-faced sandwich with hung meat, some salad, 'bean salad', and peach slices. I should have taken a picture because in all it looked weird. The bread was a different kind of bread than I'm used to. When we were wandering around I bought postcards and Snorri bought a flag pin for a certain country to put on his backpack...

This was what I ate in the café.

This is a street in town. The sign says 'Warm Welcome' in different languages. There isn't a sidewalk like I'm used to, there's either small posts that act as a barrier between the sidewalk and road, or the ground for the sidewalk simply looks different than the road for the cars. All the cars are smaller and the roads are smaller, and it doesn't smell like exhaust everywhere even if you're walking right next to the road. There's less traffic than I'm used to, too.

This is the gate to the cemetery.

A lot of the graves were fenced off like this, but all the gates looked different.

This was a catacomb!

Later we picked up Roxy and went with her to the mall, where she bought some clothes and Snorri gave his phone to the phone store so they could fix the screen(?) on it. He got a replacement phone to use while they do that. We saw an ad for an Icelandic movie that airs in a few days, so we're going to see that.

We went to a grocery store in the mall, the one with the pig mascot. It was super small compared to what I'm used to! All the packaging on the food was really simple and you knew what most things were just by a glance. You bag your own groceries, even though there is a cashier.

Last night we ate dinner at Café Paris. I didn't finish my breakfast from there, so this time I ordered cheese-garlic bread, which was a smaller meal. It was good! Then I went to the bathroom in the café... at first I was unsure if it was a bathroom. There were three stalls, but they were actually little rooms instead of stalls. There were no gaps in the doors between the ceiling and floor, and they looked like regular doors (a bit skinny perhaps). The toilets look different and inside the café there was an odd button. Instead of those small black ones on the wall, this was a really big one of metal that looked like intersecting circles or a sideways figure eight. The water from the sink was nice and hot!

So far it doesn't seem like I'm obviously a tourist, except when I´m talking English, because at the bank they started talking to me in Icelandic. But at this other store where I bought postcards, they talked English to me because I had been standing right in front of the cashier talking English the whole time. Snorri and his friends and family talk in Icelandic, except when it's Roxy, Snorri and I where they mostly talk in English, and then usually he or Roxy will summarize conversations for me. It's strange because I only know a super tiny bit of Icelandic... people get around with knowing none, but how? Some things are entirely in Icelandic, like stuff at the phone store and things at the bank if I remember right.

It seems like nearly early every time we go into a place we have to draw a number and wait with it! This happened at the bank, the phone store... I think somewhere else too but I forgot.

Gifts!

2009-08-25T18:51:00.000-07:00

Here's what I'm bringing as gifts: (To be bought at the airport - fish salmiakki.)

For Snu.

For Snu, except the tea candy and tea is for Roxy. Whoever wants the Ring Pops can have them.

Maple stuff is for saizopwns, and other stuff is for someone and I to share because I haven't tried any of it yet (except for Crunchie - those are Snu's).

Edit: UPON CLOSER INSPECTION, the Yorkie bar is made in/imported from both the UK and Norway, so says the packaging. If you can just buy it in Iceland then I'm going to eat it myself.

For saizopwns and friend(?) (the blue one is already gone and went to Olynthus).

Both flags for saizopwns.

Flight information, General Info

2009-08-06T00:27:00.003-07:00

Airline - Icelandair

September 1st:
Flight FI680 From: SEA To: KEF
Departs at 16:30, September 1st, from Seattle.
Arrives at 06:45, September 2nd, in Keflavik.

September 21st:
Flight FI681 From: KEF To: SEA
Departs at 17:00, September 21st, from Keflavik.
Arrives at 17:45, September 21st, in Seattle.

When talking about people, for the most part I'm going to be using nicknames for friends that my other friends are familiar with, or people's online names, so that everyone who doesn't know everyone's real names will still know who I'm talking about (or be able to find out who I'm talking about).

I probably won't post every day, considering I want to be out and doing things as much as possible, but I'll catch up at some point later. For pictures, I'll be posting some of them here and I'll make an image-album-account-thing and upload everything else on that, then just link to it. I'll have videos, probably, and probably sound recordings too.

The photo album for this trip is here, organized from oldest to newest. I will put descriptions on the photos when I can. Click on the small pictures to see a bigger version on both the album and this blog.