Sunday, 29 June 2008

Icelandic Summer Nights




Before we get too far away from the Summer Solstice that occurred on the 24th of June this year, I need to tell you about the long light nights! Well for starters actually we are quite a bit south now and it makes a big difference! Sunset has only been at 11:40 PM while in Reykjavik it has been past midnight and in Akureyri in the north the sun sets around 1 AM! After the sun sets it just gets darkish not exactly night! Last night I stayed up doing a few things, waiting for Eman to get back from Reykjavik where he amongst other things went to a Björk concert! It was one of those last minute things and it was free. Anyway, he got back around 1am and it was still light of course and so we stayed up and talked for awhile. We were lying in bed and suddenly it started getting brighter! The sun was already starting to rise! ( one of the most amazing things is that it rises in the north!) So it was like- we better get to sleep before the sun rises! Sometimes if the weather is not overcast, we have to put something over our little window in the top of the loft where we sleep, because otherwise you have sun streaming on your face at 5 in the morning!

But for all of you suffering from a hot muggy summer this is the place to be! If you want to get into some free airconditioning all summer long, consider Iceland! I am hoping that July might prove to actually be warm, but so far we are having daily temps between 6 and 10 C! July should bring warmer temps and then, alas, it will immediately start to cool down in August. When the weather is anywhere over 0 C the people are all ' Oh the weather is so nice and they are all in shirtsleeves'.

Top photo_ One of the farms next to Buland
Bottom photo_ View from our summer house back door at sunset at Kross

Wednesday, 25 June 2008

Summer Tree Planting Season has begun




Photo top: Underneith Eyafjallajökull
Photo bottom: Marie & Raf getting started with baby Aspen trees

Doing our good deed for the nation of Iceland.....tree planting! First it was Aspens and then Christmas trees...ok, Spruce. All the credit goes to Eman, Raf and Dom who are our tree planters par excellence and have done a total of 20,000 trees so far. Hurray for the tree planters! They work really quickly and Dominique is in the lead with some days getting as many as 1500 in the ground. This takes only 4 to 5 hours for one person to plant this many, so it goes quite fast. Now they are taking a few days off to see if it will continue to rain, because everything depends on the moisture in the soil.

It is, I must say, very beautiful out here and would be a great spot for a little summer house. Any takers? the land´s for sale!

In the distance you can see this very small glacier called Eyafjallajökull which is a mouthful I know. If you check out the map of Iceland you can compare this with the biggest and baddest of glaciers Vatnajökull to the west which is a hundred times bigger.