The Blue Lagoon

 

The Blue Lagoon is truly an amazing experience....at least I loved it as did Emma and Brandt. I have heard a few comments from young people saying that is was over rated, so I went not quite knowing what to expect. Fortunately I was pleasantly surprised and would definitely recommend it to everyone who has gotten out of their teens and into real life......teens with a tiny view of life? The white silica mud was wonderful and squishy between the toes acting as a fine abrasive and makes you look something like an Aborigine with war paint. We were there on a clear day with blue skies and a slight dusting of snow on the surrounding lava dunes which made it very surreal with the steam rising from the hot pools. Hmmmmm.......take me back!

We are really getting VERY Icelandic now....

I knew that once we got an Icelandic sheep dog it would be clear to all that we are now a permanent fixture on the Icelandic landscape, which is not a bad thing in itself considering the absolutely stunning views we have here! But no we are not settling down just because we have a dog now, I mean us settle down? No way! ..... Jose or whatever your name is. So this is Snorri who is a great all around guy and fits in so well with the scenery! (click on photo to enlarge)

So the newest news is that we are online now at home! Finally! At our newest place of residence, in the posh area of town where a few of the insanely rich of Iceland chose to put their homes and or summer houses. Some of these have recently become the *baddies* of Iceland and being our neighbors we hope we can influence them in a positive way now that their Icelandic moneyship is sinking. One of them is the Minister of Justice who needs oodles of help just now. Eman has had a few casual conversations with him so far...... go Eman!

We are of course affected by the present state of affairs: namely the price of food is going up daily. OK, well not as fast as it does in Zimbabwe, but lets just say we hope Iceland doesnt become the first Nordic Third World Country!

Glethileg Jol or Merry Christmas from Iceland

Wishing you a very healthy, happy and hearty Christmas to all our friends all over the world! Also wishing you SNOW of course and many beautiful snowflakes to brighten your life.

Even though it is Jesus' birthday and we do our humble bit to show Him our love especially at this time of year, I find that He seems to have great fun bestowing gifts upon us also at Christmas! Especially in the last few years, He seems to be very attentive to our thoughts and surprises us with a little gift which we were not necessarily expecting. Now the presents from Him come in unexpected ways and are not from our friends and loved ones either.....as for me He seems to monitor my thoughts! One year, I noticed a pink fluffy bathrobe with matching pajamas and wistfully thought to myself how nice and cosy that would be, but of course I couldn't really afford it and I just never seem to be able to bring myself to buy clothes for myself anyway. So imagine my surprise when friends arrive with a box of clothes and there in my size? Pink fluffy pajamas of course!

So every year there are those little surprises that come from Him and we know in our heart of hearts this is ture. So I would like to ask you a question. Do you have a special gift bestowed upon you in secret that you know is from our best husband and friend? If so I would love for you to send it to me and who knows, maybe I will compile these one day and publish them for all to enjoy!

Such a special time of year! Merry Christmas!

Kross

The view north-east from our front door.

Nice rainbow, huh? This is one of the views from our front door...the little church with it own graveyard. The house on the right also belongs to the church. Now the thing is, people don´t ever attend church in Iceland anymore, especially not this type of Lutheran church. But sometimes tourist buses pull up for a look and then there is the occasional baptism performed here, but that is about all they ever use the church for. Nevertheless, everyone born in Iceland is a member of the church when they get baptised. After the earthquake one of the local priests called up all the members of her parish. She called one of my friends to see how she was doing after the earthquake, you know, to find out if she was ok. Well, my friend was fine, but proceeded to tell this priest some real major problems she was having ( a supposed friend had embezzeled 10 million Icelandic kroner from her ) but the priest didn´t want to get involved with hearing her problems!

Enter.........us! We take up where the local priest leaves off!

Here is a recent testimony: We have been doing Bible studies with Guthny from Buland, you remember, the organic dairy farm where we first lived. Guthny, recently went on a weeklong riding tour into the mountains taking some of their horses. One of the riders suddenly became very fearful of her horse and couldn´t go onwards. They were in the a very desolate area so this was a rather serious setback as horseback was the only means of transportation. There was a psychologist on the tour who talked to the woman to see if he could help her but to no avail. Others tried to reason with her but her fears were overcoming her and she refused to go onwards. Finally Guthny asked her if she could pray for her. The woman said yes, she asked Jesus into her heart and then Guthny prayed for the demons of fear to leave her. Well, that did the trick, the woman felt better right away and the riding tour continued. The psychologist is now interested in learning about the power of prayer!

Domi and Thea have a part time job!!!

Believe it or not Thea and Domi just started working (with Eman) at "N1" on weekends! This is the place where Eman worked over the winter. In summer it becomes more like a "travel centre" and I think half of Reykjavik was there with another few thousand touristsin their tourist buses this past weekend. It is the last outpost of civilization as there is virtually nothing between us and the next major town of Vik 100kms away! So everybody stops here to eat, fillup their tanks, etc. before going onwards. If I am here, even I help out but that is strictly just to be nice as sometimes the personnel are soooooo overloaded they can't even keep up! They work 12hour shifts, most of them! They told me they were very impressed with Domi & Thea, how well they worked etc, so that was nice to hear.

Hvolsvöllur is just a village with about 800 people living here. Life is very safe as there is no crime, I doubt people even lock their houses and everybody knows each other. The doctor in town recognised Eman after 35 years; he used to play with Eman´s brother when they were about 10 years old! So the "N1" as it is called, is pretty much the busiest place in town, expecially now in the summer. So it is a very good experience for the girls getting a taste of real life, work ethics and learning Icelandic at the same time.

Between this weekend job and the tree planing during the week, they keep themselves pretty busy!

Photos:
#1 Some of the sweet kids who work at N1 and Eman at the far end.
#2 Eman taking care of customers
#3 Domi wiping down tables on Sunday night as the dinner rush ended.
#4 Thea stocking shelves

Random Photos ( scroll to bottom for captions)

#1 "The Shed" sits next to the milk can platform, ( see photos #5 & 6) On warm days the milk cans would go in this turf shed which helped to keep the milk cool. It was also used as a shelter from storms by people waiting for long distance buses and for farm children waiting to be picked up by the local school bus.

#2 The farmer's wife, Ester, drives the tractor at Kross. View to the west from the deck of the summer house we are staying in on a very sunny day!

#3 A pretty good photo of the nearby falls, Seljalandfoss, which I found on the internet. Although the grass is very green now, this photo has obviously been colored and that is why is only rates "pretty good". This is maybe the only falls in Iceland that you can walk behind. I go very often as it is only a 15 minute drive.

#4 Me at Skogafoss. Photo taken by a friend last winter- note lack of water in the falls, usually there is much more in the summer months. This is a 30 minute drive from the house. Will try to get a more spectacular photo of these falls.

#5 Lambafell- the house we were sitting in having coffee when the earthquake occured.
Also for sale- only $10 million. If you Google "Lambafell, Iceland" you can see photos of the inside.

#6&7 When Asgeir was young he had to carry the milk cans out to the road. The milkcans were placed on a platform such as the one shown here and would be picked up by a truck. Now they have refrigerated trucks which drive directly to the farms.


#8 The hot tub at Lambafell is fed by this natural hot spring which gushes just a few metres away from the house.

#9 Another view of Lambafell

#10 At the tree planting location with Halldor (5) from Buland at the tree planting location.

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

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.

We are all fine!!!

For those who perhaps scrutinize the news, you may or may not have run across a tiny article entitled "Iceland hit by earthquake" and this is to confirm that yes, for once they got the news totally accurate! Maybe journalists should stick to just the things that are TRUE and observable such as weather events from now on. It will be interesting to see in heaven, (where your whole life and more! is stored on video) how many lives were ruined by false reporting, twisting of the truth and lives shattered by deliberate lies parading as the truth......but that is an idea for another blog.........

Back to the earthquake! I had planned on going into Selfoss to do our main food shopping, but Eman wanted to take a drive towards Vik, to hunt down a specific guesthouse which he had heard was for sale. There is a beautiful house about 20 kms away which used to be owned by a doctor who wanted to open a health spa at the foot of a mountain called Lambafell. Evidently all the plans came to a halt due to problems. Now the house is being used as a guesthouse and we were sitting with the caretaker/manager having coffee when all of the sudden the whole house started shaking! Now this house is huge by Icelandic standards, and built of gigantic logs from Canada so the thought that this could actually start shaking was rather incredible. We ran outside for safety, and in the distance we could hear and see in the neighboring mountain the loud rumble of a rock slide coming down the near vertical slope. Soon a herd of Icelandic horses came thundering by to add just a touch more drama. Then all was quiet except the birds nesting in the cliffs directly behind the house who were in a bit of a frenzy I suppose worried that their eggs might have gotten shaken loose from their nests!

The kids were home, as it was the first day of NO MORE SCHOOL! Hurray! So they were just chilling...... Dom phones me all excited. But Buland being 50 kms from the epicenter near Selfoss, we experienced only the house shaking and nothing more. In Selfoss the shops had some big messes to clean up after the contents of their shelves ended up on the floor, but there were no casualties as Icelandic houses are very well built. I heard that the earthquake in Turkey where there was massive destruction was 6.7 in magnitude and this one was 6.2, so obviously a lot depends on how well cities are built to withstand an earthquake.

I am going today into Selfoss to do the shopping that I couldn't do yesterday and I will report back to you with any more outstanding updates on the situation! Stay well everyone and don't forget to write! (i.e. Leave a comment!) Love to hear from you!

On how I mistook the Island of Vestmannæyjar for a chicken farm.....

The windiest place in Iceland on Vestmannaeyjar


Cod drying on racks

Smelly!

Old water tank partly demolished by lava from the 1973 eruption


View from lava mounds of 1973 towards mainland and 2 more islands. Note small white speck on island on the right which is a sheep farm.


Another harbour shot


Harbour shot with me and a teacher from the kids' school


Me at old Norwegian Church replica on Vestmannaeyjar


Inside the plane...first trip

The farm Buland is out in the middle of nowhere in South Iceland, so of course there are not many lights out here except from a few farms in the area. There was one very bright row of orangey lights in the distance not too far away. They seemed to be on all night long and and had a definite shape. Being new I guessed that this had to be a chicken farm, you know where the lights are on all the time. So in surveying the landscape, I had pretty much concluded that this was indeed a chicken factory and had even imagined how it looked!

One day I asked the farmer if we could go and visit this chicken farm. He looked at me with a very puzzled expression and said, "Chicken farm? There's no chicken farm over there, those are the lights from the town on Vestmannæyjar!"

Monday the weather was all sunny and blue so I decided I'd go for a visit. If you want to be spontaneous this is the right place to be! The tiny airport is only a 10 minute drive from the farm. Check in time was for 1pm and the plane took off on schedule at 1:15. I was the only passenger! The pilot did inform me however that I might not make it back later in the day as they were expecting high winds and fog over the island, so I needed to be prepared. Fine with me!

Touch down in the little 6 seater plane was perfect and I also had the whole airport to myself. The lone employee called a taxi as there was no other way to get into town; I was heavy laden with inspirational books and calendars, so decided walking the 2 kms to town might not be the wisest choice.

I spent the day visiting many shop keepers and getting to know the locals. Quite a friendly bunch they are. Then in the evening I stayed at this very nice inexpensive guest house in the center of town because as predicted, there were no more flights to the mainland. The next day the weather was worse so I decided it was time to leave and the only way was to take the car ferry to þorlakshöfn and have my husband come and fetch me if I couldn't find anybody going back towards Hvolsvöllur.

Unfortunately my camera was nowhere to be found as I was leaving home, so the photos here are thanks to the kids' Danish teacher who took these photos from our first expedition. Thanks Ann-Sofie!