daily poetry

Walking home from a cozy evening with an international group of women, Danish jazz from a colleague in my ears, I just looked northwards and caught the first glimpse of the northern lights this year. The air was still balmy and full of the smell of green, and the breeze stirred it gently across my face as I walked.

It got me to thinking about the strings of moments over the past months where I

spring, but not

today's the day that officially we are all supposed to have removed our winter nail-tires. It's appropriately ironic that today I woke up to a white world, and since then it's been snowing on and off. The view outside my office is one of those classic Icelandic days, the sky aswirl with clouds and pierced by gentle shafts of sunlight. A crowd of seabirds has just taken off and are reeling against

Mass exodus?

Ever since about a year into this blog, I've been getting emails from people asking me about ways to move here. They stopped abruptly at the beginning of October 2008 but always reappear in a spike during the first few months of the new year. I can't quite figure why, given how idle this blog is, but since it doesn't seem to be disappearing, this post is for all of you frustrated would-be

lay low in the snow

The snow is just warm enough to slide down the window in lazy ribbons, accumulating in fractals along the lower sill, and my trustily unreliable streetlamp winks and flickers as always. The air is unusually still, so the snow billows beneath the illumination in ways remembered from childhood. Across the street one tiny tree on a doorstep still twinkles with ice-blue fairy lights, left from

localized memory loss

Last Thursday night the first real autumnal weather arrived, a howling wind that spattered rain on the bedroom windows and tore leaves from the trees. It roared all day Friday, bringing with it a strange high mist that blurred the edges of the landscape. Along with rain, this wind blew in the memory of Iceland when it's not summer.Every year as soon as the darkness disappears in late spring, the

straight from the land

For Saturday's lunch I had an omelet covered with mushrooms I'd just picked. Iceland's got all kinds of interesting mushrooms sprouting up this time of year and I figured some of them must be edible but wasn't daring enough to figure it out on my own. So, I recruited a friend and longtime reader S for some help. She's trained in the forests of Germany, a country that seems to have made a

downtown love

I'm in my third month of being a downtown girl again, and after this last weekend, I think I'm a fan. My brother was in town for the weekend, one of the best in the whole Reykjavík activity calendar. First on the program, the Reykjavík marathon, a great race that offers distances for all types of runners- 3k for the kids and purely recreational folks, 10k and half marathon for the more ambitious

nose-walk

this post inspired by Maya's comment about the smells of IcelandA few days ago we had unusual weather for Iceland- a light, low drizzle with absolutely no wind, the kind of day that I think is perfect for walking. I threw on my trusty Iceland-made raincoat and headed out towards Öskuhlíð's tiny forest. The path there is close with pine trees and moss, all sharply scented in the mist.From there I

exploration at a different pace

One of my favorite mini features of the pools here is the hlaupakort (running map). It's not exactly the kind of thing one goes expressly to visit at the pool but I think it's a brilliant idea. Each swimming pool has a large map tacked to the wall by the door where they've described running loops that start and end there, marked with distances and a short explanation of how to do it and what kind

Calabrese Concerts

Here we are on an even year so that meant choir trip again! This year we returned to Italy, to Calabria, where the choir director's wife P comes from. She'd arranged a marvel of a trip that left us all breathless with the pace of everything but certainly having seen as wide a variety of landscape as can be achieved in just 7 days.We flew to Bologna and then to Lamezia Terme, then by bus to our

lucky number seven

I've just completed the move into my seventh home in Reykjavík, back in my original moved-to-Iceland postcode, and a few blocks from this place. It's a lovely old house from the 1930s with graceful proportions and funny little details like a frosted glass window on the narrow bathroom door, and a pantry. Unlike my last apartment, the ceilings here are so high I can only see into a third of the

in the name of science

Yesterday was a perfect clear sunny spring day, so S decided it was time to see if he could collect samples of the volcanic ash for his research institute. We headed south along the ring road, passing the cars collected at Hellisheiði, and all along the road pass Selfoss who'd pulled over to gape at the plume that was so crisply visible on the horizon. From 70 km away it seemed surreal, beautiful

hot views

By now I'm sure everyone's heard of the latest excitement to reach us here on the island. The volcano at Fimmvörduháls has even been covered by the revered news service at Fox to the delight and amuseument of most people here.So yesterday when the weather was clear and spring-like, S and I skipped out of the office early to see what we could see. At Hvolsvöllur we turned on to route 216,

not done yet

Over the past few months there's been some serious Iceland-or-not debate going on here, and for a while I thought I might be leaving the country. And yet, I'm still here and plan to stay for a while. Based on the world media and the currency and the dirty politicianing it might seem like the last place someone would choose to stay, particularly since I arrived here by following someone else's

the mysterious pickle

As I mentioned in my last post, Germans are extremely enthusiastic about the Christmas traditions, and many of them have migrated to America. One that I'd heard of years ago and continues to crop up regularly is that of the Christmas tree pickle. These things are readily available in stores and online in the US, described as this charming German tradition. The story goes that this glass pickle is

german holidays

Germans know how to do Christmas properly, from the gluhwein and the markets to the vast and ancient churches that host vesper services. The markets are a unique experience that no American replica I've visited has been able to reproduce faithfully. To start with, I've had the happy fortune to be able to visit one of the oldest and most famous of all the German markets, a festivity that consumes

marshmallow lessons

I was one of the fortunate invitees to a rather spectacular dinner on Saturday night, at the now famous blue house. One of the temporary house residents A, a restaurant owner from Germany, had been in Iceland for the autumn lamb slaughter season, learning about where exactly the food's coming from. He'd also started producing a new lamb sausage, a perfect marriage between the texture and

not mourning the departure

After our first attempt to hail the departure of McDonalds failed, S was determined to try again, so we went again a few days later and braved the line for a final "góðborgari" for me and a McFish for him. As always, the food tasted exactly like the McDonalds in France or Canada or America (the only locations I've tried it) and came in the exact same packaging as always. Nothing special there

two ways

Last Saturday I met one of the very few traffic engineers in Iceland, and we spent some time discussing how they're in the process of overhauling the timing of all the lights in town so that certain corridors have the "green wave" where you can hit greens all the way along. This was happy news, since only a few months ago I'd been having a conversation about how the number and timing of the

Iceland escape

So, the reason I was in Norway a few weeks ago was to start the next phase of the Norwegian project in Trondheim. My colleague had told me that I'd like the place, and my Norwegian friend K had lived there for three years, coming away with many good things to say. After my time in Oslo I was starting to think that Norway was a rather uncolourful and serious place, but my time in Trondheim has