Random information

[shewhomust]

While we were in Hveragerdi, I picked up a tourist information leaflet - outside the library, underneath whose floor runs a volcanic fault line, a long rift which has been retained on display but covered with a sheet of glass in the floor. "It's still growing," says the lady in the post office, "about 2cm a year. We're going to have to replace that glass." But I digress: according to the leaflet, Heimaey is the Pompeii of the North, because of excavations which are uncovering the houses engulfed in the 1973 eruption. The past arrives so much faster than it used to...

English: the lingua franca of Iceland. Waiting to pay for my postcards, I heard the assistant explaining in English how to reclaim tax on your purchase to a rather baffled Frenchwoman. It's the language we speak to foreigners - though this may not apply to Scandinavians.

It's not that the landscape is entirely unfamiliar; it's that we keep misinterpreting things that look familiar but have different causes. That's what 'uncanny valley' means, isn't it? The flat valley bottoms, all mossy green and scored with long parallel lines, result from volcanic rifts, not from peat cutting; and a row of regularly spaced round structures were surely volcanic outcrops, too, not grouse butts. We walked this morning on a black beach, black sand strewn with black pebbles - but they were lava, not the colliery waste of Durham's black beaches, and puffins bobbed on the waves whch were not black at all.

I'm in the lounge of the hotel at Skaftafell, and through the window in front of me I can see a glacier coming straight towards me (but slowly).

Comments

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Run! Run for the hills! (It'll be okay to run slowly...)

[janni.livejournal.com]

I want to get back to Skaftafell--we only managed to drive by our first trip, and didn't make our way east the second at all!

Are you going to Heimaey? Walking on 30-year-old ground was a pretty lovely experience ... and you can pretty much walk right up to the puffins, too. :-) (The puffins and the lava being on different parts of the island, though!)

[larryhammer]

The languages best known after English are German and Danish -- so with a Norwegian, an Icelander would speak English. (I once overheard on a bus an Icelander talking with a Swede in English about, among other things, local foods; the names of dishes were problematic as they ran into the difficulty of spelling out words, since they were both shaky on the names of English letters, and neither knew the other's language, but Danish letter names are close enough to Swedish they could spell with those.)

The interpretation of flat-topped hills are what threw me. Here in the American southwest, mesas are eroded down to a flat top of a hard rock layer; in Iceland, the flatness is from the underside of Ice-Age glaciers, capping lava from welling up any further. A different geologic grammar.

---L.

[durham-rambler.livejournal.com]

If you would like more comments on our trip to Iceland, see this post, soon, I hope, to be followed by others.