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).

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[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.