blood_winged (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
blood_winged) wrote2012-01-12 07:06 am
blood_winged) wrote2012-01-12 07:06 am
Finally updating about Iceland!
For lack of an Iceland display picture, I'm going to use Norway. It's close enough.
We went to my dad's on Thursday, to see a pantomime. I'm pretty sure that America doesn't have pantomimes, and I have to tell you that you are really missing out. It was absolutely hilarious. But I'm not here to write about the panto.
A final chapter to the laptop saga comes in here. On Thursday night I got a text off mum saying that someone had called about a Samsung product. It turned out to be Laskys. Dad called them for me in Heathrow on Friday morning, and I spoke to someone who finally got in touch with the system support team and worked out exactly what had gone wrong. I should have my refund by this Friday. Thank god for that.
We headed out to catch the bus to Heathrow in the morning on Friday, thankfully not horridly early but I hadn't managed to sleep much anyway. I was fine, though, since I'm used to working on little sleep, and we got to the airport pretty early and got checked in. Then, we had two hours to wait until the plane. Amy and I went for a nosy in the shops and I bought a keyring, because I'm a sucker for anything with the British flag on it, and when the gate opened we went straight there.
Here is our plane.
As you can see, it was a lovely, sunny day in London, if a little cold because lovely, sunny days in London during the winter are always cold. I haven't been on a plane since our holiday to Venice last year, and I love flying. My sister isn't really a fan, but at least she doesn't throw up because of it anymore =V The flight to Iceland was a little under three hours, and I watched the new Planet of the Apes film on the way, which I thought was rather good. I also watched half of Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief but didn't get to see the rest (until the return trip). Dad unfortunately got the inevitable 'person in front of you who wants to put their seat back', but thankfully the leg room was quite generous even for economy class.
We got to Iceland at around 4.30pm and it was already going dark. At this time of year Iceland only has about five hours of full daylight per day in the south. We were in Reykjavik, where a full third of the population lives, the rest being scattered around the rest of the island in the more rural areas. After a brief difficulty in finding our guide we got to the coach and were on our way to the hotel.
The hotel that we were staying at for the first two nights was Hotel Ranga, the only four star resort in Iceland, and it shows. The rooms were lovely, and the food was amazing - I don't think I'll ever have wild goose soup like I had there. I found that the Icelandic people seem to like to put a lot of cream in their soup. We also had chicken, which Amy was happy with, and ice cream. There was a polar bear (I assume real), stuffed and dressed in a hat and scarf in the foyer.
Apparently they occasionally get polar bears in Iceland. They're usually shot.
Aaaanyway. On Saturday morning we headed out at 9am, when it was still pitch dark, to do a tour of the Golden Circle. Our driver, nicknamed 'the Eagle', was an absolute legend driving on the dangerously icy Iceland roads, and he first took us up to a small waterfall named Faxi, or Vatnsleysufoss. The snow was very compacted on the ground and very slippery, and two people fell over at this place - one, a woman named Barbara who fell quite hard on a wooden platform and scraped her lip - and my own father. He thankfully didn't hurt himself, but we were heading back to the coach after climbing up on a large pile of snow (because we felt like it), and his feet just slipped out from under him. He ended up flat on his back, and slid back and forwards a little on the ice before finally just lying there with his arms splayed out. I wasn't terribly worried, since he had the dorkiest grin on his face while he was lying there, and we got back on the coach to a chorus of laughs and a comment of it being a spectacular fall.
This is Faxi.
The second place we drove to was Gullfoss, which means 'Golden Falls', so named for the way that the light of sunset in summertime makes the spray coming up from the falls look golden. There was no golden spray while we were there, since it was easily below freezing and a lot of the waterfall was frozen solid. The way down to the lower area of the spot was a rather slippery wooden staircase, which I was absolutely terrified of going down (and my gloves got soaked because of clinging to the rail), but I made it, and took some pictures. I'll just put one of them here.
I'd love to go back in summer to see these places again when it's not all white. Not that it wasn't stunning when it was white, but I can imagine that the contrast would be quite startling.
After Gullfoss, we headed to Geysir, home of the famous geyser named.. well, Geysir, and his 'nephew', Strokkur. Geysir used to go up every few minutes to a height of over 70 feet, but it doesn't happen anymore. Strokkur, however, still pops off every few minutes to a height of around thirty feet, and it was very impressive to watch. And very noisy. The place, unfortunately, absolutely stank of sulphur, thanks to various minerals and such in the hot water, and it wasn't constantly smelly either, but it came in waves so you could never quite get used to it.
Still, it was very pretty to walk around and we saw a couple of people fall over, and several more almost fall, mostly because of being stupid and not looking where they were going. I'm pretty sure I saw the same man fall over twice. We stopped at this place for lunch also, at a place across the road from all the geysers and ice, and they had a shop. I had no idea that Iceland had managed to make such a joke of the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull.
I had a good laugh at some of these. I got a t-shirt with a spell of protection on it, and an adorable little plush seal that I simply couldn't resist because of how cross it looked. Really it was just too adorable. Everything in Iceland is expensive because the value of the Icelandic Kroner is rock bottom - no one wants it, not even Iceland - but the prices at this place were pretty much what you'd expect from a tourist attraction. They had a whole section of clothes made from real fur. I couldn't wear it, but man was it soft to pet - they had wolf, rabbit, fox, and even mink.
After we finished lunch, we were supposed to go to one final place, where a couple of volcanoes were. However, we weren't sure that we'd be able to go, and one way that we attempted was too icy for even our intrepid Eagle to attempt. While the guide was trying to get hold of the transport people to see if another route was clear, we stopped by a crater and had a poke around. It was very pretty, and it was there that I took my favourite picture of the holiday, which is this one.
Unfortunately, we were told that the road was simply too bad for us to even attempt to drive up there - we found on Sunday that later that day (the Saturday) another bus from a rival tour company had had a small accident on the same road that we had been driving on, and all other tours of the Golden Circle on all companies had been cancelled. The Eagle got a round of applause for that. So, we went back to the hotel, where I had time to try out the bath. The plug wasn't fitted correctly, which meant that the water drained out a little when the bath was full, but I didn't mind too much, and the water jets were so much fun. I don't take baths often, but I felt very fuzzy when I was done.
Amy was tired, since she hadn't been sleeping well at night (I was still getting maybe five hours of sleep a night at this point...) and she didn't want any dinner, but we had vegetable soup, again with lots of cream in it, and cod, and a dessert called skyr cake. Skyr is a product native to Iceland, and it's something between yoghurt and soft cheese. I liked it. The guy sat next to me - Gary - didn't like his. So I ate it.
On Sunday we left the hotel at ten, with all of our things, heading over to the second hotel on our itinerary - the Northern Light Inn. We didn't go straight there, we went on a little tour around Reykjavik first. A lot of the important buildings in the place seem to have been designed by the same person, and a lot of the small, older houses didn't look like they were suited for the climate at all but are apparently built to be quite warm. Reykjavik is very much a patchwork of different styles - something that the guide didn't lie but I found it to be very charming. We drove past the prime minister's offices, and there was no guard on the door, no CCTV, and the PM's car was outside - she had driven herself to work.
The first interesting place we stopped at was this building.
This is the building where, during the Cold War, Reagan and Gorbachev met. It was seen as the best place because of the open sea behind it, and the fact that at the time there were no other buildings anywhere nearby. We also visited the town hall, which had a huge table 3D map of Iceland, but something else caught my eye, and that was this.
I suspected what it was, but I asked the guide, and he went to have a look at the description for me before coming back to tell me that this was a thank you from dozens of people in Japan, to the Icelandic people, because after the tsunami of 2011, Iceland sent Japan warm clothing for the victims of the disaster. I also found then that Iceland had done the same for the UK, sending warm clothes over for the elderly during the bad winter that we had a couple of years ago. I loved Iceland a little more then.
After that, we went for lunch, and then went to the Blue Lagoon. I didn't take any pictures there, because they warned us not to take our cameras as the air is so salty it can corrode them. I will however pull a couple of pictures off Google to show you what it looked like.
Hopefully both of those work. As you can see it's outdoors, with proper changing facilities and so on. You're encouraged to shower before you go in, and the water itself is about 35 - 40 degrees centigrade (around 100F), and feels absolutely amazing. You can't see an inch into it, so if you drop anything in there you've lost it, and they have containers of this... the guide described it as 'sulphur mud' - basically the stuff that makes the water cloudy I think - and it's supposed to be very good for your skin. Naturally we tried it, and put some on our faces. It was tingly. Of course I didn't think about washing it off when I was putting it on, and the water didn't taste very nice, but not as bad as sea water. We stayed there for about an hour, and started getting very hopeful when the sky started to clear now and then. We hadn't seen the Aurora by this point, though we were pretty sure it had been there above the clouds at night, so we were hopeful that we'd see it on our last night.
Also at the lagoon I got talking to a couple of young women - Megan and Rhia - who were a little older than me. I tend to gravitate towards people of my own age on holidays so I hope they didn't find me annoying, but they were friendly and talkative and it was nice to have people to chat to. By this point we were also friendly with several other people on the trip - Phil and his wife Sue, Gary and his wife Jo, and Barbara and Angela (who we found, to our amazement, own a fancy dress shop in my town! I gave them my phone number in case they want someone to work, and hopefully I'll get a call. It would be nice). There was also Megan, Rhia, and their parents, and a few others who we could speak to but I can't remember any more names.
The one downside of the lagoon was that the minerals in the water play absolute havoc with your hair. I managed to get away with slathering it in conditioner once I got out, I think because my hair is short, but Amy is still suffering with a wire-brush effect that is like she's left hairspray in her hair. Hopefully it will eventually wash out. We had showers at the lagoon, then another shower when we got back to the hotel, and then we went and had dinner. I had some absolutely gorgeous lamb. It really was just beautiful. Mmm.
Sadly, although we waited past midnight, we didn't see the lights. Our last day more than made up for it.
For those who were leaving on a later flight on Monday, there was the option of a tour of the Reykjanes peninsula. We left at 9am, and the first place we went was to what looked like a small church and a house in the middle of nowhere. This was, in fact, the Icelandic president's house. There were no guards, and no CCTV, we could have actually walked up to the door and knocked if we'd wanted to.
After we stopped there for a few minutes, we were driven around to the side of the peninsula away from any buildings, and the scenery was absolutely stunning. We stopped for a little while by a lake called Kleifarvatn, which has been the setting for a crime novel by Icelandic writer Arnaldur Indriðason.
We drove on from there to some natural hot springs, and then through some lava fields outside of Grindvík. The lava had been there for over 1000 years, from activity when Iceland was first settled. We stopped in Grindvík for lunch, and then carried on. As we were leaving Grindvík, our guide for that day pointed out that there was a rock stood inside a storage shed, that hadn't been moved. She told us that this was because the rock belonged to the Huldufólk, that I will explain about at the end of this entry, and it couldn't be moved. We went on to a spot by the coast where the wind was so high it stole your breath if you tried to speak, and then on again to a shallow valley that would have been completely nondescript if you didn't know what it was - it is a place that marks where the ground is dropping as one tectonic plate moves under another. There was a small bridge over the valley, with the midpoint marked on it. On one side of the bridge you are standing on the Eurasian tectonic plate, and on the other you're standing on the American plate.
After we'd been here, we drove to the airport, and came back home. I watched the rest of Percy Jackson on the return trip, and nothing interesting happened.
I learned a great deal about Iceland in the short time that I was there. English is very widely spoken and very well spoken, the Icelandic people are wonderfully friendly and they have herds of fluffy, stocky Icelandic horses like we would have cows or sheep. I also learned that the majority of Icelandic people (around 70%) are descended from Norwegian men, and British/Irish women. Apparently what the Norwegians would do would be to set off for Iceland, stop off at Britain on the way, pick up some women and carry on. What was also interesting was that at least 500 Icelandic people living today have Native American blood. An explanation for this would seem to be that at least one Native American came back with the Scandinavians that discovered America, and in 1000 years there could easily be 500 descendants.
I had never had any idea that Iceland had so much folklore. What we heard a lot of were the Huldufólk, or Hidden People, who live in the lava rocks and are beautiful people who wear colourful clothes, they always have plenty of food and their homes are always warm. There are a lot of stories surrounding them, and one thing that is said is that if one of the Huldufólk ask you to come away with them, make them promise to bring you back, or you could be lost forever. Rocks that are thought to be gateways to where the Huldufólk live can't be moved, or a deal must be made with the Huldufólk to allow them time to move away before anything is done.
If you see one of them or do one of them a good deed, you will be lucky for the rest of your life, but if you do anything against the Huldufólk, you will have very bad luck.
A lot of fruit and vegetables are grown in Iceland, in huge greenhouses that glow like gold with the light coming from inside. Light pollution is so minimum that you can see towns and villages from the orange patches on the clouds at night. We were also told a lot about the volcanoes and the history of Iceland, which I loved, and I had a good talk with the guide on Sunday after lunch about where he learned English and how hard Icelandic was to learn. He said that it wasn't very hard, but he also told me that they have twenty-four different words for 'horse', and over one hundred words for 'snow'. We talked a bit about how Old English and Icelandic were so similar, and I mentioned that I'd love to learn it. He told me that Iceland takes in a lot of young foreign workers during the summer for the tourism industry, and on Monday I got a website from the guide we had then that I'm going to have a look at it and see if I can find any work.
Either way, I intend to go back to Iceland. It felt comfortable there, despite the cold. Our guide said that when we live on an island it's only natural to want to leave and travel, and I think he was definitely right.
If you got this far, well done. You can see the rest of my holiday photos here.
We went to my dad's on Thursday, to see a pantomime. I'm pretty sure that America doesn't have pantomimes, and I have to tell you that you are really missing out. It was absolutely hilarious. But I'm not here to write about the panto.
A final chapter to the laptop saga comes in here. On Thursday night I got a text off mum saying that someone had called about a Samsung product. It turned out to be Laskys. Dad called them for me in Heathrow on Friday morning, and I spoke to someone who finally got in touch with the system support team and worked out exactly what had gone wrong. I should have my refund by this Friday. Thank god for that.
We headed out to catch the bus to Heathrow in the morning on Friday, thankfully not horridly early but I hadn't managed to sleep much anyway. I was fine, though, since I'm used to working on little sleep, and we got to the airport pretty early and got checked in. Then, we had two hours to wait until the plane. Amy and I went for a nosy in the shops and I bought a keyring, because I'm a sucker for anything with the British flag on it, and when the gate opened we went straight there.
Here is our plane.
As you can see, it was a lovely, sunny day in London, if a little cold because lovely, sunny days in London during the winter are always cold. I haven't been on a plane since our holiday to Venice last year, and I love flying. My sister isn't really a fan, but at least she doesn't throw up because of it anymore =V The flight to Iceland was a little under three hours, and I watched the new Planet of the Apes film on the way, which I thought was rather good. I also watched half of Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief but didn't get to see the rest (until the return trip). Dad unfortunately got the inevitable 'person in front of you who wants to put their seat back', but thankfully the leg room was quite generous even for economy class.
We got to Iceland at around 4.30pm and it was already going dark. At this time of year Iceland only has about five hours of full daylight per day in the south. We were in Reykjavik, where a full third of the population lives, the rest being scattered around the rest of the island in the more rural areas. After a brief difficulty in finding our guide we got to the coach and were on our way to the hotel.
The hotel that we were staying at for the first two nights was Hotel Ranga, the only four star resort in Iceland, and it shows. The rooms were lovely, and the food was amazing - I don't think I'll ever have wild goose soup like I had there. I found that the Icelandic people seem to like to put a lot of cream in their soup. We also had chicken, which Amy was happy with, and ice cream. There was a polar bear (I assume real), stuffed and dressed in a hat and scarf in the foyer.
Apparently they occasionally get polar bears in Iceland. They're usually shot.
Aaaanyway. On Saturday morning we headed out at 9am, when it was still pitch dark, to do a tour of the Golden Circle. Our driver, nicknamed 'the Eagle', was an absolute legend driving on the dangerously icy Iceland roads, and he first took us up to a small waterfall named Faxi, or Vatnsleysufoss. The snow was very compacted on the ground and very slippery, and two people fell over at this place - one, a woman named Barbara who fell quite hard on a wooden platform and scraped her lip - and my own father. He thankfully didn't hurt himself, but we were heading back to the coach after climbing up on a large pile of snow (because we felt like it), and his feet just slipped out from under him. He ended up flat on his back, and slid back and forwards a little on the ice before finally just lying there with his arms splayed out. I wasn't terribly worried, since he had the dorkiest grin on his face while he was lying there, and we got back on the coach to a chorus of laughs and a comment of it being a spectacular fall.
This is Faxi.
The second place we drove to was Gullfoss, which means 'Golden Falls', so named for the way that the light of sunset in summertime makes the spray coming up from the falls look golden. There was no golden spray while we were there, since it was easily below freezing and a lot of the waterfall was frozen solid. The way down to the lower area of the spot was a rather slippery wooden staircase, which I was absolutely terrified of going down (and my gloves got soaked because of clinging to the rail), but I made it, and took some pictures. I'll just put one of them here.
I'd love to go back in summer to see these places again when it's not all white. Not that it wasn't stunning when it was white, but I can imagine that the contrast would be quite startling.
After Gullfoss, we headed to Geysir, home of the famous geyser named.. well, Geysir, and his 'nephew', Strokkur. Geysir used to go up every few minutes to a height of over 70 feet, but it doesn't happen anymore. Strokkur, however, still pops off every few minutes to a height of around thirty feet, and it was very impressive to watch. And very noisy. The place, unfortunately, absolutely stank of sulphur, thanks to various minerals and such in the hot water, and it wasn't constantly smelly either, but it came in waves so you could never quite get used to it.
Still, it was very pretty to walk around and we saw a couple of people fall over, and several more almost fall, mostly because of being stupid and not looking where they were going. I'm pretty sure I saw the same man fall over twice. We stopped at this place for lunch also, at a place across the road from all the geysers and ice, and they had a shop. I had no idea that Iceland had managed to make such a joke of the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull.
I had a good laugh at some of these. I got a t-shirt with a spell of protection on it, and an adorable little plush seal that I simply couldn't resist because of how cross it looked. Really it was just too adorable. Everything in Iceland is expensive because the value of the Icelandic Kroner is rock bottom - no one wants it, not even Iceland - but the prices at this place were pretty much what you'd expect from a tourist attraction. They had a whole section of clothes made from real fur. I couldn't wear it, but man was it soft to pet - they had wolf, rabbit, fox, and even mink.
After we finished lunch, we were supposed to go to one final place, where a couple of volcanoes were. However, we weren't sure that we'd be able to go, and one way that we attempted was too icy for even our intrepid Eagle to attempt. While the guide was trying to get hold of the transport people to see if another route was clear, we stopped by a crater and had a poke around. It was very pretty, and it was there that I took my favourite picture of the holiday, which is this one.
Unfortunately, we were told that the road was simply too bad for us to even attempt to drive up there - we found on Sunday that later that day (the Saturday) another bus from a rival tour company had had a small accident on the same road that we had been driving on, and all other tours of the Golden Circle on all companies had been cancelled. The Eagle got a round of applause for that. So, we went back to the hotel, where I had time to try out the bath. The plug wasn't fitted correctly, which meant that the water drained out a little when the bath was full, but I didn't mind too much, and the water jets were so much fun. I don't take baths often, but I felt very fuzzy when I was done.
Amy was tired, since she hadn't been sleeping well at night (I was still getting maybe five hours of sleep a night at this point...) and she didn't want any dinner, but we had vegetable soup, again with lots of cream in it, and cod, and a dessert called skyr cake. Skyr is a product native to Iceland, and it's something between yoghurt and soft cheese. I liked it. The guy sat next to me - Gary - didn't like his. So I ate it.
On Sunday we left the hotel at ten, with all of our things, heading over to the second hotel on our itinerary - the Northern Light Inn. We didn't go straight there, we went on a little tour around Reykjavik first. A lot of the important buildings in the place seem to have been designed by the same person, and a lot of the small, older houses didn't look like they were suited for the climate at all but are apparently built to be quite warm. Reykjavik is very much a patchwork of different styles - something that the guide didn't lie but I found it to be very charming. We drove past the prime minister's offices, and there was no guard on the door, no CCTV, and the PM's car was outside - she had driven herself to work.
The first interesting place we stopped at was this building.
This is the building where, during the Cold War, Reagan and Gorbachev met. It was seen as the best place because of the open sea behind it, and the fact that at the time there were no other buildings anywhere nearby. We also visited the town hall, which had a huge table 3D map of Iceland, but something else caught my eye, and that was this.
I suspected what it was, but I asked the guide, and he went to have a look at the description for me before coming back to tell me that this was a thank you from dozens of people in Japan, to the Icelandic people, because after the tsunami of 2011, Iceland sent Japan warm clothing for the victims of the disaster. I also found then that Iceland had done the same for the UK, sending warm clothes over for the elderly during the bad winter that we had a couple of years ago. I loved Iceland a little more then.
After that, we went for lunch, and then went to the Blue Lagoon. I didn't take any pictures there, because they warned us not to take our cameras as the air is so salty it can corrode them. I will however pull a couple of pictures off Google to show you what it looked like.
Hopefully both of those work. As you can see it's outdoors, with proper changing facilities and so on. You're encouraged to shower before you go in, and the water itself is about 35 - 40 degrees centigrade (around 100F), and feels absolutely amazing. You can't see an inch into it, so if you drop anything in there you've lost it, and they have containers of this... the guide described it as 'sulphur mud' - basically the stuff that makes the water cloudy I think - and it's supposed to be very good for your skin. Naturally we tried it, and put some on our faces. It was tingly. Of course I didn't think about washing it off when I was putting it on, and the water didn't taste very nice, but not as bad as sea water. We stayed there for about an hour, and started getting very hopeful when the sky started to clear now and then. We hadn't seen the Aurora by this point, though we were pretty sure it had been there above the clouds at night, so we were hopeful that we'd see it on our last night.
Also at the lagoon I got talking to a couple of young women - Megan and Rhia - who were a little older than me. I tend to gravitate towards people of my own age on holidays so I hope they didn't find me annoying, but they were friendly and talkative and it was nice to have people to chat to. By this point we were also friendly with several other people on the trip - Phil and his wife Sue, Gary and his wife Jo, and Barbara and Angela (who we found, to our amazement, own a fancy dress shop in my town! I gave them my phone number in case they want someone to work, and hopefully I'll get a call. It would be nice). There was also Megan, Rhia, and their parents, and a few others who we could speak to but I can't remember any more names.
The one downside of the lagoon was that the minerals in the water play absolute havoc with your hair. I managed to get away with slathering it in conditioner once I got out, I think because my hair is short, but Amy is still suffering with a wire-brush effect that is like she's left hairspray in her hair. Hopefully it will eventually wash out. We had showers at the lagoon, then another shower when we got back to the hotel, and then we went and had dinner. I had some absolutely gorgeous lamb. It really was just beautiful. Mmm.
Sadly, although we waited past midnight, we didn't see the lights. Our last day more than made up for it.
For those who were leaving on a later flight on Monday, there was the option of a tour of the Reykjanes peninsula. We left at 9am, and the first place we went was to what looked like a small church and a house in the middle of nowhere. This was, in fact, the Icelandic president's house. There were no guards, and no CCTV, we could have actually walked up to the door and knocked if we'd wanted to.
After we stopped there for a few minutes, we were driven around to the side of the peninsula away from any buildings, and the scenery was absolutely stunning. We stopped for a little while by a lake called Kleifarvatn, which has been the setting for a crime novel by Icelandic writer Arnaldur Indriðason.
We drove on from there to some natural hot springs, and then through some lava fields outside of Grindvík. The lava had been there for over 1000 years, from activity when Iceland was first settled. We stopped in Grindvík for lunch, and then carried on. As we were leaving Grindvík, our guide for that day pointed out that there was a rock stood inside a storage shed, that hadn't been moved. She told us that this was because the rock belonged to the Huldufólk, that I will explain about at the end of this entry, and it couldn't be moved. We went on to a spot by the coast where the wind was so high it stole your breath if you tried to speak, and then on again to a shallow valley that would have been completely nondescript if you didn't know what it was - it is a place that marks where the ground is dropping as one tectonic plate moves under another. There was a small bridge over the valley, with the midpoint marked on it. On one side of the bridge you are standing on the Eurasian tectonic plate, and on the other you're standing on the American plate.
After we'd been here, we drove to the airport, and came back home. I watched the rest of Percy Jackson on the return trip, and nothing interesting happened.
I learned a great deal about Iceland in the short time that I was there. English is very widely spoken and very well spoken, the Icelandic people are wonderfully friendly and they have herds of fluffy, stocky Icelandic horses like we would have cows or sheep. I also learned that the majority of Icelandic people (around 70%) are descended from Norwegian men, and British/Irish women. Apparently what the Norwegians would do would be to set off for Iceland, stop off at Britain on the way, pick up some women and carry on. What was also interesting was that at least 500 Icelandic people living today have Native American blood. An explanation for this would seem to be that at least one Native American came back with the Scandinavians that discovered America, and in 1000 years there could easily be 500 descendants.
I had never had any idea that Iceland had so much folklore. What we heard a lot of were the Huldufólk, or Hidden People, who live in the lava rocks and are beautiful people who wear colourful clothes, they always have plenty of food and their homes are always warm. There are a lot of stories surrounding them, and one thing that is said is that if one of the Huldufólk ask you to come away with them, make them promise to bring you back, or you could be lost forever. Rocks that are thought to be gateways to where the Huldufólk live can't be moved, or a deal must be made with the Huldufólk to allow them time to move away before anything is done.
If you see one of them or do one of them a good deed, you will be lucky for the rest of your life, but if you do anything against the Huldufólk, you will have very bad luck.
A lot of fruit and vegetables are grown in Iceland, in huge greenhouses that glow like gold with the light coming from inside. Light pollution is so minimum that you can see towns and villages from the orange patches on the clouds at night. We were also told a lot about the volcanoes and the history of Iceland, which I loved, and I had a good talk with the guide on Sunday after lunch about where he learned English and how hard Icelandic was to learn. He said that it wasn't very hard, but he also told me that they have twenty-four different words for 'horse', and over one hundred words for 'snow'. We talked a bit about how Old English and Icelandic were so similar, and I mentioned that I'd love to learn it. He told me that Iceland takes in a lot of young foreign workers during the summer for the tourism industry, and on Monday I got a website from the guide we had then that I'm going to have a look at it and see if I can find any work.
Either way, I intend to go back to Iceland. It felt comfortable there, despite the cold. Our guide said that when we live on an island it's only natural to want to leave and travel, and I think he was definitely right.
If you got this far, well done. You can see the rest of my holiday photos here.