Catching up

It's been a while, hasn't it?

So much has been happening in the past months that I never really got around to writing it all down. Time to catch up and bring you up to speed.

First things first, you might have noticed that we are still in Iceland. We have decided to stay for now, but have moved from rural Hveragerði to metropolitan (cough) Garðabær, a neighbouring municipality of Reykjavik. With geekdom grossly underrepresented in rural Iceland, Frankenspouse wasn't finding enough like-minded people to play with and asked to move to the capital area. Three months' worth of searching, contacting potential landlords, sweating and expecting the worst later, we found our new place in the new neighbourhood Urriðaholt, overlooking a little lake, ridiculously overpriced of course, but very scenic.

For me, that means commuting to work, 45 km over a mountain pass by an active volcano with interesting weather conditions. On a good day, the drive is easy and relaxing through beautiful scenery, moss-covered lava fields, steaming mountains and very little traffic. On days with less than stellar weather, it implies crawling through dense fog with visibility of something like 15 meters. On those poor-visibility days, I'm so pumped with adrenaline by the time I get to work, I'm rather short-fused and need to calm my nerves with sugar before facing the happy, excited masses. None of this is matters right now though. Fríða, my little Honda Civic committed suicide by means of a broken alternator and our other car is in the shop for a broken gearbox. Only the 3rd and 6th gear were working in the end, which made driving over the mountain an interesting experience, to say the least. So now I'm condemned to using public transport, which, outside the capital area, is tedious and takes forever, but at least gives me a chance to catch up on my reading.

Last week, I went on a 4-day tour with one of the Icelandic guides that return each summer for a few tours. It was nothing short of a blast and I had my first shot at being in charge of the horse list. This means it was my job to match horses and riders, as well as to make sure all horses were getting enough rest and riders were neither overmatched or bored. Sounds trivial? You try it. It's basically an enormous puzzle that you solve several times a day, then throw all the pieces in the air and try to put them together in a completely new and different way, so that people don't always end up riding the same horse.

One of the highlights of the last few months was definitely Frankenspouse's Christmas gift to me, a tour into the lava chamber of a volcano. Þrínúkagígur (let's say it all together: Three-nookah-geeyur) is an inactive volcano close to Reykjavík. It is the only (known) crater in the world that didn't collapse with the volcano's last eruption or filled up with lava, allowing people to visit the actual empty lava chamber. We found ourselves in a huge, cathedral-like hall with beautiful, multi-coloured walls. The colours are due to different mineral deposits and evoke the feeling of being inside a ginormous piece of art. It is an incredibly beautiful and raw place, this lava chamber, one that makes you want to lie one your back and stare at the walls for hours, trying to grasp what happened here. You'll be able to follow the path the fire took with your eyes, you'll see where it burned the hottest, you'll see where the volcano's lava chamber was touching another, much older volcano's lava chamber, creating a completely different structure in the rocks. It's one of the places that make you feel small and irrelevant, yet giddy with excitement at how cool this planet is. It was a huge privilege to see this and if it wasn't so expensive, I'd go back every week, staring at the insides of Earth's womb like a kid at a Christmas tree.