Okay, the current comic at Scandinavia and the World (a comic in which anthropomorphized versions of various countries interact with each other in ways typical of each country) totally cracked me up: it's about the ubiquity of yogurt in Scandinavia.
Because, truly, I had a moment on my last day in Iceland where I was at the airport, looking around for something to take as snack on the plane, and I was in a shop and I looked at the rows and rows and rows of yogurt (and skyr and other yogurt-like products), and I had this brief but visceral moment of, NO! I can NOT eat any more YOGURT!
Tuesday, January 30, 2018
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
...því ég er kominn heim
...And now I'm in Iceland.
I know, I've become so predictable! So ridiculously predictable! When in doubt, I suppose just assume I'm traveling to Iceland.
But all this semester (after I also visited Iceland on my way to Scotland, in August/September) I've been longing for Iceland, always thinking, "Oh, if only I could be in Iceland..." And I have two weeks off between first and second semester, and it was very clear I really needed to take that time as an absolute, true break away from everything, so I could come back to second semester refreshed and ready to dive into it all again, after the exhaustion of first semester. And besides, you know, I'd been pining for Iceland. So Friday my last piece of coursework was handed in, Saturday I sat down to write all my friends in Iceland and book flights and make plans, I traveled on Tuesday, and here I am.
(I realized when I arrived in Reykavík last night that in total I'd taken: a bus to a train to a tram to a plane to another bus. If only I'd been picked up by car from the airport instead of taking the city bus, or if I'd had cause to get on a boat for some reason, then I'd have hit nearly every kind of standard transport in one day!)
Beautiful afternoon sun in Reykjavík:
I'm staying with my friend S. and his wife and their two little kids. It is so amazing to have this life in Iceland I can drop back into, these friends who enthusiastically invite me into their homes. S. keeps saying how happy he is that I chose to come and stay with them, and I keep saying how happy and grateful I am to be there.
The first part of the day we spent lazing around, eating breakfast and chatting. There are some renovations being done on their apartment building, so there was some banging and hammering happening somewhere in the background as we talked.
Then S. went into the kitchen and I heard him say to someone in Icelandic, "Do you want some coffee?" So I assumed his wife must be somewhere in the apartment, though I hadn't seen her.
Nope – I went into the kitchen and saw that one of the workmen doing the renovations was directly outside the kitchen window – the third-floor kitchen window – on a bit of scaffolding. That's who S. was talking to. And the worker was opening up the window from the outside, and S. was handing a steaming cup of coffee out into the cold to him. So S. and I stood there inside the kitchen and drank coffee and chatted with the worker standing outside the kitchen, perched in the air three floors off the ground, drinking coffee from a dainty cup.
I thought maybe they were friends, or at least knew each other a bit from the course of these renovations, but no – my friend asked the guy his name at some point in the conversation. It's just that S. is that friendly. It was so Icelandic: the kindness, the hospitality – and of course the coffee. Iceland runs on coffee.
Here's me by the ocean in Reykjavík at dusk, in the snow, happier than the happiest clam in the world:
Monday, January 15, 2018
Ceilidh-ing
I went to a ceilidh!
A ceilidh (pronounced "kay-lee") is a Scottish party centered around traditional dance and music. It's a very, very Scottish thing, so people have been telling me since my very first days here that I have to go to at least one. (Even the friendly bank employee who opened my bank account told me that...)
And then a great opportunity came up: the same friend in Stonehaven, who invited a couple of us from my master's course for Hogmanay (New Year's), invited the same two of us (both Americans) to come back again two weeks later for a ceilidh her running club was hosting as their big yearly fundraiser.
It was so much fun! I truly can't give adequate words to how much fun it was. Watching the dances, participating in the dances (only a little bit, though – unfortunately all the spinning makes me way too dizzy), chatting with everyone. People in Stonehaven have been so friendly and welcoming, both times I've been there. My friend who lives there told a bunch of her friends beforehand that they had to ask us to dance, but I'm sure they would have done it even without her prompting, because everyone is just so nice!
It makes me really glad, too, to see people still embracing and living their own traditions.
In addition to the dancing, there was also a ceremony of awards and prizes (since this was a running club event, so they recognized various people's achievements in running). And then, as a fundraiser, there was a bottle slide. A what? Two bottles of gin were set on the floor at the front of the room, and people rolled £1 coins towards them, and whoever landed their coin closest won the bottle. Hilarious, and apparently raises a lot of funds for the club, too!
After the ceilidh, I caught the next-to-last train back to Aberdeen, then hurried to catch the night bus that would take me back home, so I wouldn't have to walk the whole way (about an hour). But it turned out the night bus I got on was...the wrong night bus. (Even though it was the right route number, which I'd looked up beforehand.) So the driver of my wrong bus caught up to the right bus, and pulled up in front of it so I could run off of his bus and onto the other one.
Take away of the evening as a whole: Scottish people are so nice!
A ceilidh (pronounced "kay-lee") is a Scottish party centered around traditional dance and music. It's a very, very Scottish thing, so people have been telling me since my very first days here that I have to go to at least one. (Even the friendly bank employee who opened my bank account told me that...)
And then a great opportunity came up: the same friend in Stonehaven, who invited a couple of us from my master's course for Hogmanay (New Year's), invited the same two of us (both Americans) to come back again two weeks later for a ceilidh her running club was hosting as their big yearly fundraiser.
It was so much fun! I truly can't give adequate words to how much fun it was. Watching the dances, participating in the dances (only a little bit, though – unfortunately all the spinning makes me way too dizzy), chatting with everyone. People in Stonehaven have been so friendly and welcoming, both times I've been there. My friend who lives there told a bunch of her friends beforehand that they had to ask us to dance, but I'm sure they would have done it even without her prompting, because everyone is just so nice!
(Sorry, these are all horrendous, blurry cell phone photos, because I didn't think to bring my camera.)
When I first moved here to Aberdeen, four months ago now – it's hard to explain, but I often had this odd feeling that I just didn't feel very much like I was...in Scotland? Generic UK, yes, sure – the shops and the street signs and everything were different from what I was used to, and were clearly British. But much of the time I felt vaguely that I could be anywhere urban and British, because things around me didn't feel specifically, particularly Scottish.
Which is unfair, of course! What, do I expect everybody to act like a walking Scottish cliché all the time? But, I don't know, the other places I've been in Scotland have had such a specific atmosphere of their own – Edinburgh, the Highlands, the Western Isles. Aberdeen is nice, but I don't feel I've discovered its own specific culture yet. (This is probably the fault of spending most of my time at a university, which is very international – so I'm indeed not in a particularly Scottish context much of the time.)
Anyway, at that ceilidh in Stonehaven I felt more like I was really, truly in Scotland than at any other point so far. It wasn't just that there was Scottish music playing, and almost all the men were wearing kilts, and at half-time they served stovies and sticky toffee pudding. It was more that I was in a big room surrounded by Scottish folks, a community of friends hanging out together and just doing the stuff they like to do anyway (chatting, having a beer, dancing dances they all learned growing up). And, again, they were all so friendly and cheerful and welcoming. I really appreciate how international the university is (my 6 flatmates alone are from 5 different countries!), but when living in a country, it's nice to get a chance at least sometimes to be truly, deeply immersed in that country.
It makes me really glad, too, to see people still embracing and living their own traditions.
In addition to the dancing, there was also a ceremony of awards and prizes (since this was a running club event, so they recognized various people's achievements in running). And then, as a fundraiser, there was a bottle slide. A what? Two bottles of gin were set on the floor at the front of the room, and people rolled £1 coins towards them, and whoever landed their coin closest won the bottle. Hilarious, and apparently raises a lot of funds for the club, too!
After the ceilidh, I caught the next-to-last train back to Aberdeen, then hurried to catch the night bus that would take me back home, so I wouldn't have to walk the whole way (about an hour). But it turned out the night bus I got on was...the wrong night bus. (Even though it was the right route number, which I'd looked up beforehand.) So the driver of my wrong bus caught up to the right bus, and pulled up in front of it so I could run off of his bus and onto the other one.
Take away of the evening as a whole: Scottish people are so nice!
Burnieboozled
I do believe I may have found the greatest Scottish street name, out of some very stiff competition of great Scottish street names:
(This one had competition right there in the same neighborhood – it was directly next to Monymusk Terrace, as well as some quite normal-Scottish sounding names, like Craigiebuckler Avenue. A lot of street names here are named after other places in Scotland, which are generally long mash-ups of syllables that are never pronounced quite the way you'd think they would be...)
(This one had competition right there in the same neighborhood – it was directly next to Monymusk Terrace, as well as some quite normal-Scottish sounding names, like Craigiebuckler Avenue. A lot of street names here are named after other places in Scotland, which are generally long mash-ups of syllables that are never pronounced quite the way you'd think they would be...)
Monday, January 1, 2018
Great Balls of Fire! (...sorry, I couldn't resist)
Happy new year!
There's an idea I've heard somewhere or another, that how you spend your New Year's Eve and/or Day is indicative of the whole year to come. It's not the sort of thing I would usually think about, and I'm certainly not thinking about it in a predictive way (not like, "You must do X on New Year's Eve, otherwise your entire year is doomed to be Y").
But there's something nice about thinking of a particularly lovely New Year's as setting a precedent, starting out the year as you mean to go on. In this case, I was in a new (and beautiful place), experiencing a new-to-me (and very Scottish) tradition, staying with friends and also meeting new people. Those seem to me very much the sorts of things I'd wish for my coming year.
(Along with a WHOLE LOT of global, political and societal change...but let's not even start talking about that. About five minutes before midnight, my other, American friend and I caught ourselves talking passionately about everything that was wrong with 2017 and realized that, while true and real, bemoaning it wasn't how we wanted to spend the final minutes of our year.)
Hogmanay! That's the Scottish word for New Year's Eve.
One of my grad school classmates (coursemates?) invited me and another friend from our program to spend New Year's in her town, Stonehaven, not far from Aberdeen.
Stonehaven is a picturesque little harbor town, which happens to have a longstanding and internationally famous New Year's tradition: at the stroke of midnight, 40 or 50 adults walk up and down the main street, swinging over their heads ENORMOUS FIREBALLS. They make the fireballs themselves, some of the fireball swingers have participated for years or decades, and my friend and her husband are among them.
It was SO COOL. First there was a drumming group, then a bagpipe band (playing clearly-beloved Scottish songs that the entire crowd sang along with), then came the fireball swingers. My wimpy point-and-shoot camera can't begin to do it justice, but here they are, processing up and down the street, swinging fire:
Rounding out the evening there were fireworks, right under the full moon:
There's an idea I've heard somewhere or another, that how you spend your New Year's Eve and/or Day is indicative of the whole year to come. It's not the sort of thing I would usually think about, and I'm certainly not thinking about it in a predictive way (not like, "You must do X on New Year's Eve, otherwise your entire year is doomed to be Y").
But there's something nice about thinking of a particularly lovely New Year's as setting a precedent, starting out the year as you mean to go on. In this case, I was in a new (and beautiful place), experiencing a new-to-me (and very Scottish) tradition, staying with friends and also meeting new people. Those seem to me very much the sorts of things I'd wish for my coming year.
(Along with a WHOLE LOT of global, political and societal change...but let's not even start talking about that. About five minutes before midnight, my other, American friend and I caught ourselves talking passionately about everything that was wrong with 2017 and realized that, while true and real, bemoaning it wasn't how we wanted to spend the final minutes of our year.)
Hogmanay! That's the Scottish word for New Year's Eve.
One of my grad school classmates (coursemates?) invited me and another friend from our program to spend New Year's in her town, Stonehaven, not far from Aberdeen.
Stonehaven is a picturesque little harbor town, which happens to have a longstanding and internationally famous New Year's tradition: at the stroke of midnight, 40 or 50 adults walk up and down the main street, swinging over their heads ENORMOUS FIREBALLS. They make the fireballs themselves, some of the fireball swingers have participated for years or decades, and my friend and her husband are among them.
It was SO COOL. First there was a drumming group, then a bagpipe band (playing clearly-beloved Scottish songs that the entire crowd sang along with), then came the fireball swingers. My wimpy point-and-shoot camera can't begin to do it justice, but here they are, processing up and down the street, swinging fire:
The tradition has been going on for well over 100 years at least, and probably a lot longer than that. It appears to stem from ancient fire ceremonies of burning the old and bad and things that are worn out or broken, making way for the new.
The fireballs are huge, and heavy. At the end, once the material inside the wire frame of the fireballs has burned away, they fling them into the harbor.
Rounding out the evening there were fireworks, right under the full moon:
In the morning we got up for...a 5k run in the park. (I didn't run, just watched.) My friend and her husband are super intense runners. Like, ultramarathon, think-nothing-of-a-race-that-takes-32-hours-to-complete runners. So doing a 5k first thing after staying up late for New Year's really was a walk in the park for them.
Then, we were just in time to catch a glimpse of the "Nippy Dip," where masses of people run into the cold water of the harbor. (Like a polar bear plunge...except that Scotland is comparatively not so very cold...)
We also walked up the brae (hill), for a beautiful view over the town. (Stonehaven is also right next to Dunnottar Castle, where I went before classes started, but we didn't walk that far this time.) Here's cozy Stonehaven, and its beautiful bay:
We walked as far as the war memorial, perched atop Black Hill. The view from there is wonderful. Exactly, exactly my kind of landscape. I could look at this endlessly:
When we came back into town, we stopped by my friend's parents' house – I'd asked earlier if they do "first footing" and indeed they do! For good luck, the first person to enter your house in the new year should be a dark-haired man, bearing gifts. My friend's husband has dark hair, so he went into the house first, and gave his in-laws a bit of coal for their fire and some shortbread.
While we were there, my friend's mother gave us fruitcake (actually referred to as Christmas cake, but it was what I would think of as "fruitcake"), and my friend's father gave us a dram of whisky. It was a very Scottish New Year's!
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