Pictures from the East

I left a bit of my heart in Borgarfjörður eystri. Here are pictures!

ÍSLAND: Borgarfjörður Days

Pictures from the North

Pictures from northern Iceland: Dalvík (a tiny town I only meant to pass through, but was so charmed I stayed several extra days), Grímsey (a beautiful little island directly on the Arctic Circle), Akureyri (a lovely small town that's in fact Iceland's second largest) and Myvatn (an area with all the cool geothermal stuff: hot springs, boiling mud, volcanic craters, old lava fields...)

ÍSLAND: North

In Which Iceland Is Literally a Village

I arrived here in Borgarfjörður eystri, a truly tiny village (population about 100, though the numbers cited vary) tucked away inside a fjord accessible only by a steep, winding road around a mountain, literally the very furthest point you can drive from Reykjavík... and ran into someone I know.

Yes, in this country where there are only five people total that I can count as "friends" by even the most generous definition of the word (two Couchsurfing acquaintances from three years ago plus three festival acquaintances from earlier this month) – I walked into the town's only bar and saw someone I know!

(I suppose it shouldn't really have come as a surprise, since I came here for a wonderful music festival called Bræðslan, which was recommended to me by this friend I made at the Rauðasandur Festival, so it really could have occurred to me that if he likes this festival enough to recommend it, he'd likely be coming too. Still, though.)

So: I came here expecting to spend another string of solitary days mostly at the fringes of things, and instead on my very first evening I ended up being one of the last five people who stayed up talking and playing a silly card game, and closing down the bar/restaurant/concert venue at 5 a.m. (Bars in Iceland are supposed to close at 1 a.m., so as these guys pointed out to me, it helps to know the owners!)

Life is good in Borgarfjörður eystri.

Tiny Town, Iceland

One of the things I'm coming to love about Iceland is how most of it is these tiny, tiny, tiny towns tucked away in a fjord only accessible by a twisty dirt road and at least an hour away from the next proper town... and yet they each seem to have just enough of everything you need.

Each one has its gas station, a small grocery store, at least one restaurant/café where folks hang out, and of course the all-important community center for cultural events, which can be a big, fancy complex in a big town, or in a small town it might be a simple hall that also doubles as the village school.

And with these just-enough resources in hand, Icelanders nonchalantly set about putting together concerts, festivals, exhibitions and all manner of creative things. Because if there's one thing an Icelander seems to be constitutionally incapable of, it's being not creative.

As an example, here's "downtown" on Grímsey island: The sole restaurant (surprisingly good), a tiny supermarket and an even tinier gas station that's basically just a shed with a pump out front. An Icelandic town pared down to the essentials:

Other things I love: Cozy cafés run on a standard model of serve-your-own soup-and-bread plus serve-your-own coffee-or-tea. A very relaxed set-up, and most places are stunningly chill about a traveler coming and lingering over a cup of coffee to use the wi-fi for a while.

Here's my absolute favorite café so far, a place called Gísli Eiríkur Helgi (named after three brothers from an old legend) in the town of Dalvík in northern Iceland. I also watched a couple World Cup games here, in a back room with an amusing mixed crowd of Icelanders and Germans:

(They made me a vegetarian option! Those folks are awesome.)

And of course I love the nature, the nature, the nature. Fjords and mountains, lava fields and hot springs and steam rising out of the ground. I'll try to put some more pictures together soon.

But meanwhile, speaking of paring life down to the essentials...

As for me? Give me a cup of coffee (one of those twin fuels of Iceland! gas for the cars and coffee for the people, both going non-stop at all hours) and a place to plug in the computer (because, yes, I'm doing this weird combined kind of travel where I'm partly hiking in the mountains, but partly sitting in cafés writing and stuff) and, hey, how about a view of the fjord to one side and a band warming up for tonight's concert on the other?

In other words, greetings from Borgarfjörður eystri, in the East Fjords, in the days just before this town of 100 or so residents welcomes thousands of guests for a music festival.

Rauðasandur – the Red Sand Festival

Rauðasandur! A little music festival in a remote bit of the West Fjords of Iceland, that I'd been dreaming about for at least two years. But planning a trip to Iceland just to go to one festival would be crazy.

But if you happen to be in Iceland anyway...

Trying to figure out how to get to the festival (it's so remote that buses don't run there) was a lesson in learning to be as last-minute as an Icelander – not my natural mode, to say the least. I don't think I've ever met a group as categorically last-minute in their life planning as the Icelandic people! (One Icelander I talked to linked this to their catastrophic financial crash of a few years ago – Icelanders are amazing at coming together to help each other after a crisis, she said, but not so good at sparing a thought for how to avert the crisis in the first place.)

Nonetheless, by some miracle of good luck, I managed to land a ride north to the festival from Reykjavík with a laconic guy named Þórður (pronounced Thor-thur) – to me, he seemed the epitome of the old Icelandic fisherman type – quiet and implacable, but kind-hearted in that Icelandic way where they don't even notice that what they're doing is above and beyond – like stopping to help a stranded tourist whose rental car had broken down in the rain in a remote fjord. Also in the same car were Arndís (bizarrely, it's pronounced more like "Ard-nis") and her boyfriend Koosha. The two of them were fantastically open and fun (Arndís may be the least Icelandic Icelander I've met, in that respect!) and they ended up being my constant companions through the weekend. The music at the festival was enjoyable and all, but the real magic was in the friendships forged in just those four days.

The location for Rauðasandur (literally "Red Sand") is a stunning red-sand beach at the foot of a steep cliff exposed directly to the Atlantic and all the wild weather that entails. Of the festival's three nights, we actually spent two in nearby (by which I mean a 40-minute drive away) Patreksfjörður, which is more sheltered, inside a fjord. In fact, I was woken up on Saturday by Arndís shaking me and saying we had to break camp immediately and move back to Patreksfjörður, because a storm was coming in. The wind was so strong, it bent two of the poles of my tent as we were taking it down! I've never woken up, taken down a tent and packed up all my belongings faster.

Rauðasandur: Some kind of magical mix of stunning location (seriously, just the skies over the sea at Rauðasandur I could try forever to describe) + a whimsical sampler of Icelandic music, from electronic to folk to reggae and everything in between + friendships forged in the enjoyable kind of "adversity," the kind that involves rolling with the weather-changing punches and having all the more fun for it. 

I could write pages and pages and pages about the experience that was Rauðasandur, but I'll let the pictures tell the story:

ÍSLAND: Rauðasandur

The Great Hiatus Begins

Hello there, world. It's been a while! I no longer have the slightest idea how to summarize the last half year of my life. Let's try bullet points:

• In December, with three weeks' notice, my main translation client – the one that formed the backbone of my income for the last six years – announces it's axing its English-language offerings and no longer needs freelancers as of January 1. Merry Christmas!

• Cue panic and existential angst.

• The months January–June: Various projects for other clients, periodic attempts to think about "what comes next," more panic and angst, existential questioning of whether I want to keep doing what I'm doing or whether this might be an opportunity to try something new, gradually coalescing plans to take a serious break from working to clear my head before even trying to sort out the future. Alarming realization that I haven't taken a true, complete vacation – the kind where I don't bring my laptop along and work at least part of the time – in...actually, I've lost track of how long. People ask about my specific plans for said work break, to which I tend to say, I don't know! I don't know! Maybe Iceland??

• While also seeing various friends visiting from out of town, finishing up some last paid work, trying to complete a 50-page novel excerpt in time for a submissions deadline, helping a sick friend, having root canal myself, getting my apartment ready to sublet for the summer and assembling all the camping gear I never got around to buying in eight years in Germany, I finally book a flight to Iceland. It's open-ended. No set return date, just two weddings I know I need to be back in Germany for at the end of the summer. It's terrifying, but good.

• Arrival in Reykjavík with naïve dreams of instantly ending up hanging out with all my favorite musicians, because, come on, it's Iceland. It's like a village, but one in which everyone is mind-bogglingly talented.

• Reality, instead, is a very solitary first week spent frantically revising my novel excerpt, barely interacting with other human beings, working all day and all evening and then looking up to find it's almost midnight, even though it looks like 6 p.m., because this is Iceland in summer. (I do see one of my very favorite musicians on the street, just pushing her baby carriage along and chatting with a friend, and I panic and go the other way, because I don't want to be a creepy fan.)

• Novel excerpt DONE. Three (3!) concerts by favorite Icelandic musicians ATTENDED. Ride to extremely remote music festival FOUND. The great adventure BEGINS.

Here are a few pictures of the Reykjavík days; pictures of the Rauðasandur Festival will be coming soon.

ÍSLAND: Reykjavík Days

Männertag

Today is "Christihimmelfahrt" in Germany – in English, Ascension Day.

A day that I can only assume is, in other countries of the Christian world, a solemn and important religious holiday, in Germany somehow has morphed into... "Männertag" ("Men's Day").

And what do men want to do, apparently, on a day devoted to them?

Drink, of course!

The standard sight on Männertag is a group of men wandering through the countryside, pulling a child's wagon repurposed as a conveyance for all the beer they've brought along, and getting roaringly drunk. Germany doesn't even have a Father's Day – it all gets folded into this, "Men's Day."

Today around 11 a.m., I was walking to the office (despite it being a public holiday, because the freelancer never sleeps...though the freelancer may, I admit, sleep in) and passed one of those old Berliner dive bars that's managed to keep a foothold here despite the terrifying pace of gentrification in my neighborhood.

Being an old Berliner dive bar, and today being Männertag, it was packed with people drinking and singing at the top of their lungs the song "Viva Colonia," the city of Cologne's anthem of drinking and good times; I associate the song with the Carnival season and my time living in the Rhineland area, but apparently anyone in Germany can sing it when they're drinking. (Sample lyrics: "We love our dear God and we're always thirsty!")

Got to the office and laughed with my French colleagues about Männertag; one of them said, Oh, so that's why this morning I saw an otherwise normal-looking guy standing around on the street with a beer in the middle of the morning.

Berlin ist ein Dorf

Here's how small Berlin – or at least the expat/journalist/fellowship-recipient community in Berlin – can be:

I'm looking to sublet my spot in my office share, so I wrote a post to an English-speaking academics' listserv and got a bunch of responses. The first guy to actually make a specific appointment and show up to look at the office (let's call him "S.") was a journalist, but someone I don't know.

But he showed up with a friend of his... who I know! We'll call her E.; we met through friends a few months ago and she even came to my Chanukah party, but that was just before she had a baby, so she understandably dropped off the radar for a while. We were both excited and pleased to have stumbled across each other again.

We tried to explain to S., the journalist, how we knew each other – we were both at a dinner at our mutual friend J.'s house... except in truth I don't even know J. all that well, it's more that she's a friend of my friend R., and R. had invited me along...

"Oh, wait," S. said. "Is that the R. who dated P.? I know P. Through journalist stuff."

Yes. It circled all the way back around.

"Berlin ist ein Dorf," as the saying goes – Berlin is a village.

Spring Ragbag – A Few Culture Notes

Miscellaneous observations each too small to need their own post:


• Helping a friend (German) and her boyfriend (Dutch) move, I was helping the boyfriend get all the boxes optimally organized inside the moving van – and speaking English together rather than German, because he lived in England for years and his English is flawless – when he looked at one box and asked, baffled, "Why is it bad?"

We looked at the box he was indicating, and both realized the word written on it was indeed "Bad" ...as in "bathroom," in German.

Such fun to be had with that particular false cognate! Like a bathroom fixtures store near me with a huge sign that reads "BAD IDEEN" – looks like it means "bad ideas," but actually just translates to "ideas for the bathroom."

I similarly snorted over a beer advertisement in the U-Bahn at Alexanderplatz reading, "Die Nacht Wird Hell" – it means "the night will be bright" or "the night grows bright," but it kind of looks like it's saying the night will be hell.


• Some friends recently threw a baby shower for a friend who's about to have a baby (all involved were North Americans). A couple days before it, I was walking with a friend (French) and her boyfriend (German), and the French friend and I were laughing about how you would normally never have a baby shower in Germany; Germans are superstitious about doing anything ahead of the fact, and won't even wish each other happy birthday a day early because it's "bad luck."

At this point, her German boyfriend broke in to ask who the baby shower we were talking about was for; when told who it was (a mutual friend whose due date is later this month), he said in honest bafflement, "Aber sie hat noch kein Baby." ("But she doesn't have a baby yet.")

And that right there, my friends, is why you will never attend a German baby shower.


• I met the same friends (the French and German couple) at an Italian-style café (or trattoria? or osteria? I'm trying, but I honestly can't sort out all the different Italian terms for eating establishments!) near where they live.

My German friend pointed out that this place was run mostly in the Italian style, with the emphasis  on the big deli display case and the shelves of food products, but with concessions to German-style café culture, in the form of more table seating. In Italy, the focus would be almost entirely on the deli case and the delicacies within; in Germany the focus is on the comfortable space to sit and linger; so this place had a bit of both.

And I realized, hey, that's true – as much as we Americans might have this image of Italians/French/southern-Europeans-in-general lingering over coffees on sidewalk cafés, in my actual experience, people in Italy tend to order a shot of espresso, knock it back while standing at the bar, then continue on their way. This seems to be true in France as well (I remember walking along a street in Paris and seeing people leaving a café with tiny espresso-sized to-go cups, which is just adorable) and it also ties in with the Spanish (and Venetian) culture of standing around ordering drinks-that-also-come-with-small-dishes-of-tapas, rather than sitting down for a meal and then also ordering a drink with it.

That hanging-out-over-coffee culture that I appreciate so much here (no one will ever rush you out or give you the bill as a subtle hint to leave; it's completely acceptable to hang out, chatting over coffee, for hours, because the whole point of a café is that it's somewhere you go to chat and hang out) and which I think of as being a "European" thing – perhaps it's not actually a European thing but a German thing, at least in the form in which I know it. (Though, yes, Italy is absolutely the source of the "slow foods" movement, of the idea of placing value on taking time over good food and good company – so maybe that philosophy applies in some contexts and not others?)

At any rate, my German friend, at least, says we have Austria to thank for the "hanging out over coffee" culture – that's Viennese culture, coffeehouse culture, from a tradition of sitting and discussing philosophy. It's not often I can think of anything I'm specifically grateful to Austria for, so, score one for Austria!


• A couple weekends ago, I went out on a bike ride in the countryside east of Berlin for an afternoon, and on the train back at the end of the day, ended up talking with a Dutch guy who's living in Berlin to build up his start-up company (what else!) and was similarly exploring the countryside. It was fun hearing his perspective as someone who's newly in Germany and only just discovering the cultural differences, and he seemed intrigued to hear my perspective as someone who's been here for a number of years and could confirm or refute some of the things he'd been wondering.

One thing we got to talking about is how environmentally minded Germans are, but often in these very small, obsessive, detail-oriented ways, rather than in a big-picture way. He laughed about the little sign next to the train door that says "on cold days, please close the doors" and joked that he could totally see Germans doing that, making a point of going over and pressing the button to close the doors.

I added the example of, "You don't need this light on, do you?" – Yes, Germans really do sit around in the semi-dark a lot of the time, because they seem to think turning off one lightbulb makes a big difference in their overall electricity consumption.

This is a hard one for me, because I love how much Germans think about the environment. I love that a basic level of environmentalism is simply a given, a building block of the culture, taken for granted. Of course we recycle, and save energy when we can, and ride bicycles and want more green energy. That attitude is one of the biggest things that drew me to this country in the first place.

But at the same time, people are then so very pleased with themselves, patting themselves on the back for doing even the smallest things. I get the sense that people who recycle and turn off the lights when they don't need them think that's it, they're done now – they're the good guys, the environmentalists, they've done their bit to "save the planet" and now they don't have to think about it any further.

And turning off the lights is well and good, but as long as I'm still living in a modern apartment with electricity and gas heating and own a computer and a cell phone and other gadgets and fly in planes and buy really anything at all in plastic packaging (even if I'm going to recycle it afterward) and take hot showers every day, I have no illusions about the overall environmental balance of my existence. And I think Germans tend to forget that, while they're so caught up in the small, obsessive details.


• To counter that with an example of something cool about Germany: the very idea of a "Kur."

That's "cure," I suppose, in the old-fashioned sense of "taking the cure" (picture olden-days posh British people going to Bath for the winter...) Do we even have a word for this in modern day English?

I doubt it, because we don't even really have the concept – it's preventive medicine (gasp!), and the idea is that you go away and take care of your health before a problem becomes acute. A German guy I know (early 50's, perfectly healthy) just went on a week-long "Kur" sponsored by his employer, where they did lots of exercise and outdoorsy stuff, and learned about good nutrition, and even had a couple sessions with a psychologist, just as a routine part of the program. It's then followed up by a once-a-week exercise course once they're back in Berlin.

It's a pilot program sponsored by a retirement pension scheme (either the company's scheme, or the government's, or a mix of both, I wasn't entirely clear on that) and I can only assume the idea is that if you help your employees learn to take care of their health now, then they're less like to end up on long-term sick leave or taking early retirement a few years down the line because of problems that could have been preventable.

Can you imagine that in the US? Where the overarching work culture seems to be: Work until you drop, work no matter how sick you are and no matter how long working-while-sick ends up extending your illness, and by the way you'll be grateful for those measly two weeks of vacation we allow you a year?


• Also. Based on my own rigorous and empirical research, I now present to you the only proven way to not just endure but in fact enjoy a 15-minute wait on line at the grocery store check-out (because Germans panic and rush to the stores to stock up whenever there's a public holiday coming up and the stores are going to be closed for a day):

mp3 player cued up with old episodes of Cabin Pressure. Seriously, guys, the best and most cleverly written radio comedy out there! I could listen to that thing on endless repeat. (And, basically, do.)

When German Is Too Literal

I just learned that the German word for "morgue" is "Leichenschauhaus." It literally means "corpse show house."

Or you can say "Leichenhalle" or "Leichenhaus" ("corpse hall" and "corpse house"). "Leichenkeller" ("corpse basement") is also an option.

My dear German language. I love your literal-mindedness! But sometimes... it's a bit much.