Enjablog

We made a trip to visit Sune’s parents in the rural mainland of Denmark. Along the way, we passed Middelfart, the town where Ian’s grandmother grew up. We didn’t stop, but I was able to get a picture of the sign on our way past.

We made it to Sune’s parents’ in time for lunch: a mix of traditional Danish sandwich makings, new potatoes dug up that morning, and scrambled eggs.

From there, we left for an afternoon in Ribe. This was another town dating back to the Viking Age. We visited the Cathedral, went up the tower to see the town, and also saw the totem pole marking the flood lines from the many times the city had flooded. Ribe also has a viking museum, but we ended up saving that for next time since we would have had to rush through to see everything before they closed.

We stopped in a cafe for some coffee (hot chocolate for me!) and people-watching. The cafe was in a really old building with doorways that have long since settled, so I took some pictures inside before picking a table outside to enjoy the weather.

When we got back, we had an Independence Day snack. Nanna got out the American flag from Cassia and Sune’s wedding (they merged 3 nationalities and many more languages at their wedding) and we had fresh bruschetta and champagne.

Nanna cooked up a wonderful meal for us for dinner: roast beef, ham, duck, 2 different kinds of potatoes, asparagus, cauliflower, and fresh breads. We discussed what we saw in Ribe (though, I’m sure she’s been there dozens of times) and our plans for the next day. For dessert, we had fruit and ymer, a Danish soured milk product that is a cross between yogurt and buttermilk. Nice, refeshing end to a filling meal.

After dinner, I took a walk around Skodborg. I brought some carrots with me to feed the neighbor’s horses, saving some for when I finished my walk as well. I wandered up the block trying to get a better view of the windmills. I ended up following the sunset until I got out to a main road and figured that was as much as there was to see in that direction.

I turned back and took pictures of the interesting flowers people had in their gardens. I also really enjoyed the variety in the houses. A lot of the houses had a year written on the side indicating when it was built. Most noteworthy: there were no cookie cutter, model homes here!

I walked up to the school, passing the grocery store, the building formerly serving as the train station, and the cellphone/internet place. The sports fields by the school had a gate closed and locked in front of them… but no fence. So if you wanted to use the field, you could just walk around.

I walked back to finish spoiling the horses and they ran right up expectantly. One of them even neighed loud enough when he saw me that Ian heard him from inside the house.

As I was heading inside, I heard some rustling in the gravel near me. I looked around… and waited… and finally saw these little frogs crossing the path. Cute, but the horse seemed uninterested. So, finally headed in for the night.

We spent a day in Roskilde, a city dating back to the Viking Age. The Roskilde Festival was in town this weekend, but was sold out, and, kinda wasn’t where my interests were.

We visited the Roskilde Cathedral, built in the 12th and 13th centuries. Royal tombs spanning over a millennium are buried here. The architecture here is very interesting because royalty was buried here over many centuries, so as additional wings were needed, they were built and decorated in the style of the time, incorporating Gothic and Romanesque features.

The Viking Ship Museum, Vikingeskibsmuseet, was one of my favorite museums to visit. We started in the reconstruction exhibit, where they show how they resurrected the ships that were deliberately sunk in the waterway to prevent enemy attack by sea. These ships were later replicated and on display in the harbor.

In the outdoor area, they had displays about Viking ship design and construction, explaining the Nordic clinker-building method. They also had a row of trees, representing each type that might have been used for shipbuilding. The harbor had about a dozen replicas on display on the water. And they also had some tours available where you actually go out on a viking ship that the participants have to row.

Inside the main museum building, they had the original ships that were resurrected from the fjord and exhibits on the history of war at sea. They also had an exhibit on Havingsten fra Glendalough (Sea Stallion), a 30-m warship found in the fjord. The ship was replicated and set out on a 45-day journey from Roskilde to Dublin, documented by Timewatch. The purpose was to “test and document the seaworthiness, speed and manoeuvrability of the ship on the rough open sea and in coastal waters with treacherous currents.”

We got back pretty late in the afternoon, so had some down time before heading to Nyhavn (New Harbor) in downtown Copenhagen to see some of the nightlife.

Our first day back in Copenhagen, Ian was finally able to get to a gym. While he, Cassia, and Julia were off doing their thing, I went for a run to explore the city. I didn’t have my camera on me but I did record my route afterward:

I got a little turned around because I turned early on one street to avoid construction, and then turned the wrong way when I got back to the cross street I meant to turn on. Fortunately, I brought my map with me! I would’ve been hosed if I had relied on Ian and my algorithm for getting back (go down [street we can't pronounce, a.k.a. "Main St"], turn right at [other street we can't pronounce, a.k.a. "7-Eleven St"]). Oh, and there were three 7-Elevens that I saw on Main St. Not sure how many more there were if I had explored in the other direction.

Melissa (Ian’s cousin) & Fredrick arrived soon after everyone got back and cleaned up. They were in town for the day on their way to their week-long travels across Europe. We all headed out for lunch at Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus.

After lunch, Ian and I headed back to do some laundry and take naps while everyone else went out to do some shopping. Front-loading washing machines are fantastic. Definitely want a front-loader when I need to buy one.

We spent the evening in Tivoli doing some site-seeing and watching the free Friday night concert (Fredagsrock). Dicte, a favorite of Sune’s, was playing that night.

We spent our last morning in Iceland visiting the Cathedral that you can see from across the city.  Looked around inside, went up in the tower for an overhead view of the city, and then out front to the statue of Leif Erikson.

It started to rain, so we took a car tour of the Southwestern coast. 

We made a stop to feed Julia and were attacked by some birds while we hung around outside and eventually just took cover in the car until we were all ready to go.

Made it to the airport with a slight delay in the flight and were back in Copenhagen that night.  Had Danish hot dogs for dinner, which had toppings similar to Icelandic toppings, plus pickles, but the hot dog were really narrow, and was about twice as long as the bun.

After finding out it would take 90 minutes to drive to a town that could get us on a 4-hour, ~15km, bus ride to get to a location that would allow us to hike 2 hours to get close-ish to Eyjafjallajökull (which is covered by a glacier, so you can’t see much anyway), we decided we should do something else the next day. Oh, and it’d be super expensive.

Reykjadalur was recommended to us by the night clerk at the hotel. He told us it was a favorite of locals, so we gave it a try. We hiked out about an hour and got to a hot river where we could take a dip. Over the years, people have piled rocks strategically along the river to create dams where little pools could form, decreasing in temperature moving downstream.

Ian and I wandered around a bit and found where 2 rivers interesected to feed the stream. One was a hot river and one was cold, so you could stand in the pool with your feet in water differing by ~60 degrees.

When we got back to town, we decided this was a good day to try some Icelandic hotdogs. After some effort, we were able to find Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur, the most popular eatery in Iceland.

The casing was much more elastic than American hotdogs, more like sausage casings, but were similar in flavor to hotdogs. The big difference was the toppings available. They had ketchup, sweet mustard, fried onion, raw onion and remolaði, a mayonnaise-based sauce with sweet relish.

After hotdogs, the group split up for the afternoon. Cassia, Sune, and Julia went shopping in search of an elusive Icelandic sweater. I headed over to the National Museum for free Wednesdays! And Ian got some quiet time back at the hotel.

The National Museum was mostly history of Icelandic culture. Each time period had a main display that showed an artifact that played a significant role in their history. Since I had only an hour before they closed, the people at the info desk recommended I focus on those and look more in depth at the exhibits for the time periods around the items that caught my interest. Definitely worked as a good strategy for me.

After the museum, I finished up my postcards and headed into downtown Reykjavik to get them mailed off. The people at the post office were very friendly and told me a bit about their postal system. They have teams of carriers for each region, typically delivering mail within 3 days of send date. The rural carriers deliver mostly to intersections, so all residents on a rural road would have to go to the junction to collect their mail.  Occasionally, routes will be closed due to weather, but most of the year, they are able to access the populated areas.

The international stamps I bought for outside the EU were pretty cute too. I got frogs and waterfalls — and they were old-timey where you have to moisten the stamp before it will adhere.  I then got into a linguistics discussion with the other teller and a French woman until the post office closed.

I spent the next hour slowly making my way back to the hotel, taking pictures of pretty much anything that caught my interest.  Some of the buildings and statues only had placards in Icelandic, so I looked them up later.

I made a stop in the Kraun Design Gallery because they had a picture of yarn outside and I wanted to know what it was.  They had a photo exhibit of Iceland’s role in WWII, a yarn exhibit that was closed for the day, and a super-expensive arty store.

After that, met up with everyone else to have dinner at Fish Market.  The food was fantastic, but the visit was a bit odd.  We didn’t have a reservation, so they said that we could have a table, but would have to be done in an hour and a half for a reservation that was scheduled.  We agreed to the terms, were seated, and put our orders in.  We got our appetizers relatively quickly, but then waited an hour before our waitress came to tell us our entrees were getting started.  This was about 10 minutes before our deadline, but the restaurant was still relatively empty.    We explained the agreement to the waitress who was completely uninterested.  The hostess eventually came out and let us know that we were not going to be held to the deadline.

We spent the day at Landmannalaugar. There were hot springs and interesting landscapes, but more bugs! Again, they didn’t do anything to us, but they kept swarming our faces and getting in our ears and noses.

We had dinner at Caruso, an Italian place, following a recommendation in the tour book. I had salted cod there that was seasoned and not overwhelmingly salty. And some really good veggies, which seem to be rare in the country. Food was pretty good and the portions were quite filling. Our waiter here had, what sounded like an American accent, but not quite and we couldn’t figure out what kind of accent he had. So we finally asked him where he was from — LA, but he was picking up an Icelandic accent.

Did some souvenir shopping after dinner and called it a night.  Got some Icelandic wool for the knitters in my family and mittens for myself.  *SO* excited for winter!  The mittens have separate hand and thumb partitions that flip up, so I can type on my phone and keep the rest of my hands warm!

We started our day off walking around Reykjavik, parting ways mid-morning so Ian and I could visit Vikin, Iceland’s Maritime Museum, and everyone else could go to the National Museum.

On our way to the museum, we saw a sign indicating hard hats and steel-toed boots were required to go down a side street. It seemed that Reykjavik had a dry dock! We were able to get a closer look later from the other end of the street that did not require safety gear.

We spent about an hour in the museum learning about the history of trawling and then another hour in Óðinn, Iceland’s decommissioned Offshore Patrol Vessel.

Definite highlights were having the tour guide tell us about all 3 Cod Wars and pointing out that the gun on the ship was built in 1898. Oh, and Óðinn was decommissioned in 2006.

We met up with Cassia, Sune, and Julia early afternoon to head out to Þingvellir and learn about Viking parliament! We saw the law stone, which was lost due to earthquakes, but a flag was placed in the approximate location and stadium seating was available to listen to the speakers.  The continental drift between the North American and Eurasian Plates (which cause the earthquakes) can be clearly seen in this region.

For dinner, we tried some “authentic” American-style dining at Grillhusid.  The burgers were pretty adequate, but their “cold slaw” was not cole slaw.  They claimed it was mayo and sugar, but it tasted a lot like whipped cream.  Weird. And Ian’s meal was somewhat noteworthy for how old his potato looked, like it had been baked, frozen for months, and then re-heated. So, if you’re looking for low-end dining in Iceland, go for the fries.

We took a gravel road down the middle of the country with instructions to fill up on gas before leaving because, well, there aren’t gas stations in that part of the country.

We passed between 2 glaciers, Langjökull and Hofsjökull. Along the way, we stopped to look at a map and found some sheep a few meters away hiding from the wind. They stuck around long enough for me to take a picture and then walked away. We also stopped in Hveravellir to see the hot springs and mud pools.

This video is kinda boring, but it’s a synopsis of our ~6-hour car ride. I used my camera’s time lapse setting to make a video using a picture taken every second and included videos I took in the places where we stopped. Because of the distance and areas we traveled that day, this video shows a lot of the different landscapes in Iceland. Most of the roads we traveled on were gravel, with some areas worse than others as becomes apparent in the video when it looks like I’m filming an earthquake.

Coming back into civilization, we made stops to visit Gullfoss and Geysir. Gullfoss is a popular tourist attraction, since it’s more easily accessible than Dettifoss. It’s also a pretty strong waterfall, averaging 140 m³/s of water running over this waterfall in the summertime.

The word “geysir” is derived from the Icelandic word for “to gush.” According to the tour book, it’s the only Icelandic word that has made it into the English language (I guess Bjork doesn’t count). Iceland’s Geysir, or The Great Geysir, was the first geysir found, but is now only active following earthquakes. The active geysir remaining in the area is Strokkur, erupting every 8-10 minutes.

We made it to Reykjavik just in time for dinner (the hotel knew of 1 restaurant that was open). The wait staff at Þrír Frakkar (3 Coats) were super nice and seated us without a reservation and brought a book out for Julia to play with while we ate. The decor was very fishy, including a cod clock and other types of fish mounted on the walls.

Ian and I shared the Arctic charr appetizer, while Sune and Cassia tried the whale sashimi. The Arctic charr was served with scrambled eggs and chantilly sauce, which was good, but definitely did not sate our craving for scrambled eggs. For our entrees, I had the cod in mustard sauce and Ian had the redfish with wasabi sauce. We got a couple desserts to share and they were garnished with a fruit I’d never seen before: gooseberries. They taste like a tart plum, but with the texture of an apple, the size of a blueberry. Craziness. All around, very good!

photo by underbunny

After dinner, we got back to the hotel for Internet! Granted, we only had connection from the stairwell to the lobby. But it was worth the trouble after going days without!

We got a lot more site-seeing in the next day, since we were staying in the area for 2 nights. We spent the day visiting the Myvatn lake area.

Our first stop was Goðafoss. This is the waterfall where statues of pagan gods were thrown in to symbolize Icelanders’ adoption of the Christian faith.

Skútustaðagígar Pond is adjacent to Mývatn lake and surrounded by pseudo-craters formed by steam explosions when lava spray hits water.  This was our first introduction to Icelandic gnats. They didn’t bite, but they were attracted to heat, so they swarmed our faces as we walked around.

Next, we went to Dimmuborgir. This area had a lot of interesting rock formations created by lava pooled over a small lake. As the lava flowed across the lake, the water started to boil, the vapour rose through the lava forming lava pillars. As the lava continued flowing towards lower ground in the Mývatn area, the hollow pillars of solidified lava remained.

We got lunch at Gamli Bærinn (The Old Farm) in Reykjahlíð before moving on to Námaskarð to see the sulfur fields. The sulfur fields were super stinky, but pretty cool to see. I kinda rushed through the lower area because the wind would blow the steam into the valley and get trapped there.

Next, we went for a swim in a nature bath.

The last stop of the day was Dettifoss, the northern-most point in our trip. Dettifoss is the largest waterfall in Europe in terms of volume discharge, having an average water flow of 200 m3/s.

We got dinner at the Gamli Bærinn again on the way back since we expected everything to be closed by the time we got back to Akureyri (and it was the only place still open in Reykjahlíð). We saw the start of sunset on the way back to the hotel, but didn’t stay up to see it “fully” set.

The next morning, we got up bright and early to get in on the breakfast buffet. What we had not prepared for was the typical Icelandic breakfast:

- corn flakes
- meusli
- skyr (a yogurt-like product that I later found out was Iceland’s national cheese)
- sliced hard-boiled eggs
- platter of sliced sandwich meats and cheese
- breads
- crackers, salty and sweet (like animal crackers, but in round and rectangular forms)

I think Ian summed up best what we were all thinking, “All I wanted was a plate of scrambled eggs the size of my head!” Seems the entire country is unfamiliar with scrambled eggs. We didn’t find any the whole trip.

After breakfast, we explored the Snæfellsjökull area. There were a few easy trails nearby with interesting scenery, so we went to see some volcanic craters and waterfalls.

Around noon, it was time to hit the road for Akureyri. We decided it would be prudent to find a grocery store for some emergency rations and possibly a restaurant for lunch before we got too far away from civilization, so we made a stop in Olafsvik — the largest town on that peninsula.

Olafsvik was a really cute town. We went a little overboard at the grocery store, but we all had our hungry memories of the night before fresh in our minds. Ian and Sune searched for high-protein snacks, and not being able to find any jerky, settled on some dried fish. I’ve had chinese dried fish and it looked very similar, so I vouched for its edibility. (To be continued…)

We had lunch at Olafsvik Hotel, which had somewhat small portions, but really good food. Ian had their monk fish and even I thought it was delicious! Though, I did find a lot of fish entrees that I enjoyed throughout Iceland; maybe I just haven’t been trying the right kinds of fish at home.

From there, we drove west across 2/3 of the country and made it to Akureyri in time to pick up Ian’s bag from the airport before they closed.  We even made it to Hotel Edda with a half hour to spare before their dinner buffet ended.  Down side: no internet! It was broken and they had no idea when it would be fixed.

So, this was our first experience with Icelandic dinner:

- a few typical salad options, breads, rolls, crackers
- 3 kinds of pickled herring
- reindeer pate
- tuna pate
- smoked salmon
- salted cod
- smoked whale
- smoked puffin
- roast beef
- ham
- roasted potatoes
- french fries

I tried a little of everything except the smoked puffin.  I accidentally got smoked whale twice, which wasn’t particularly noteworthy.  Everyone else thought the puffin was very strong, but mixed response as to whether it was good. I didn’t much like the reindeer pate.  It had an odd texture to it.  The pickled herring was pretty good, though very strong. It’s traditionally a breakfast food, but I definitely would not eat it for breakfast. I think it’d make a reasonable side to a lunch, like a pickle would. The salted cod was alright, but I didn’t know what it was and was really unprepared for how salty it was. And I <3 potatoes.

After dinner, we settled in for the evening. Ian and I both ended up staying up way later than we thought because we missed the sunset and sunrise… and thought it was still evening.  At that latitude this time of year, there’s about an hour between sunrise and set, which means dusk and dawn overlap and it doesn’t actually get dark. We started to learn not to use the sun as a guage of time after a while.

On Day 2 of our trip, Ian woke up with the 4am sun… to find that the Red Sox game he had been waiting to start the night before hadn’t finished yet.

Around 8am or so, we decided we would make some oatmeal for breakfast. I went with Cassia the day before to the grocery store, so I knew she got some, but couldn’t remember what the package looked like. After searching much of the kitchen and some strategic googling, we concluded that Morgen Knas (Morning Bone) was cereal and not oatmeal.

At that point, I used google translate to see what oatmeal was in Danish, then did an image search to see what some common Danish oatmeal packaging looked like. This was when we discovered the flour-style paper sack we dismissed as cornmeal was actually oatmeal. And the “Korn Bord” and “Full Korn” label on it referred to the Danish Grain Board and whole-grain nature of the product.

Easy from there, right? Well… we translated the cooking instructions (in deciliters), looked up Quaker Oats to find out how much a serving was, converted that to deciliters, searched for a measuring cup (measuring liter?), and were ready to go. Oh, except for turning on the stove. They had a gas stove that didn’t have an auto-starter on it. Searched all over the stove area and kitchen counters — no matches. We finally found a stick lighter under some dish towels which didn’t have gas in it. Assuming they used it just for the spark to light the stove, we gave that a try. The first 20+ tries didn’t work, so we tried the burner next to it and it lit up on the first try. Four minutes later (approximately 90 minutes after we started our journey), we had hot bowls of oatmeal in front of us!

Soon after, we were packed up and ready for Iceland! Headed back to the airport for the second day in a row, landed in Keflavik, and went to retrieve our luggage only to find that Ian’s bag got left behind. The plane wasn’t full or anything. They just failed to put his bag on the plane. The airline people said they’d bring it to us the next day, but we’d be over 400 miles away by then. (Stayed in the mid-western peninsula of Snæfellsjökull [Snow fall glacier] the first night and then in the northern city of Akureyri the next day.) So, they flew his bag to Akureyri, the country’s second largest city (about the size of Old Town Alexandria) and it was waiting for us at the “airport,” i.e. runway with a building at the end.

When we got to Snæfellsjökull, it was about 8:30 pm, which we soon discovered was half an hour too late to get dinner. The grocery stores close around 5, so we were just out of luck. There weren’t really any other restaurants in this area. The bar was still open; they just didn’t serve food. So we had a few Viking beers and the remainder of the bread the wait-staff was kind enough not to throw out.

After “dinner”, Sune, Ian, and I did some exploring. These pictures were taken between 10pm and midnight (you know, midnight — an hour before the sun sets):

Our first night in Copenhagen, Ian and I joined his cousin’s family and a friend to celebrate the Midsummer Festival. This is comparable to America’s Independence Day, but instead of fireworks, they burn a witch!

Before the witch-burning, they sing the Midsummer Hymn. In the third verse, they talk about the witches and trolls they burn to rid their towns of evil:

Midsummer song
We love our country
Text: Holger Drachmann, 1885
Melody: PE Lange-Müller, 1885

We love our country,
when it is redesigned in July
teeth star of wood with brilliance in each eye,
when the spring of each bird
over fields of beach
let the voice of greeting trills themselves bend:
we sing your law over the road, the street
we wreaths your name when our harvest is in charge,
but the most beautiful wreath
just can not wait, however, your, Midsummer,
it is the bottom of this summer’s hearts so warm, so happy,
- But the most beautiful wreath
just can not wait, however, your, Midsummer,
it is the bottom of this summer’s hearts so warm, so happy.

We love our country,
but by midsummer most
when every cloud over the field blessing transmitter
when flowers are most
and when the cattle in bucket
gives rigeligst gift for hardworking hands;
when we do not plow and harrows and drums,
when the cow’s dinner munching clover:
then go to the youth dance
on your bid Midsummer!
right as a foal and the lamb who freely across the meadow to tumble,
- Then go to the youth dance
on your bid Midsummer!
right as a foal and the lamb who freely across the meadow to tumble.

We love our country,
and with sword in hand
each udenvælts enemy dressed us know
but against the spirit of strife
over fields, under the beach
we will fire on fathers barrows turn:
each city has its witches, and each parish its trolls,
them, we will from life with joy torches hold,
we want peace in this country,
Midsummer, Midsummer!
it can be won when hearts just can not wait never doubting cold
- We want peace in this country,
Midsummer, Midsummer!
it can be won, where hearts never doubting’s going cold.

We love our country,
and we welcome the king,
who have tried and elected himself the right princess:
on his adventure castle
can every woman, every man
an example of life in love find!
Let the times grow old, let the colors fade,
a memory we will be in the heart us subscribe:
from narrative rich north
shows a gloss over land -
It is a wonderful reflection of its enchanting meadows
- From narrative rich north
shows a gloss over land -
It is a wonderful reflection of its enchanting meadows!