Enjablog

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):