Changes

I have switched to a new place in town. New address: Austurgata 9, 340-Stykkishólmur, which is literally down the road from my last location (as are most places in this small town...!). I had to move as the flat was likely to be mobbed by a bunch of Uni student transients during the summer: I was forewarned there would be a lot of comings and goings with new folk passing through for short fieldwork sejourns. It was best to up sticks and move. This is a super, old house. It is a very different place to the last: from IKEA to original furniture! (Nice).

And - although spring can´t be said to have completely sprung in town - I was also recently off up to the (more) Frozen North for an Ísfestival near Akureyi with the Icelandic Alpine Club - this was a long weekend of ice-climbing and socialising (not eating ice-cream, as one friend suggested might be happening....).

Here are links to more/better photos
http://grettisgata.eitthvad.is/isklifurfestival2007
http://www.pbase.com/agustthor/festival2007

... and here´s a few of my own (although I must credit the 2nd photo here to someone else, a guy called Gummi who takes rather good photos of ice with a massive camera he insists on lugging up routes with him).

I have also been catching up with friend Yvonne Sell (from Calgary ´03 Days) who was up visiting from London last weekend. It was really great to see a familiar face over here. We managed to do a fair few touristy things, mostly on the famous Golden Circle tour from Reykjavík, where you can experience volcanoes, spouting geysirs, waterfalls and colliding continental plates!

Brrrr. Ice cold conditions within the crater of Kerið.

This is Strokker the geysir in action, which spouts boiling water every few minutes and is located a mere few metres from Iceland´s famous - and originally named - 'Geysir' geysir (Geysir seems to be inactive these days, and Strokker now the main attraction).

Exploring Þingvellir, which is the former seat of Iceland´s parliment, positioned right on the rift between two tectonic plates: North America to the left and Europe to the right. Very fitting for a the two of us we felt, with our tourist mix of Canadian/British heritage.

Gullfoss is a very spectacular twin waterfall - the second chute is 70m deep/high. It was noisy, wet and cold there and a breathtakingly dramatic sight in an otherwise quite remarkably flat area of countryside.

Plus.... Yvonne and I snuck in a bit of an ice-climb (or two) over her visit, and made this beautiful snow-woman as the weather turned to custard (you can see we were very proud of her - but I do question myself: why am I still wearing my climbing lid?). By the way, the Chelsea hat on Yvonne was purely for practical purposes only.... (Funny what you can buy in the Stykkishólmur 'Olís' gas-station when on a mission for 'something warm that fits under a climbing helmet'...).