What am I supposed to write here

OK so I’m not having the greatest day so I’d rather not blow all my emotional energy bitching about how our “caving” “tour” was a waste of far too much money and whatnot. So instead I will do what I sort of meant to do at the end of last post about Daggson. Off topic for a second, Icelandic names are so cool. Anyways here are a few of the cards that came in the deck to show just how much of a hilarious monster that man is. 

I was worried that the little cardboard box the cards came in would wear out too fast and risk losing these magnificent abominations to the elements so i threw together this little case and im quite happy with it. It feels like something that belongs in a backpack traveling around the world.This deck will be one of the many motivations to get me up , get me out, and get me into the big and wonderful world around me. Also to play 99, One of the best watys to piss off your friends.

I promise, next time I will be bitching about caves and how they are just too dark and small. I swear.

Ok, so I am a terrible person. I fell into a rut and stopped writing these for far too long. So now I have to do my best to remember all the grand times we had in Iceland.

The next day (I think) after our snorkelling adventure (let’s just go with it being the next day, I really cant remember) we returned to our favourite coffee shop, currently in the whole wide world, and we were given the pleasure of watching them roast up some new coffee fresh for us. 

Watching coffee being roasted is a mesmerizing delight to the senses. The sound, the smell, the spinning of the mixer is just a delight.

After coffee Alex and I went and explored. We visited several book stores and were treated to the majesty of Hugleikur Dagsson’s work. 

He is a dry and satirical, horribly inappropriate artist who makes works that are not for the faint of heart. I picked up the deck of cards. Sadly, I couldn’t afford all the other books. Damn you Iceland and all your products being prohibitively expensive!

Honestly If you ever see these books anywhere they are worth every penny.

It was a rather dreary and quite windy day so after our couple hours of exploring we went back to the hostel to pass the time before our “Caving Tour Guide” came and picked us up.

In that time Alex schooled me at Othello at least 3 or 4 times. 

This entry has taken three tries just because of how huge of a photo dump it is.

We met up with another group at the information center and got into our down coveralls. They’re such a lovely warm outfit. After that we drove to Thingvelir and hopped danced and squeezed into our dry suits. It was great fun to watch.

The winds out there in the open were terrible so we took cover any way we could. This buckshot bin was good enough for us.

We had to wait a while to get into the water because the group before us had some issues with their diving gear. It was a frozen regulator hose or something? Once we got in we really didn’t worry about the cold anymore. Our suits sucked up tight to us as the air was pushed out and we were plenty warm, besides our hands and faces.

The juxtaposition of the drab and arid land above the water and the crystal blue water and beautiful rock formations was stunning. It was sort of magical, which seems to be something Iceland is very good at. 

The entire time we were in our own little worlds, taking in the gorgeous view below us. There were a few times where we almost ran into each other because we were so busy looking around.

The last stretch of the tour we turned back against the current and this was legitimately the hardest part. The dry suits are ridiculously buoyant and don’t really allow for any propulsion through the water. 

In the end the tour felt way shorter than expected but still entirely worth it. After being in the water so long the cold outside seemed like nothing.

On our walk back we took a quick detour to do some cliff jumping in a small pool just before the point where we got in the water.

Our third day started bright and early. I believe our ride came at 8am? We were picked up by our diving guide (insert name here) who was a very nice guy from Argentina. From town we travelled into the lovely but desolate regions outside of Reykjavik.

The Thingvellir region is a really cool area. It’s where the North American plate and the Eurasian plate are separating. That seperation is what allowed Iceland to form. Almost any mountain or peak our guide pointed out was a volcano.

Today was the coldest, windiest and in general most unpleasant day to be doing anything outside of a warm coffee shop or hot springs. So clearly it was the best day to go swim in a glacier fed ravine.

Something really funny we noticed: no tourist signs, at all, are in english, or any other language but Icelandic. Kind of strange for a country trying to become a destination for tourism.

We stopped at one of those super touristy lookout points. To be fair, the view was very nice, but it was so cold that we basically just ran out and took a few pictures without stopping and ran back to the van. 

Reviewing the pictures afterwards they turned out a lot better than I thought they would. 

I absolutely love all the rock formations and vegetation in Iceland. I’ve always had a weakness for moss and crumbling rock, so I guess I lucked out by going to a country made entirely of moss and crumbling rock!

This is the dive company we chose for this trip. They seemed pretty well set up. If I’m honest, the other company looked a little more organized. At the very least they had less set backs and fancier looking gear.

Either way this was the excursion I would recommend most.

This is going to be a picture heavy one just because i realllly like a lot of the stuff from inside Harpa. Lots of really fun angles and some good views on just how crap the weather was.

This is Alex’s favourite shot of the trip (according to her). To me it’s a reminder to never let my beard get that long again. So red. So wispy.

Harpa really isn’t all that interesting. It’s a neat concert hall with architecture that’s enjoyable to look at for a while while your lady friends pee, but beyond that I don’t have too much to say. As with everything else in Iceland I did appreciate how good the incorporation of lava rock into the cement looked.

For the afternoon we decided to go wander around some old lava craters just on the outskirts of the city. Besides a little trouble navigating the highways and a slightly precarious drive down a country road they are super straightforward to find.

I found it really neat how young and rough the formation seemed. Crumbling rock everywhere. and lots of neat vantage points... none of which I managed to take any great pictures of for some reason.

This big rock looked way too much like pride rock to not try recreating the lion king opening scene

We ended day two with a nice dinner at a restaraunt whose name I can’t remember. The saddest part is I tried getting fancy with my order with a very nice waitress who didn’t quite understand what I was asking for. Lesson learned.

Todays work day was very productive but also had a few more scares than I’d like. 

I finished the back side of the house, leaving only the gap where I will be tying into the ridge cap. The scares consisted of not one, but two failures of my platforms that I’ve been using to work on. If I ever roof again (which i would prefer not to) I will be dropping the cash to buy proper roofing platforms. As effective as mine are, they are already starting to show their faults. 

The first big scare was while I was rearranging the platforms to the top position to finish the roof. With the house being a century old and the base material of the roof being just as old, there are a lot of cracks in the wood down there. Long story short: I anchored my platform in the regular way, but the wood I anchored it into was too cracked and brittle to support the weight of me and the materials i had on it. It resulted in one side giving away unexpectedly and everything, almost including myself sliding gleefully off the roof. 

The second scare was similar with the first support I built wearing out because of a design that was not fully thought out. It ended up sort of... imploding on me. Nothing fell and I was able to fix it, and replace the worn out parts at the end of the day, but after that first surprise the second was unwelcome.

Tomorrow I start it all over again on the front side. Mornings will be a lot nicer, but working into the evenings is going to blowww just as much as mornings did on the back side.

Day 2 in Iceland started with a lovely jaunt to Reykjavik Roasters. It is possibly the best coffee shop in all of Iceland, but I may just be biased. I had my Swiss Moka and it was fantastic, while the girls tried their espressos and cappuccinos. 

It’s dumb, but I like how these two pictures look together.

It was here where we planned our day, Mostly just a recap of the day before, showing Chelsea, our third travel companion, most of the stuff we saw yesterday.

Speaking of yesterday. We went to the swimming pool just up from our hostel. After a fairly chilly and blustery day we wanted to warm up in the hot tubs. If you have some free time in the evening it is totally worth it. The main tub was way too full and actually pretty cold so we found the much hotter ones off to one side and relaxed in the glory of geothermal heat.

One of the nice excursions was visiting the whale museum. It was a little costly at 2500 isk but worth it in the end. It was amazing to see the displays of the animals in full scale.

This is the bowhead whale. My favorite of all the whales on display. The most surprising thing I learned at the exibit was that one of the biggest threats to the larger slower swimming whales is being struck by ships that pass by. that sounds terrible.

In the last post I said my updates would be less frequent than daily. To really drive home my consistency and how uniform my update schedule will be, I’m immediately going back on that and doing two updates in one day!

Today was day 2 of my roofing job. I am very nicely tanned already in the arm and neck regions and the roof is slowly coming along.

My first big gripe of the day: I don’t have any heavy equipment, so I frankly totally hate how damn heavy a bundle of shingles is... I believe 80lbs a piece. My word. My not so great solution is slowly and exhaustingly carrying each bundle up the ladder. I know. 80lbs isn’t all that much but it’s just enough to be unpleasant.

I started out without the plan to have these stands. I quickly learned why all roofers have them. Trying to maneuver while dealing with an ascender, carry your tools (who all want to fly down the roof to the ground any chance they get) and walking on the shingles while the sun was beating down on them made them very soft and easy to mar. All these factors came together and caused me to make an emergency run to the hardware store.

The first version of my roof stand design worked but had a lot of flaws. The platform came out of the runner at a 90 degree angle making the platform nearly impossible to stand on comfortably, as well as being very very bendy and wobbly to move around on. I worked through it for the first stretch but when the time came to move my platforms up I took the opportunity to upgrade my setup considerably.

Something to note before I go any further with this update: my daily updates will be far less than daily. If I spend a full day doing nothing of interest I most likely will not write a post that day. As this blog goes on I may expand it to be other things and to spread the scope of it, because I really do enjoy writing these.

Ok, on to the cause of my absence for the last few days. It’s not exciting. Basically, it’s been a combination of work and exhaustion. 

A few months back, while I was still working as a healthcare tech (a poor career choice, but it paid the bills for the late winter, so I shouldn’t complain), my coworker friend bought her first house with her family. She was very excited about it all, but it definitely needed some work. I went and helped pull out some carpet and did some work with the cabinets in the kitchen, really nothing all that exciting. But while there I noticed the abhorrent condition of the old house’s roof. Feeling a little concerned I trekked onto the roof to do a quick repair, and made the offhand remark that I would replace it for her for a fairly reasonable price.

That day has come, and I ever so slightly regret it. I spent a few months right out of high school working for a roofing company installing fairly fancy and very expensive tile roofs. So, I am very confident in my ability to install the roof competently. What I had partially forgotten in the past 6 years is exactly how back breaking and generally exhausting roofing is. 

It’s especially exhausting when the roof is at this steep of a pitch. As you can see the roof was in very rough shape.

My plan for day 1 was to only do the shingle removal of the one side, but it turns out that it was a very easy task and I believe it only took me 2 hours to go from fully shingled to bare roof.

From here was the fun of picking up the materials a day early and learning how to install them. Day 1 ended with a lot more progress than I expected at first, but frankly less progress than where I had shifted my expectations to.

After our spectacular time with the walking tour we wandered over to a nearby coffee shop that was just stuffed with trinkets and souvenirs. All the cafés we went to served a lovely cup of joe, but I honestly can’t be taken as an authority because I stuck to the scrumptious swiss moka. The best drink! 

The best thing in this shop though were these few books and deck of cards.

Seriously, they are the most lude and inappropriate things I’ve ever seen. I had no choice but to buy the deck of cards. Worth every single krona!

(I’m sorry, I didn’t take a picture of this place so this is stock) Kevin pointed out that there was a shop up by the piers named Sægreifinn, or Sea Baron in english, that sells samples of Minke whale, and his exact words were: “I hate to say it, but it is absolutely delicious!” So I had to give it a try.

Kevin was right. Whale has such a great texture and flavor!

The texture is very creamy, I’d guess it is a little greasy but it definitely did not come across like that. Flavour wise whale resembles a good steak with just the tiniest hint of liver mixed in, which was unexpected but was not unwelcome.

Now the important thing I must mention. As tasty as it is, I am totally unsure as to how sustainably or responsibly Iceland goes about its whaling and morally I am still pretty torn as to whether or not it is acceptable to hunt and kill such a social and intelligent animal. I haven’t done enough research to know enough to have anything valuable to say, so just stick to your values and go from there. 

This may or may not be Kevin (I’m terrible with names), our very knowledgeable tour guide on the walking tour we went on our first day in Iceland.

I’ve said it once already but I cannot say it enough, free walking tours are such a great way to see a city and learn a lot of neat things by a knowledgable resident.

On our tour we learned about the rather interesting history of Iceland and how it very recently became its own country, leaving the rule of Denmark... basically by asking politely. We learned that the country is so small and politics are so uninteresting that the prime minister of the country, who works in the building in the background of the picture will bike or walk to work frequently without anyone really giving him more than a pleasant good morning.

We learned how Harpa, Iceland’s biggest opera house and convention center, although quite fancy looking and shiny, is generally seen as an eyesore by spoiling the view of the mountains across the smokey bay.

We learned how in Iceland first names are the primary name and surnames  only describe whose son or daughter you are. We also learned how the second great war had a very positive effect on the country, bringing Iceland both of its airports along with its main hospital and most of its paved roads around the country.

Lastly we learned how Iceland is the leading consumer of Coca Cola... per capita of any country in the world, and that whale, though controversial in its hunting, is strangely delicious! (which we will discuss more in a later post) 

For about five or six years now I have either been supplementing my income or attempting to make my full income by doing odd jobs as a handyman… to varying degrees of success and stress. This year I’ve made it my only option and I am having a great deal of success with the lovely benefit of also having plenty of free time, which I used to see as time I should be stressing about finding other jobs.

So far this year, I’ve had the opportunity to build a really neat treehouse and rope bridge at a daycare I’ve been working for pretty consistently.

A less exciting job was building a shed for a really nice old man. The problems were that he had ordered materials and had the shed designed by the store that sold him the materials, but the final design never did make it to me, so that was an interesting but mostly enjoyable learning experience.

Today marked the completion of a job that I found really interesting at the beginning but slowly started to frustrate me in the end. Much like the shed did. See, I'm not the best at finishing work, This act of doing finishing, sanding staining, and making the object I’ve made out of rough material into something I'm proud of is difficult. I’m just far too critical to enjoy this step.

This is a display beehive. It holds six frames for the bees to make honey and honeycombs on. It is on a pivot that allows the hive to be viewable from both sides. The pivot mechanism does this really neat thing where one of the pivot arms also houses the channel that the bees use to exit the hive and go outdoors. All in all it is really neat and at the point of the above picture I loved it.

This next picture is about four weeks later and all I’ve done from the beginning stage of the first picture is stain it, put in the frames and close in the other side. At this point I hate it entirely. The joints have small gaps, the staining job is acceptable at best, the glass is next to impossible to keep clean and the screens just sort of look ugly in my eyes.

But I trudged on and finished the last few steps of what had to be done. The install went down without a single hiccup. The delivery on the other hand involved leaving the wall mount at the hardware store the next town over and my blind dog running away from the daycare while I went back to pick it up.

In the end the client was ecstatic about the hive, and when it was put in place and all finished even I was pretty happy with how it turned out.

I’m going to start todays post with some of the lovely street art and graffiti that we found on our first day visiting Iceland. No matter where I am, I love to search for graffiti. It is a beautiful deeper look into the minds and the art of the local people.

Sadly my home town is winning its battle against the art. Any pieces that go up are immediately covered over, or worse covered with a local history mural, which aren’t terrible but just don’t do it for me.

Everywhere we went in Reykjavik we found really creative and well made wall art. I found it pretty cute that a lot of them incorporated motivational quotes and sayings. 

This shark was my favorite piece by far. I’m having troubles uploading a complete picture of it so it may show up in a later post. I never asked anyone but I’m guessing it’s a representation of the Icelanding “delicacy” Hákarl. Don’t try it. Never try it..

Huzzah! I figured out image uploading (which will cut the next post short) (movie magic… or something) 

So we return to the tale after Alex and I (I’ve finally asked if I could use her name) figured out our money situation and sorted our hostels. I am still running on an hours sleep, and a really good coffee from a shop in the airport called Joe and The Juice, good place. My bank card worked there mysteriously… odd. 

Anyways, I am exhausted but absolutely refuse to take a break, seeing as it is about 11am at this point in Reykjavik. Away we went to explore the city. 

One of the first things we noticed was that there was an abundance of “American style” bars and general tourist traps for the American tourist. I hadn’t thought of it much, mostly because I came on this trip on a total whim, with only a few ulterior motives, and did little to no research at all. But Reykjavi is a total tourist town, almost obscenely so. That atmosphere could have taken away from it if it still wasns’t such a lovely little town.

After walking around town and seeing the sights for about an hour or two we stopped at what was touted to be the most popular restaurant in all of Iceland. It was a hotdog stand. Of the scarce minimal research I had done, I had found that Iceland is serious about its hotdogs and its sauces. The hotdog was really good. It had two sweet sauces on it. One was a little smokey and the dog was resting on fried onions if I remember correctly. Definitely go, but be ready for at least a ten minute line.

After our top notch tube steaks, we went to meet up for the free walking tour we had planned to go on. If I have one piece of advice for the casual traveler, always take a free walking tour if you are in a town for a few days. The guides are usually very knowledgeable and personable and you learn heaps about the city and its history. 

Ok back to the trip. I can definitely say a few very nice things about the airline we took, Icelandair. They gave out blankets, which was much appreciated. I have a bad knee and it just screams when it’s cold and the pressure changes, so the extra bit of warmth was very nice. Also, I just enjoy airlines in general whenever they start handing out the free caesar mix. Then I’m a happy camper. 

So with the time change from Edmonton to Iceland we left at 6 pm and landed six hours later at 6 am. Running on the 6 hours sleep i had the night before, I began the brand new day in a new and exciting country. It was only slightly chaotic. 

First step was getting our rental car. I was very childishly excited to drive some fancy foreign car. I believe the car i begged for (since it was the cheapest) was the Opel Astra. Very not domestic. But unfortunately we were upgraded to a Chevy cruze, which we immediately named Tom, then Thomason, because Iceland. 

Driving in Iceland is actually kind of nice. There’s almost no traffic anywhere and the drive from the international airport in Keflavik to Reykjavik was actually pretty short. Our first game plan was to get coffee and food into us asap because planes suck and they dont feed you anymore. Bullshit.

We found our way to what turned out to be basically the dead center of Reykjavik. We had no idea since it was nice and quiet. We parked and found a little bakery and began to make fools of ourselves by being the most touristy, trying to fumble through pronouncing the words. Oh and here’s where the first and, I guess, only real hiccup began. Our bank cards, which our banks distinctly told us would work in Iceland, did not work in Iceland. And I had converted no cash, so yay… stress.

Over the next week or so I will be posting pictures and short stories about my recent trip to the lovely island nation of Iceland. 

Also, a warning to all: my train of thought is inconsistent and meandering at best. Good luck and if you dont like it, sorry, It most likely won’t change much.

I’ll start now with the quick tale of the travel day. To put it simply, don’t do this as it was rather unpleasant. 

Myself and my best friend travelled together to Iceland, which for me meant a 10 hour drive from my hometown of Vernon, BC to our departure location (and her hometown) of Edmonton, AB. It’s not a terrible drive. There’s lots of lovely small towns on the BC side and a few really nice resort towns in the mountains on the Alberta side. Not to mention, there’s some really lovely views of the Canadian Rockies. For my trip there were plenty of flurries and storms and construction. 

The really unpleasant part of our travel day was when my lovely travel partner had the genius idea of staying up suuuper late the night before, where we watched the Kingsmen, which i must say is a fantastic film. It has an unbelievably over the top action scene with Collin Firth. Furth? Anyways, super fun, and Samuel L Jackson was very fun and enjoyable. My only complaint was a set of rather unnecessary scenes with a very low brow joke that just did not sit well with me.

So with the great movie down we went to our respective homes and got to bed at a late hour. The next day was a little sleepy but pretty good coming up to the time of departure. 

I am not the first or last person to have less than grand feelings before the security at airports so I will just say I really hope it gets better some day. When it was time to board the plane we were both quite tired and it seemed like our plan was going to work. A full night’s sleep on the plane, and we would wake up in Iceland rested and happy. 

Then, we decided to watch Interstellar on the flight. It was another really good movie with a few flaws. I loved the robots in every way (I like robots) but the ending got very dense and a little hard to follow. All in all it was very enjoyable with a lot of great acting. But seriously, Matt Damon, you suckkkkkkk, such a dick character. 

After the film, my friend slipped off to sleep for about an hour or so and I sat there unable to sleep. Our plan had failed me.