In Varmahlid we stopped at the grocery store
and picked up a few items for supper. We did find small containers in a refrigerated case at the back of the store which held a white, creamy substance that looked very much like the unidentified "salad" we'd been served on our flight to Iceland. We bought one small serving to have with our supper. Of course the contents were in Icelandic, so we had no idea what we were buying.
We also had a dish of ice cream, each of us, plain vanilla without any sauce. I believe that if you want to judge a people by their ice cream (as I sometimes wish to) you have to taste their plain vanilla; and by this standard the Icelanders pass with very high acclaim. Or so says Tom, who admittedly has never been hired by the State Department to study the correlation between ice cream and democracy, but who would like to be. I'm just the fellow to do it.
Next door to the grocery store was the Tourist Information building. We surprised the woman there as we entered. It was nearly 4:00 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon in the off-season, which may explain her surprise; but she was there and we were there and we were trying to find our accommodations for the night at Hestasports-Husen. The woman spoke no English, or very little, and I could only say "Takk" ("please"/"thank you") in Icelandic, so I simply pointed at the name on the place on our list of accomodations; she looked at it and walked me outside, pointed south down the highway, said: "Two kilometers."
"Takk," I said.
We found the Hestasports building about two kilometers down the road but didn't see anything there that looked like the cabins we were expecting to stay in. I poked my head into the office.
"Hello?" I called.
"Hello" came the reply, and a fellow came forward from a back room to take our registration and lead us back through town and out the other side to a circle of new cabins grouped around a very large in-ground hot tub built of rock and ringed with rock and steaming in the late afternoon air. Our cabin looked like a mansion to us - one large room with windows all along the front; it held three tables - one for dining, one for cards, and one for writing, I suppose; plus cupboards, stove, refrigerator, and sink.
"Would you look at all this silverware," Mary said. "There is more silverware here than we own!"
There was a bedroom on the first floor with two single beds, and a sleeping loft with two more single beds and seven sleeping pads tucked away that could be pulled out for a very large and intimate group. And the bathroom - while it was not the size of Mongolia, it was larger than our bathroom at home. Had we fallen into heaven?
Mary and I walked for an hour and a half, up and down the trails leading to the top of Reykjaholl nearby. Reykjaholl is a wooded hill, apparently a tree preserve of some sort, with some of the largest pine trees we'd seen in Iceland. Particular trees here and there had markers in front of them, identifying what kind of tree it is by both its Icelandic name and its scientific name and its place of origin. There were at least three kinds of trees from Alaska, three kinds from Norway, and three from Russia.
To be continued....
Have you seen The Viking Site (http://www.viking.ucla.edu/)? I found it at plep today, about Scandinavian especially Icelandic legends, archaeology etc, looks interesting.
Posted by: Marja-Leena | June 16, 2005 at 12:29 PM
Marja-Leena - thanks for the reference. I'll take a look at it.
Posted by: Tom Montag | June 17, 2005 at 07:54 AM