Last weekend, travelling by train, I could wallow in vince: Looking for new crafting magazines at the station bookstore. The best: They had mags in french, spanish and english as well. Yipiiee! I spotted the new Marie Claire idée and a special edition of Verena about knitting socks.

I HAD to buy them Flipping through the pages I fell in love with crocheted christmas ornaments. And lucky me, the nice lady from Iceland gave me 3 skeins of her beautiful wool I showed you yesterday. So I grasped my hook and started. See here my results:

Maybe some of you remember that I tried some christmas stars/snowflakes last year too, see them once again here and on our tutorial site here. Enjoy!

(pics from magazines linked to their sources, other pics from Marsupialia)

OK fyrsti dagurinn fór ekki eins og ég hafði haldið. Hann byrjaði náttúrulega á því að ég vaknaði 6.20 til að bera út en svo þegar ég kom heim(Megrunin náttúrulega gleymd. Ég þarf að fara að skrifa á veggina með stórum stöfum “MEGRUN”) fékk ég mér heitt kakó. Og bara það. Svo fór ég í skólann klukkan 10 eftir að hafa sofið inná milli. Og allt lék í lindi ætlaði ekki að borða neitt í skólanum víst ég væri búin í skólanum klukkan 13.50 en já nei. Ég þurfti víst að kaupa tyggjó og víst það kostaði bara 100-200 kr þá þurfti ég að kaupa e-ð meira svo ég gæti notað kortið mitt….Og keypti ég mér ekki pepperoni taco langloku….Vond Viktoría! Vond! Og svo seinna keypti vinkona mín handa mér Fanta Lemon í jólagjöf…Gleðileg Jól. Það var reyndar óskin mín víst hún mátti hvort eð er bara kaupa e-ð smá handa mér í jólagjöf þá ákvað ég bara að nýta tækifærið víst ég var þyrst. Hún mátti bara kaupa e-ð lítið handa mér í jólagjöf víst hún hafði keypt alveg HUGE afmæligjöf..Kron skó á 30000 krónur. Þeir eru svo æðisgegnir að ég geng ekki einu sinni í þeim. Ég vil ekki meiða þá. En já svo kom ég heim og mamma. Elskulega mamma hafði keypt sykurpúða og pepsi max í bónus. Svo bjó ég til núðlur handa okkur mæðgnunum þannig vægast sagt var megrunin púfft. Ég byrja á morgun…..Mér líður eins og matarfíkli þegar ég segi þetta. En ef ég byrja ekki á morgun mun ég plokka úr mér öll nefhár….Guð hjálpi mér.
En þannig er það. Annað hef ég ekki að segja í bili..Sjáumst á morgun.

Well the diet went poof. For breakfast there was hot choclate. For lunch there was a big juicy sandwhich and Fanta Lemon and for tea? There were marsmellows and pepsi max then for dinner were noodles…..But I swear I’ll start tomorrow even though I feel like an addicted person who hasn’t admitted he/she has a problem I will start tomorrow….Or I promise I will pluck all of my nosehair out….It actually hurts just thinking about it. Well I have nothing more to say. See you tomorrow

The Iceland-post is on hold because of a misunderstanding. Coming soon.

In this first of a series set in Reykjavik, Iceland, detective inspector Erlendur Sveinsson finds a long old man murdered in his apartment. Erlendur’s partners in this suspenseful series are Sigurdur Oli and their female colleague Elinborg.

Because Iceland is such a very small community, everyone in Iceland refers to one another by first name. Erlendur is about 50, haunted by the death of his younger brother when they were children, is divorced and has children of his own with drug problems.  (Yes, a bit depressing of a character).

Murder is extremely rare in Iceland and when it is committed, the crime is usually one of passion.  In Jar City, this is not the case, making it extremely challenging for Erlendur and his team.  The killing of the victim, a very elder senior called Holberg, seems to be inexplicable until Erlendur discovers the the series of rapes Holberg apparently committed. The rapes and the deaths of a number of young women may be connected, and the search brings Erlendur to the forensic lab, whose old “jar city,” since disbanded, held research organs. Meanwhile, Erlendur’s daughter, Eva Lind, is pregnant and still using; she flits in and out of his life angrily, but may be crying out for help. Reykjavík’s physicality, and the fact that crimes are relatively rare in Iceland, gives things a defamiliarizing cast.

Click here to find this book in our catalog.

This is just a little taste of the style of a few Icelandic writers. I hope it’s more to come.

PS: Happy B-day feelgood!

Only an Icelandic band on a mission to create a musical antidote to three hours of daily sunlight could come up with an electro tune this merry.

Download: FM Belfast – Synthia (Track) – MP3
Buy: FM Belfast – How To Make Friends (Album)

Also on repeat: Tropical, Par Avion, Underwear… the whole album!

Amazon's Global Kindle Reader

I heard that Amazon now has a global version of Kindle. I was disappointed to find this morning that the new version still will not work in my country.

Since I’ve wanted one for some time, but have been waiting until they got a version that would work in my country, I checked out their website this morning, only to be disappointed again. Apparently the new global version will only work in SOME countries.

In case you are thinking of purchasing the new Global Kindle for a Christmas gift this year, since the new version will only work in SOME countries, I thought it would be helpful to most expats to have a complete list of which countries it will, or will not work in.

STARRED (*) countries marked below indicate that Kindle needs to be ordered from a SPECIAL PAGE on the Amazon site.

The Global Kindle version DOES work in (as of Dec. 2009):

Aland Islands, Albania, American Samoa, Andorra, Angola, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Armenia, Aruba, Australia*, Austria, Bahamas, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bermuda, Bhutan, Bolivia, Boznia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burundi, Cambodia, Canada, Cape Verde, Cayman Islands, Central African Republic, Colombia, Comoros, Congo, Cook Islands, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Cote d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Denmark, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Falkland Islands, Faroe Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Finland, France, French Guiana, French Polynesia, Gabon, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Gibraltar, Greece, Greenland, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guam, Guatemala, Guernsey, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Holy See, Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jersey, Kenya, Kiribati, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Latvia, Liberia, Leichtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macao, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malawi, Malta, Marshall Islands, Martinique, Mauritius, Mayotte, Mexico, Moldovia, Monaco, Mongolia, Montenegro, Montserrat, Mozembique, Myanmar, Namibia, Nauru, Nepal, Netherlands, New Caledonia, Nicaragua, Niue, Norfolk Island, Northern Mariana Islands, Norway, Palau, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania, Russia, Rwanda, Réunion, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Sao Tome and Principe, Serbia, Seychelles, Slovakia, Slovenia, Solomon Islands, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, Timor-Leste, Togo, Tonga, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos Islands, Tuvalu, Uganda, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Uruguay, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Viet Nam, Virgin Islands – British, Virgin Islands – U.S., Wallis and Futuna, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

The Global Kindle version does NOT work in (as of Dec. 2009):

Afghanistan, Algeria, Antarctica, Argentina, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bouvet Island, British Indian Ocean Territory, Brunei Darussalam, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chile, Chad, China, Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, French Southern Territories, Gambia, Guinea, Heard Island and McDonald Islands, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Isle of Man, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Korea – Democratic People’s Republic of, Korea – Republic of, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Lesotho, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco (including the Western Sahara), New Zealand, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Palestinian Territories, Pitcairn, Qatar, Saint Barthelemy, Saint Helena, Saint Martin, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Somalia, South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands, Sudan, Svalbard and Jan Mayan, Syrian Arab Republic, Tajikistan, Thailand, Tokelau, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, United States Minor Outlying Islands, Uzbekistan, Yemen.

ENDS EUROPE DAILY – 20/11/09

The Icelandic government has announced plans to introduce an environmental charge on electricity consumption and a carbon tax on fossil fuels. The charge on electricity use would be set at 0.12 krona per kilowatt hour (this is lower than the rate originally proposed) and is expected to raise €30.4m. Tax breaks would be provided for greenhouse farmers and households in areas with no geothermal heating. The carbon tax would be levied on petrol, diesel, aviation oil and heavy fuel oil, based on EU carbon prices. Iceland already has some environmental taxation through its national recycling fund, which imposes levies on a range of products and earmarks revenues for environmentally sound disposal and recycling.

Hope you all had a great weekend. I enjoyed it in the round of my family, had a great birthday-party with my father. So I’m still quite exhausted… dancing till 3 o’clock in the morning. But tremendously happy having seen my family crowd after quite a long time. So for all of you who sometimes need some protection too, because of the family living far away,  friends in cities of different countries: Here’s the solution. Fairy Flowers. Àlfablòms in Icelandic. We got them from a very nice woman, who crochets them herself, to sell them in our shop. And they are beautiful. The wool is indescribable fascinating and produced in Iceland as well as the flowers. They are brooches you can attach anywhere you like. Maybe your favourite pullover just waited for such a great companion?

The wool comes from Istex, Iceland. Isn’t the look great?

I visited Iceland in June, but am only now really looking at the photographs I made while I was there.

Sifting through them, I’m finding a lot of examples of why I love shooting on the holga. I seem to be always drawn back to multiple, whether they are simultaneous or sequential— in other words, print or video— or both. Multiple imagery calls me to relate the multiplicity of my experience, the layers upon layers, the unoriginality of my experience; I hate to say it, but the postmodern condition.

Also, they just look so pretty.

I need to keep working on these to try to keep some art-momentum. Being so mentally wrapped up in school and work right now (despite the fact that I am really not that busy) is making it difficult for me to get in touch with what I actually want to be doing. It’s not clear what that is these days.

Una vez acabada la “sesión fotográfica” en la zona de los pseudocráteres, nos dirigimos a la cascada de Godafoss.

Allí nos encontramos con dos parejas, una catalana y otra euskera que viajaban juntas en sendas autocaravanas (embarcaron en Dinamarca si no recuerdo mal) muy majas. Desde aquí si me leen (nos encontramos en agosto de 2009), un abrazo fuerte!.

Luego nos dirijimos a Akureyri, capital del norte donde pasamos la noche en una “granja”.

La siguiente foto es la de la iglesia al anochecer.

Curiosamente las luces rojas de la mayoría de semáforos tenían forma de corazón (y había muchos dibujados en los aparadores) ¿alguien sabe el motivo?. En un principio pensé que Akureyri significaba corazón pero parece ser que no.

Perhaps the most stunning song ever. And that’s saying something. Beautiful, emotional, catchy, drama-filled… has it all. Especially love her vocals at the end when she does that lovely scream type thing.

Björk - Jóga (Strings & Vocals)

Yrsa Sigurdardottir makes her first contribution to a group blog with an international flavor and charms everyone with her modesty and humor. She says,

If you are wondering what country I do call home, imagine a tiny island way up north where the only banking institution not humiliated and disgraced is the national blood bank. If this does not help, imagine a country obviously named by someone intent on keeping people out. If still at loss, imagine a war with no prisoners and absolutely no opportunity of placing landmines as it was fought at sea, on fishing boats, over cod. There will be no more clues.

But a commenter adds some additional hints:

It’s also a country with the oldest parliamentary system in western europe–and probably the longest continuous one in the world. It’s a country that keeps adding to its territory without war. And it’s a country with one of the most moving collections of epic literature, poetry and prose.

I’ve tried to create main characters who are drastically different from the types who generally appear in crime novels. Mikael Blomkvist, for instance, doesn’t have ulcers, or booze problems or an anxiety complex. He doesn’t listen to operas, nor does he have an oddball hobby such as making model aeroplanes. He doesn’t have any real problems, and his main characteristic is that he acts like a stereotype ‘slut’, as he admits himself. I’ve also changed the sex roles on purpose: in many ways Blomkvist acts like a typical “bimbo”, while Lisbeth Salander has stereotype ‘male’ characteristics and values…..

The article that Maxine links to by Val McDermid is well worth a read. In “The Man Who Died Too Soon,” she concludes,

It’s a tribute to Larsson’s skill that he never allows his political concerns to dominate his desire to tell a cracking good story packed with dramatic incident and brimming with quirky insights. But without his personal commitment to taking a stand in support of what he believed in, I’m convinced these three novels could never have had so powerful an impact among readers.

Forty years ago, with their Martin Beck novels, the Swedish writers Sjöwall and Wahlöö blazed a trail that proved the crime novel provides the perfect vehicle to write stories that shine a critical light on the society we live in. Stieg Larsson demonstrated that this works just as well for present-day concerns, and his example should give aspiring writers the confidence to put their own beliefs at the heart of their work. Books like The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest remind us all that we ignore the wider world at our peril.

Glen Harper at International Noir Fiction reviews Gunnar Staalesen’s The Consorts of Death (and promises to say more about the Norwegian television series):

Staalesen shows great skill in keeping a very complex story coherent: characters and events weave in and out, with personal and metaphorical connections among them all along the way. There are some surpises at the end, as well, when Varg finally discovers what’s been going on in the several murders and in Johnny Boy’s life. Staalesen’s novels take on social issues, but there are many passages in this book that are right out of classic noir (though Varg isn’t the usual noir hero, he has too much hope for his clients’ fates). There’s a lot more Varg Veum in Norwegian, and I for one hope for translators and publishers to fill in the gaps in what has been translated.

There’s an article in The Prospect about the Stieg Larsson phenomenon that seems peculiarly off-base in almost every particular. The author says the Sweden portrayed in crime fiction “is the modern equivalent of the library in the country house of classic English detective stories: the conventional stage in which to find corpses surrounded by a selection of intriguing and sinister eccentrics. . . . The crimes are all solved by amateurs, and usually the punishment is dealt out by amateurs too.” Salander is a witch, and Blomqvist is “Philip Marlowe without the failures or the inner life.” He considers Sjowall and Wahloo as part of the same fantasy genre, and refers (quite snidely) to the “domestic Swedish detective novel, which Scandinavia women journalists in their thirties write instead of chicklit.” My favorite comment on this article comes from a friend at the FriendFeed  Crime and Mystery Fiction room, who feels the author was “jumping on a bandwagon and driving it into the nearest vacant column inches.” Really, it’s difficult to compete with the depth of knowledge and the sheer wit of the residents of this online community.

*The country in question is Iceland, if you haven’t guessed.

A piece I wrote for The Reykjavik Grapevine in Iceland on Cod fishing in the North Atlantic.

Enjoy,

Ben

Cod fishing in Iceland (C) The Reykjavik Grapevine

Icelandic crazy person and all around genius, Björk, is 44 today. I love this hot mess. She is talented, original, cute as button and crazy as a switch engine.

Iceland quick facts

Name: Republic of Iceland (Lýðveldið Ísland)
Language: Icelandic
Area and population: Iceland is approximately the same size as Pennsylvania, but has only 2% of its population: that is 300,000 people. (The population density is extremely low, about the same as that of Australia.)

The People

The first permanent settlers of this distant and hostile land had been Irishmen and Vikings, who became the ancestors of today’s Icelanders. According to the guidebook Icelanders have a strong national identity, which stems from the fact that it’s a small and isolated country, often overlooked by larger nations. (During World War II Britain occupied the whole country with only 700 marines, as the country has no full-time army). Still, being able to stand a winter of permanent (semi-)darkness is rather impressive, and the country is (or at least had been before the banking system collapsed in 2008) one of the richest in the world.

The language is Icelandic (a country of 300,000 people has its own language), which is similar to Norwegian, Danish and Swedish, but, similarly to the rest of Scandinavia, most people also speak English. One of the language’s peculiarities is the lettern Thorn, named after Scandinavian god Thor, which looks like this: þ. This letter was part of English for a long time — until it was replaced by the th sound in the 15th century (which is the sound it corresponds to). (If you had been alive five centuries ago, you could now be saying “What’s þat?.”.

Society seems to be quite informal (probably due to the number of people in the country — many medium-sized towns elsewhere have larger populations than the whole of Iceland), apparently anyone can meet the prime minister to discuss ideas with him/her (the position is currently held by the openly lesbian Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir — her last name literally means “daughter of Sigurðar”, as Icelanders don’t have family names in the Western sense). We wanted to meet her and suggest the following touristic slogan for the country: “Iceland — where trains are never late.” Note that there aren’t any trains in the country, but still, it does sound good. (The folowing is from a blog entry teaching various Icelandic expressions to the prospective traveller: “Where is the train station? There isn’t a train station either, forget about it.”).

Icelanders have had a parliament (for more than 1070(!) years — the parliament had its first session in 930 AD on the fault line between the North American and Eurasian Plates — in the picture below yo ucan see Europe on the left, and America on the right:

Most people live in the capital, Reykjavík, in not particularly pretty concrete houses. Apart from this there are a few smaller towns and many small, godforsaken settlements scattered around the country:

And a bit of suburbia in the middle of nowhere:

Geology and Fauna

Volcanic activity has created incredible landscapes with mountains, glaciers, endless plains and plateaus, waterfalls plunging off cliffs and rivers winding into infinity.

Iceland is one of the few places left in the world where the land is still “forming” — occasional volcano eruptions cover places with lava, new islands are born (the world’s youngest island, Surtsey, can be found here — it came into being in the 1960s) — this is the same process that formed the Earth hundreds of millions of years ago, only much slower now.

Dirt track across the lava fields of the Reykjanes Peninsula (south of Reykjavík):

Volcanic activity means that the country has access to a huge amount of geotermic energy, and hot water is often directly sourced from underground hot springs (this is easy to tell as the high sulphur content makes it smell like rotten eggs) — roadside geotermic power plants are a common sight:

The landscape often changes so quickly that things in the background look surreal, as if they were put there with Photoshop:

Weather

Iceland’s weather is extremely fickle, but mostly cold and windy (the daily high is 14 degrees Celsius in the summer), so a day, for example, can be sunny, cold and windy in the morning, rainy, cold and windy in the afternoon, and foggy, cold and windy in the evening. It also tends to hail. If it wasn’t windy though, summers would be quite easy to tolerate.

Though lies mostly south of the arctic circle, summertime is marked by an almost unbroken several-month spell of sunlight (the sun does dip below the horizon, but only just), while winters are long, dark and cold. The midnight sun in May:

The extra sunlight is confusing at first, 10pm often feels like it’s just late afternoon. This picture was taken at 11pm:

Due to the cold and windy weather not many plants manage to cling on to the loose soil, so Iceland is mostly covered by tundra — trees are a rare sight, but even bushes are hard to come by.

The weather is perfect for kite-flying, but be careful, you might never have encountered winds of such strength before:

The wind blowing two waterfalls into thin air as soon as they leave the hillside:

Infrastructure

Icelandic infrastructure owes much to American forces occupying the island during WWII (Iceland conveniently lies halfway between Europe and the US), as they built many of today’s roads. Still, roads can still turn into a muddy dirt track with alarming suddenness. However, what’s bad for drivers is great for the land — Icelanders do seem to respect the incredible nature that surrounds them and don’t over-develop anything, leaving vast swathes of land nearly intact. If you choose to access more remote areas, don’t leave without a 4WD though — getting stuck in the middle of a lava plain is not that fun.

Most of the interior of the country is untouched, barren landscape — there are a few dirt tracks, but that’s it. This sign (very subtly) warns the driver that this road will become nonexistent after a few miles, after which you’ll find yourself even more in the middle of nowhere:

The almost completely deserted Route 365:

Vík

Vík is a rundown and seemingly deserted settlement on the south coast, and is famous for the black volcanic sand of its beaches:

It was a great day for a walk on the beach (only got half-drenched under bigger waves):

The Blue Lagoon

The Blue Lagoon is a (mostly) open-air spa heated by an adjacent geothermic power plant — its turquoise waters look completely surreal in the middle of the black lava field:

To see and to read

Halldór Laxness: Independent People
101 Reykjavík (like a Pedro Almodóvar movie, but with Icelanders)

Tips

• Take a kite.
• Rent a 4WD.
• Eat a puffin.
• Don’t ask Björk about Icelandic eskimos.

“People are always asking me about eskimos, but there are no eskimos in Iceland.” (Björk)

It’s that time of the year again.

I recently spoke with a friend of mine. He’s Moroccan and he’s lived in Iceland for a few years now. I asked him how it went and he just shook his head. “It’s this fucking darkness, man,” (he never swears) “I don’t know how you can handle it.”

I had hardly noticed, but once he mentioned it I felt a familiar feeling sweep through my body. Of course I’d noticed, I just hadn’t given it much thought. But, all the same, it was all there, yet again. The extended tiredness, the lethargy, the reflective mood, the sadness. In Iceland, it doesn’t matter whether you’re depressed or not. The darkness changes you.

Or should I say, the light changes you, because it is dark for two thirds of the year or so. We spend most of our lives waiting for those three golden months of pure brightness, those months when our country is transformed into a sun empire and all bets are off. There’s a reason we are a nation of maniacs – during the long autumn/winter/spring months Iceland’s suicide rate beats that of any other nation in Western civilization. During the summer, however, sleep is almost frowned upon. Nobody in Iceland dares to dream in June or July. Not when it’s all coming true before your eyes. In those times, all the world’s a stage, and life is a party.

Last year our entire economic system famously collapsed. That the collapse should happen upon the start of October, just in time for the arrival of extended, dark months, didn’t give me any pause at the time, but it sure does now. What would the collapse have been like at the start of June? Would we have raged, rallied and rioted as was the case in the darkness of winter? Or would we just have shrugged our shoulders and played another bout of midnight golf in the perfect twilight of sun and moon?

I often wonder about friends living in faraway places. Guys like my esteemed colleagues here, Björgvin and Gunnar, creatures of darkness living closer to the equator than those of us marooned ‘up here’. The one time I’ve ever lived abroad was the three months I spent in the state of Oklahoma, USA between September and December 2001. My most vivid memory of coming home on December 2nd that year was how hard the darkness hit me. Walking out of the terminal at eight in the morning into a blizzard storm, it was so dark you couldn’t see the blazing hail that attacked you from all angles. You could only feel it puncture the skin on your face. Like some fearless predator, once you saw it, it was too late. There was no escape.

Not even in rural America, far away from the lights of any kind of civilized world, would you find such darkness. Even there, you had the stars to look up to, to give hope to. When you’re besieged by stealth snow in the Icelandic darkness, there is no hope. Only one thought persists; find cover before you become too cold/wet/tired.

So, for my first post, I’d like to ask my fellow blahgers a question: how goes it for you? How’s the darkness out there? And, how does it compare to the north-Atlantic nights? Any sign of depression? No? Or is it just me?

Guess so. Now, excuse me while I set myself on fire. An Icelander can but dream of dying in a haze of light.

What’s the drooping Dollar and British Pound mean for US and UK travellers? A journey to the most European countries has become more expensive in the last year. But there is one big exception: Iceland! The country in the north Atlantic ocean has seen its banks collapse and nearly has gone bankrupt. Today the Icelandic krona is worth less than one US penny or 0.0049 GBP.

What about visiting Iceland next year and experience the great nature with volcanoes, geysers, deserts and wide fjords? On the one hand you can take a plane to get there. But of course it’s more recreative to take a ferry to Iceland. Today the ships from Europe to Iceland are both ferry and cruise ships, so that you can enjoy your yourney from the first day on. The only scheduled connection between central Europe and Iceland is from Denmark. So if you want to get to Iceland by ferry from the UK, you have to go from Harwich to Esjberg in Denmark first. But when arriving in Iceland, you will be more relaxed and you will save money, because you can go around with your own vehicle and it’s not necessary to rent a car.

Exotic Destinations a Trend

 Yesterday one of our regular customers booked a cruise from Buenos Aires, Argentina to Santiago, Chile—a 12-day voyage around the bottom of South America.  He’s going in February which is peak summertime in the destination.  Some of his stops include Montevideo, Uruguay, the Falkland Islands and Ushuaia, Argentina (the world’s southernmost city), as well as a passage through the Straits of Magellan, before ending in Santiago, Chile.

 While his itinerary is rather routine for a South America cruise, it is symbolic of a larger trend of cruisers who want to visit more unusual places on their cruise vacation.  And the cruise lines are adding new destinations at a record pace to satisfy the increased in interest in new ports to visit and experience.  New additions might be Longyearben Island in the far north, or a port in Greenland, or Iceland.  The options continue to expand for 2010.

Other places seeing significant expansion include cruises to Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Greece and Italy, or to the Black Sea and the Crimea.  With the growth in fleet size the cruise lines are scrambling to find places they can send their older ships that will keep them full, and the winner is all of us.

While these more exotic cruises are becoming more prevalent, they do tend to be longer and a little more complex to book and experience.  They might require special visas, inoculations, or other details, but, with enough planning time, none of those things is a problem.

My last post ended with my run on the Alter-G and a new stress fracture. Today, three months later, 2 days shy of 12 weeks I am running.  Most days my foot does not hurt, except when I am walking my very unruly dogs who jerk me all over.  All this time off since May 26, the first break, has given me a lot of time to think, to lay on my sofa and be depressed and  be pissed off and think of what I want to change in my life.  Now it is fall and all those races which I thought I would run were cancelled, but I smartly registered for Boston the day I canceled my NYC marathon.

I knew I could write my own training plan, but I wanted to be sure. I was ready to work with John Henwood when I read an article by Coach Roy Benson in Running Times. Something in it make me  call Roy and discuss my breaks and my approach back to racing. I was so taken by Roy that I wanted to work with him, to collaborate, his words, on my training plan. I have never felt such confidence in any coach or any training as I do now with Roy. I started the plan October 19th after clearance from my doc. It began with running a total of 110 minutes over four  days for the week. The plan incorporated my swimming and rowing workouts. I was thrilled to begin again and I just had to trust the plan and that I would come back. My first 25 minute jog  at a 9:00 pace felt like I was pushing a bolder up a mountain. I was not sweating, or heart pounding, it was just that my body did not want to move. In these last five weeks I have seen some  9:45’s  and even 10:00’s when I ran two days in a row. But my longest run was on Sunday, a full 60 minutes. The breakdown was 8:30, 8:40, 8:29, 8:31, 8:00, 7:19, 9:30, 7:53. That 8:00 – 7:19 I met a runner along the way and ran with him, though he left me at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge with a huge hill to climb and tired legs, that is where the 9:30 came in. It was rough, but I was so happy.

From now until the end of January I will be base building, no speed work, no repeats, a few steady state and a lot of general aerobic. I have it in my mind that I just want to have fun in Boston not worry about my time goals. I will leave my time goals behind, expect that I want a PR of course. Some really exciting news is that I will be doing a few long runs in Iceland. In January, I am flying to Reykavik to meet my Dutch artist friend Miek for some big hiking and a day at the Blue Lagoon.  then we are off to the Netherlands and our annual big sea walk, a 7 hour walk along the North Sea. It is Miek’s 65 birthday and I have not seen her in two years. She is a physical power house and I am really looking forward to our big walks. One year we were both guests of the Miskolc Museum of Contemporary Art in Hungary. Every morning we got up at 7:00 am, robustly walked 8k to the hot springs, bathed for 2-3 hours, then walked or jogged back to the studios to work. It was one of the most fantastic summers ever.

Bjork, the iconic Icelandic musician and actress has recorded a new song with Radiohead singer Thom Yorke. The single was composed specifically to encourage active support for the Náttúra campaign, which aims at collating and providing sustainable and eco-friendly options suitable for Iceland, and generating alternative ways to utilize it’s natural resources. People will be able to submit their ideas on the website for sustainable green workplaces for Icelanders.

Bjork – Náttúra

According to Björk, “It is now more important than ever before to emphasize a respect for nature…I believe that profits, technological advances and working together with nature can all go hand in hand. None need to be sacrificed at the expense of the others.”

Having witnessed the splendors of Iceland firsthand, I can totally get behind any cause that aims to preserve its natural beauty. Everyone should see Iceland…glaciers, volcanos, waterfalls, hot springs, geysers and super shaggy goats EVERYWHERE. Here are a couple of pics of the most magical place on Earth.

Is it any wonder Bjork wants to protect it?