5 posts tagged “movies”

So since returning from Denmark I've been back at school.  Actually the day we arrived I had to go to school to get my schedule.  That was not fun.  I really just wanted to sleep.  This semester I'm taking Figure Drawing, French, Icelandic for foreigners, Art History, and Movie History.  It's a nice, light, mostly enjoyable schedule.  It's hard to believe that a month of school is over already!  Just 3 months left of my Icelandic education.  I like my schedule this semester it's much more language dependent.  I'm no longer a fish out of water when it comes to the language.  My gills are growing, so to speak. 

My 17th birthday was a couple of weeks ago.  It was very low key, but that is what I like.  I got a couple "Til hamingju með daginn!' and "Til hamingju með afmælið!"  Luckily no one sang to me.  I blush like crazy whenever I get the birthday song.  I came home to a very nice birthday celebration.  Amma, Mamma, Pabbi, and I ate some orange cheesecake and other treats.  Mamma and Pabbi gave me two cds, both somewhat an inside joke, a pair of nice wool handwarmers, and this great puffin bowl (it´s very touristy and for little kids, but I love it).  Amma gave me a pair of hand-knitted wool socks that match the sweater I got for Christmas and a nice necklace.  Then we went out to dinner to Café Duus, this nice restaurant that´s next to the art gallery in Keflavík.  We weren't really that hungry having eaten cheesecake earlier, but we enjoyed ourselves.  Mamma's brother and his wife also had a birthday that day and wouldn't you know it?  They were at Duus as well.  Sometimes it's hard to remember that you had a birthday.  Like when it's a new year; it takes you a while to remember to write 2008 instead of 2007.  It's kind of like that.

Too much snow.

Lately the weather has been a little crazy as you can see above.  It snowed on and off for the last two weeks.  The friday before last we even had a "snow day."  Which, technically isn't allowed to happen.  My school is owned by the government and therefore isn't allowed to close.  Although it wouldn't have mattered if school was canceled because the road between Sandgerði and Keflavík was closed.  Luckily it hasn't snowed a lot lately because to tell you the truth I'm a tad sick of snow.  I went out to the movies with a friend of mine, Þórdís, last saturday (did you know that in Iceland it costs more to see Icelandic movies than it does to see foreign ones).  Around 2 o'clock in the morning she tried to drive me home but the weather was so bad I ended up staying the night.  We just watched another movie before going to sleep.  It's not so windy now, but it's definitely getting colder.

Isn't it purrrty?

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In late January the special month of Þorrablot begins.  During this special month Icelanders eat the traditional Icelandic foods.  I must note that I find absolutely none of these foods to be especially good.  For example, the picture above shows svið, or singed lamb head.  They served it in the cafeteria a couple of weeks ago and the lunch ladies let me take a picture of it because I told them that no one at home would believe me.  If you speak Icelandic to them, butchered and accented it may be, they'll let you do anything.  Other foods eaten during Þorrablot include blóðmör (blood sausage/pudding), hakarl (putrefied shark meat, couldn't even swallow this), harðfiskur (dried fish, I find it similar to eating rope), lifrarpylsa (lambs liver made into a pudding-esque sausage), sviðasulta (head cheese), and hrútspungar (jellied ram testicles).  Luckily mamma is pregnant again and therefore a little sensitive to foods so there's no Þorramat at our house.  However, my Icelandic teacher brought in a big þorra smorgasbord to class for all of us to try the delectable traditional food.  It was fun to try though just to be able to say that "yes, I have indeed munched on the reproductive organs of certain farm animals."

Speaking of Icelandic holidays, tomorrow is Bolladagur.  A day simply to eat cream puffs.  Amma Ásta baked some today for us to eat tomorrow.  According to tradition children wake their parents by hitting them with sticks while yelling "Bolla, bolla, bolla..."  The more hits mean the more buns you get to eat.  Then tuesday is, as most of you know, Fat Tuesday (also called, Shrove tuesday and Mardi gras) although where I´m from it´s called Fastnacht Day.  I'm from an area full of Pennsylvania Germans (sometimes called Dutch) and we delight in eating fastnachts on Fat Tuesday.  I'm going to miss those.  In Iceland Fat Tuesday is called Sprengidagur (bursting day) and you eat salted lamb and pea soup.  Ash Wednesday in Iceland is called Öskudagur.  On this day little kids dress up in costumes and sing for candy (quite similar to Halloween just without the haunts).  In the past they hung small pouches on other peoples' back, similar to the poisson d'avril tradition in France, but anymore it's just a hunt for candy.

There's not much else to talk about.  Life has been going well.  It's hard to believe that I only have 4 and a half months left here.  And they're going to fly by, believe you me.  February will go, then it's March which means Easter and the music festival up north (Aldrei fór ég suður), after that April and possibly a trip to Dalvík and Akureyri, then May and school is out and farm visits, and then finally June.  There is certainly not much time left.  Not much at all.

Down town

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Last weekend was a blast!  On Friday I met Rebecca after school.  We went grocery shopping with mamma and then headed home.  We made pizza for dinner and talked while it was baking.  I don't think we ever ran out of things to talk about the whole weekend!  After dinner pabbi gave us a ride into Keflavik so that we could go to the movies.  There was only around 6 other people in the theater with us watching Eastern Promises.  It seemed pretty empty for a Friday night.   After the movie ended we still had a while until the bus to Sandgerði came so we walked to a café and got some coffee.  Afterwards we headed home and spent the rest of the night talking.

becca og ég

On Saturday around noon Becca and I took the bus into Reykjavik.  We went shopping at Kringlan (one of the bigger shopping malls) for quite some time.  Around 4 we caught the inner-city bus (the strætó) and headed into the center of town.  On the bus we met a fellow exchanger, Karen (Belgium).  She had an appointment so she couldn't hang out with us, but we were able to talk while we rode to our stop.  After we got off the bus we headed to Cafe Paris, a fairly popular cafe downtown.  We enjoyed a nice chat in the cozy atmosphere over some Swiss Mochas.  We payed and then perused the shops for a bit.  Around 5:30 we headed towards B.S.Í. to catch our bus back to Keflavik.  We got off near Amma's and headed there for dinner.  Later that night we watched some movies with mamma and pabbi and then we hit the sack.  We were both quite exhausted.

Cappuccino!

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Baby Blues

I thought I'd start this post by showing you all some Icelandic!  This, as probably many of you can recognize, is the American comic Baby Blues, but it's translated into Icelandic!  And I could actually understand it the first time I read it, so I thought I'd share it with you all.   This way you can see what Icelandic looks like.  So the first panel says: I am so tired! Tough day at kindergarten? Second panel: Yeah. What did you do? Nothing. Third panel: Silence. Fourth panel: But we did it all day!  So yes, extremely funny.  Especially in crazy Icelandic.

So I ended up not going on that class trip that I didn't want to go on.  But, not because of personal opposition because it ended up being canceled/postponed.  It turns out that to get to the place the bus has to cross a river without a bridge, but the river had flooded due to the crazy amounts of rain we'd been getting (It hasn't rained this much here since 1959) so the bus driver called it off.  It might happen next weekend but we'll see.  It costs 7,000 kr. which is roughly 115 USD and I'd really rather save that money but apparently this place is amazingly gorgeous...  Well I'm not making any promises.

Snowy Day

Friday night I went out to dinner with Halldis (an AFS volunteer who went to Spain last year), Manu, and Alessandra.  We went to this pizza joint in Keflavik called Langbest.  We got pizza and they magically had jalapeno poppers on the menu so I ordered a plate of those for the table!  I just can't pass up the cheesy peppery goodness!  We talked for a bit after dinner and then we decided that some ice cream was in order.  It had started to snow while we were eating which was just amazingly awesome!  I love the snow and I'd been told that it doesn't snow very much in Iceland anymore so I appreciate any snowflake I see.  So we hopped in Halldis´s car and drove to Ungó to get some ice cream.  It was soft serve, but here it´s really good.  It was funny because Manu and Alessandra love love the ice cream here.  They have both never had soft serve since before coming to Iceland (apparently in Italy they just have normal ice cream) and apparently they think it´s much better than plain ice cream.  After eating our ice cream we drove up and down Hafnargata for a bit and talked.  Then we went home.  It was a really nice evening.  Halldis was really nice and she, of course, understood what we´d been going through.

grasker

Snow in Keflavik

So not much is going on this weekend.  But, I'm okay with that because I need a boring weekend every now and then.  Yesterday Mamma, Júlíus, and I went to Ikea (here it's pronounced eh-ke-ah).  The one they have here is humongous!! (I just found out that the Ikea here is 4,000,000 sq. m.!!)  It was awesome; I got to eat yummy Swedish meatballs (sænskar kjötbollur) and buy some Läkerol, this Swedish candy that they have here.  As soon as I have my own house/apartment/humble abode I am so going on a shopping spree to Ikea.  I pretty much fell in love with every piece of furniture/ornamental item that existed in that 4 million sq. meter store.

Lately, I've been developing this... obsession of sorts over the item you see to your left.  It's the Stóra Myndordðabókin and I want it.  Badly.  In English it means Big Picture Dictionary, which is what it essentially is, but in actuality it is so much more than that.  I've been lucky enough to hold one of these puppies in my hands and... oh, 'twas almost orgasmic.  It's over 1,000 pages full of pictures with their respective titles in Icelandic, English, French, Spanish, and German.   Oh it's heavenly and I would buy one right away...if only it didn't cost around 200 USD.  Perhaps it'll show up under the Christmas tree?  (or maybe I'll just give into desire and drop 2 c-notes for it)

I've also started to drink a lot of coffee here.  It's a very Icelandic thing for friends and relatives to just stop over for a cup of kaffi.  There's this great Icelandic coffee brand called Kaffitár.  Their factory/shop is in Reykjanes and they have cafés in Reykjavik and at both the Keflavík and Reykjavík airports.  They have this great coffee called Guatemala that's flavored with dark chocolate and fruit.  Oh, It's spectacular (Mom: I'm sending you some for Christmas and next summer there will be at least 5 bags of it in my suitcase).  Here thought a lot of people use a moka pot (seen on left) to prepare coffee.  I had never actually seen one used before but I'm really starting to prefer them to the traditional drip coffee-pots.  (There will also probably be a moka pot of my own in my suitcase when I come home too)

Well this week Alessandra and I are going to try and get together Thursday night.  We really want to try the Thai restaurant in Keflavík and afterwards we're going to hit the movies.  Everything that's out is pretty old, for example Superbad, Hairspray, and Stardust.  But, I'm sure we'll enjoy ourselves none the less.  Then hopefully this weekend I am going into Reykjavik to visit Karoline and Jelena.  Hopefully all goes as planned.

Oh, I've also just purchased an orchid for my room.  Please send out good vibes/prayers/Buddhist mantras/etc. for it because I really don't want it to die on me.

Lovely Orchid