Akureyri has snow for skiing, so they said.

Well well ... Quite a lot of stuff happened since I wrote the last time into my blog. I spent a wonderful christmas in Germany, went for a week to Denmark to visit my fungal nerdy friends and attended a fungal picture night with them (where we looked at over 2.000 pictures of mushrooms!) - and I moved to Akureyri. The Akureyri move is now 1.5 weeks ago and I must say, I don't regret it. The silence of the Icelandic countryside in the winter time had lately become a bit too much for me and I hated getting stuck because of snow storms and the like. So I'm glad to be in a little town now. Akureyri is rather small, it has 17.000 inhabitants and lies at the end of a fjord cuddled inbetween mountains. So not many storms reach it (so they said). It snows quite a lot, though (so they said). Which is great. Today I went on a little guided cross-country skiing tour with the "hiking association of Akureyri". It turned out that I was the only one who attended the trip, so I ended up having two guides: an Icelandic speaking one and a German speaking one. How privileged can one be? We started our trip at the skiing area Hlíðarfjall but left the trail soon to criss cross somehow up the hill and ending on another trail marked by wooden sticks. By the time reaching it, dense fog was engulfing the mountain and I was told that we would have a great view over the fjord if it only wouldn't be for the fog (so they said). (There's a lot of "so they said" here in Iceland ...). They led me to a little cottage which had an amazingly dense layer of dead flies on the floor (so I seriously wonder how many flies we will have here during the summer but I shall not worry, there won't be so many. So they said.). We sat down and drank good hot tea and the fog outside cleared and gave us a bit of a view onto the fjord.

A little bit of view on Akureyri at the end of the fjord when the fog cleared away.

Hues of the snow.

 The fjord is quite amazing, it is one of the longest of Iceland and it has these beautiful mountains on both sides. The winters get a bit colder than usually and the summers a bit warmer than usually here because we are rather far inside the country - and that's great. The biggest skiing area of Iceland is here and the swimming pool is just installing the biggest waterslide of Iceland. Then there are also some forests. Real forests with trees higher than humans, not the usual sight in Iceland. That's quite beautiful.
Anyway, here is a picture without forests but with a lot of snow:

Finally an area in Iceland which has enough snow to use my cross-country ski properly! Me in front of the little mountain cottage whose floor has an amazingly dense layer of dead flies.

Cross-country skiing trip no. 1 (2014) successfully completed!