I'm not the world's best Northern light photographer ...

... but here are two pictures of a long Northern light who is dancing right now over Akureyri:

I took the pictures through the window because I live on the 8th floor and have a good view over the town. But it is only possible to open the window up a little gap, and there is a reflection on the photos. But I am going to take a walk outside soon and watch it dancing. :)

Icelandic February highland and food adventures

This weekend I had two first time events.
The first one was that I went on a two days ski trip and stayed overnight in a so-called fjallaskál, a mountain or highland cottage.
The other one was that I experienced my first Þorrablót, a come-together in February when you "enjoy" the classical Icelandic winter dishes with each other. Fresh food was a very rare thing during the harsh Icelandic winters, so in order to survive you have to know how to conserve your food during the long winters. So people survived on potatoes and turnips which are possible to store for a long time, and they had a special technique to make meat long lasting. The trick is to pickle the meat in whey or to smoke it. There was lamb meat and there was whale (bacon) and there was shark. The shark needs to be digged, though, because the fresh meat is poisonous and it needs to ferment. So the Þorramatur (Þorra food) is a mixture of potatoes, turnips and sour meat and fermented meat. Quite special but that was the way to survive.

Þorramatur (þorra food). Mashed potatoes, different pickled lamb meats, and whale bacon. Picture taken in the highland cottage.

 The ski trip was a special þorra ski trip organized by the lovely hiking association of Akureyri, and we drove to the highlands East of lake Mývatn which is in the middle of the volcanic zone of Iceland. There are big stretches of lava and strings of little craters, and the biggest volcano of Iceland (Askja) is somewhat close-by. From the road to the highland cottage it was around 9 km over the rather flat lava highlands. The weather was mostly calm and cold and the snow was crispy and perfect for skiing. Since it was my first trip with a planned night in highland cottage here in Iceland I was thinking a lot how much food to take with me and ended with packing a huge bag of cooked pasta with vegetables which lasted for three days and then still a quarter or so of it was left ... I also carried my own þorra food which I had bought a little bucket of (you can get those buckets here in Iceland during February and they are full of meat "specialities" lying in sour whey). So with my backpack filled with a weird mixture of sleeping bag, the huge pasta bag and a bag of sour meat (and a thermos filled with wonderful hot tea) I went along with my group skiing over the crispy white endless highland landscape glittering in the snow along with the string of small craters. When we reached the highland cottage which was a bit hidden behind one of the craters I was surprised by how well equipped it was. Due to a solar cell it had electricity and two well working ovens (gas and oil), ten beds, a well equipped kitchen and a lobby with a good heating system to dry wet clothes. There was an outhouse with a toilet (the toilet seat overfrozen with little ice crystals, so I am quite sure that nobody took a seat on it ...). While heating up the cottage we took a little ski walk around the area and had a look at the old house (which hardly deserves the name "house") and walked up one of the craters to have a look inside (and it had boiling red lava inside ... no, just kidding. :) ). We spent a cosy evening eating the þorra food (and I am grateful this is only done once per year nowadays), singing þorra songs and drinking hot chocolate with cognac.

Endless snowy lava highlands in the lake Mývatn area.

Pointing out the way to the highland cottage. If you don't know where it is you would probably never find it in this endless uniform landscape ...

The group (picture on www.ffa.is).

Me enjoying the february sun.

The highland cottage in sight!

Inside was a quite well-equipped kitchen ...

... and a really well-working oven!

That's the old house and I was quite happy that we didn't have to spend the night in there ...

That's the crater next to the cottage, picture taken from its neighbour crater.

Cosy þorra evening in the cottage.

Group prepared to ski back the next morning in some snow showers.

The february sun appearing from behind the clouds and the quietly falling snow.

Wet'n'wild: Cross-country skiing trip no. 2 (2014)

My second cross-country skiing trip of 2014 (again with the hiking association of Akureyri) has been a rather wet one. The snow under my feet was wet and heavy and the air was full of those compact fast falling snow flakes which melt immediately as soon as they touch ones clothes. Plus a layer of thick fog which seems to have chosen the fjord to be on an early february holiday. Smoothly and densely it lies over the fjord and seems to say "There is an amazing landcape to see here but I won't reveal it."
Actually I haven't skied much outside a loipe and I don't own ski for "wilderness" tours. So I was very grateful when my German speaking guide borrowed me a pair of real cross-country ski which even had the right bindings for my shoes. Her ski are slightly broader and a bit "less loose" on the feet than mine, so I got an immediate "Ahaaa, nice!" feeling when I stepped into the deep snow.
The plan was to ski a bit up Mt. Súlur (Akureyri's "backyard" mountain) and then to roam cosily on a fenland located on a softly sloping plateau. Because of the fog and the wet snow it was decided that it wouldn't be really worth it going there (no gliding in the heavy snow and now view in the heavy fog), so the route was changed and we went a little bit into Glerárdalur, a beautiful valley (well, there was a sign showing beautiful pictures of the valley on a clear day). The skiing went more or less okay but at some point we stopped because the heavy sticky snow had formed pads under our ski which made it impossible to glide on it. So we decided to do some "group waxing" and everybody became busy taking off their ski and waxing them properly. So I did the same but went with a bit too much of "the more the better" attitude to work and waxed even the grooves in the middle of the ski. However, these grooves are meant to stop the ski from gliding backwards when walking up a slope. So I was okay when we went down a tiny canyon but failed completely when we walked it up again. The ski just slided away under my feet, I stepped to the left (which was the downgoing side of the slope), lost balance and ended head over feet half-way down the slope in the deep snow. And my ski got of course thoroughly stuck in the wet soft snow and my first and only thought was "Oh God, why?" My German speaking guide laughed a bit before she gave me proper guidance how to safe myself out of this situation (and what I learnt from this is "Don't you ever wax the grooves again like this. Ever.").
Anyway, it's fun practicing on real cross-country ski and here are some pictures:

Up the slope through heavy wet snow!

We were literally IN the snow (which was under us and between us and above us.) Oh, and there is a beautiful valley behind me ... somewhere.

Tea break: Deep soft snow also has its advantages, for example in holding a thermos and a cup really well!

The tea cosy and the snow cosy

Here is a picture of my tea cosy and me taken in the sewing room of Punkturinn:

Punkturinn took this picture of the tea cosy and me.

My, this place is so cosy and creative! I already started my next handicraft project over there but I won't reveal yet what it is. Just that it involves my knitting needles and that there was a half circle of women sitting around me today looking at it because they think it is so cute. :)

Oh, and then I saw that the hiking association of Akureyri put some pictures of our trip on their website which reveals a bit more the true nature of my cross-country skiing skills:

The skillfull cross-country skier turning around for a professional picture ...

And ending very unprofessionally in the snow.

Tea cosy cat made in Akureyri's handicrafter's paradise

I have found a wonderful place here in Akureyri, a place like I have been dreaming about sometimes: a handicraft house where everybody can meet up, has access to a range of wonderful facilities to use and meet other handicrafters, sitting together at a big table knitting and chatting.
This place is called "Punkturinn" and it was founded in the 90ties with its first intention being a meeting place for unemployed people to have facilities to work with their own creative projects.
Now it has a sewing room as well as glass, tree and clay workshops. And a big table which is always surrounded by busy chatty knitters. And p-l-e-n-t-y of workshops where you can learn everything from sewing to binding your own books or building your own bird house! It's a true paradise for handicrafters.

I have been inside handicrafter's paradise several times now and got a very warm welcome by the friendly staff who assisted me patiently when I used one of the sewing machines in the sewing room (I haven't really used a sewing machine before, so I had no clue how the thing works, let alone how to insert the sewing thread around its numerous little hooks, edges and wheels :) ).

I have a book called "Nordic Crafts" and there is manual in there how to sew a super cute tea cosy cat. My mom had bought me some very beautiful fabrics in Germany and here I was cutting them and sewing them together in this wonderful handicrafter's house.

Cut out fabrics for my tea cosy cat.

Tea cosy cat's face.

My tea cosy cat: finished! :)

The sewing edge.

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!