Ted in a China Shop: Barbecue time

Greetings!

The past few days have been quite eventful! I will hit a few of the highlights here.
Tuesday night we got done with work a bit early and I think Kyle, Bre and I all took naps. The long days and short nights are catching up with us a bit. We pretty much all agree that we need a day to sleep in! Which of course doesn’t look like it will happen for another week, at least. We’ll have to start going to bed earlier instead, I guess… After our nap time we had a good dinner of some simple pan fried chicken. The cuts of chicken here are interesting. This was I guess what you would call a shoulder. It was good, although not the meatiest, which happens when you’re shopping on a budget and pretty much the only meat we get is what happens to be on sale at the Bonus that particular week. (aside: Bonus is a chain of discount grocery stores here in Iceland. It is a truly traumatic experience shopping there, especially if you don’t know what is where and you can’t read the name of half of the items, forcing you to guess what something is. Kyle literally got nudged out of the way by this lady last time)

Anyway, after dinner Jamin and David and Claudio were going to work on their papers so we underlings had some time to ourselves. Instead of sitting around we decided we should go out and do something. We threw out some ideas like hiking or going to surf the internet at the field station or just driving around but we decided we were too tired to hike, none of us had emails to send, and driving around cost too much money. So we decided to go relax in a hot spring nearby. I would write the name but it is a bit of a secret, only a select few know where it is, and how to get to it, much less that it even exists. And who knows what kind of secret-revealing hoodlums are patrolling my blog for just this kind of information… But anyway it was a really cool place, the spring/pool was down a narrow, deep crevice in a lava field and we had to climb down about 20 feet to the bottom. The water was unbelievably clear, and very warm. It was nearly the perfect temperature for the evening; great compensation for the chilly air and cold rain that was falling off and on. There was a mist rising from the water that made the whole scene look like a scene from some medieval movie. It was nice and relaxing, save the thought that crept into my head that one little disturbance in the equilibrium in the earth’s crust below me could cause me to be Dante’s Peaked… but it was a risk I was willing to take.

Wednesday after the workday we had our “landlords” Friða and Ella (the two Icelandic women [mother and daughter] whose house we live in) over for dinner. Neither of them speak English, so Árni and Unnur (the Icelanders who run the field station) came over as well. It was really great to learn about the farm we live on. It has been in the same family for over 200 years, and is one of the most prized parcels of land in the region. We had made a couple of minor changes to the house, moving some furniture and taking the pantry door off its hinges, and they noticed almost immediately. They couldn’t stop raving about how good the adjustments we made were! We had been pretty worried that they wouldn’t approve, and even hoped they wouldn’t notice.

We have had some incredible weather the past few days. I even was wearing short sleeves at a couple of points yesterday and today! We decided after we got in from collecting midges at all our field sites that we’d have a barbecue since our last attempt was thwarted by cold and wind and we had to resort to sautéing our hot dogs on the stove (Icelanders love hot dogs, by the way. You can get them almost everywhere, and they’re usually cheap, around $3.00, and much tastier than American ones.) We had quite a success this time, despite our lack of grilling utensils, which then resulted in a lack of hair on my knuckles…