Goodbye Lava Fields, Hello Minster Bells

It feels strange that a few hours ago (I guess 14 is more like it), John and I were wandering the pre-dawn streets of Reykjavik, lost on our quest to find the bus terminal and somehow led astray into some sort of shipyard. As the time of our flight drew nearer and we only seemed to be getting loster and loster, I flagged down a car for directions. In a wonderful turn of events, the driver of this car, a bouncer at a local club who was just getting off work, offered to give us a ride to the airport. He was very friendly, spoke excellent English, and even has a friend from Michigan. Without him, who knows where we'd be right now...

Our last two days in Iceland were tip-top, and progressed a little bit as follows: we ended up borrowing Sean's neighbors car for a trip through... the countryside? Well, whatever you call the brown grass and dramatic mountains with intermittent lava fields and craters, that's what we drove through. Our first stop was *ingvellir (I'm not sure how to make my Latin type the write characters), the site of Iceland's first legal and government meetings around 900 AD. There we walked through a rift valley along the mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the American and Eurasian tectonic plates converge. It was interesting to stand in a no-man's-land, not technically on either, or any, continent. After that it was off for Geysir and its surrounding field of boiling hot springs and bubbling cave-pools. Geysir itself, the second highest geyser and the namesake of all geysers, only actually functions during or immediately after volcanic eruptions, and so we had to settle for its smaller sibling, Strokkur.

After that, Sean let me take over driving for a while, and I had the pleasure of cruising past mountains and lava fields and farm houses in a snazzy little European auto. Or maybe it was an American model? I wasn't really paying attention to that, I guess; I just got a rush from driving for the first time since January. Our next stop was Gullfoss ("Golden Falls") on the river Hvitá. The falls are actually at a right angle from the turn of the river and disappear behind the cliff walls (especially with banks of snow and ice jutting out over the edges of the rock), making it seem as if the river simply disappears into a crack. But when we got up close, it felt a bit dizzying to be literally face-to-face with such a huge torrent of water. Away from the coast in Reykjavik, winter was still just beginning to recede, and so the mist and spray from the falls were a bit freezing. We scrambled around on some rocks and grass to take pictures, and then headed back to the car for our ride home. However, we passed a crater on the way--a collapsed magma chamber, as the sign explained it--and we felt compelled to stop and toss some igneous rocks towards the pond at the bottom of the pit. On the ride home, we listened to various Icelandic music to match the scenery and I balanced on the edge between rapt appreciation of the landscape and napping.

For our last day with Sean and Reykjavik, we took things easy, strolling around town, visiting shops but not buying things, and chatting in coffeeshops and restaurants. At one especially hip coffee shop, the ladies from the musical group Amiina stopped by. But they didn't seem to recognize us. I guess that's okay. We spent the majority of the evening post-dinner at another public pool, relaxing in the seawater pool or spring water or the steam room or the graduated hot tubs or the plain ol'... pool--whatever we fancied. After a few days of such leisurely evenings, I can see why a lot of Iceland people seem healthy and fresh, and why the city feels so safe. Maybe hot tubs are the best deterrents of violence? At any rate, I wouldn't mind if these sorts of public pools caught on in York or Grand Rapids.

I'll admit, I've done a little bit of splurging on food since getting back into the UK. I never thought England would feel cheap, but it's nice to buy a sandwich or a coffee without guilt (with less guilt, at least...). After nearly a month of being away from York, it was familiar but strange to return. We navigated around town effortlessly for a change, with the church bells ringing in our arrival. It felt, of course, like we had just left the day before, but I could see the passage of time in the daffodils blooming along the city walls or the progress of construction sites around the college here. It's nice to feel a little permanence and security again, and although I'm exhausted I got motivated with the help of a little coffee, unpacked my luggage, rearranged my room, and nested myself in for the next 5 weeks or so. Life would be great if it were not for the surplus of academic work waiting for me here. I calculated the amount of words I need to write in the next month but stopped from fear and anxiety at about 10,000. For now though, sleep-sleep-sleep.