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I'm in Iceland, visiting my brother James who's been here learning Icelandic on a Government scholarship since the beginning of September.
Got in yesterday evening, the light dying as the clouds broke to reveal a landscape of lava with a thin ribbon of street-lights across it, and the bright lights of the big city of Reykjavik shining off low cloud; Thai-style lamb stew for supper.
Today we've wandered around the city; most of the waterfront is working docks, but there's a bit of it you can walk along, with a steel sculpture inspired by Viking longships
and a superb view across blue water to marvellous snowy stratified mountains in the distance.
I've indulged my inner meerkat with a trip up the cathedral tower, swum in a geothermally-heated pool, lounged under the stars in geothermal hot tubs, and taken very sulphurous geothermally-heated showers; it's great to be with both my brothers, I think this is the first holiday I've been on with both of them and without our parents. We've cooked, conversed, not killed one another yet, met James's colleagues from the five corners of Europe and the top and bottom of North America, and drunk mediocre Icelandic beer at £4.50 the pint, or a positively reasonable £3.75 in the student bar.
(Ben and I, by the sculpture)
The hope, if we all wake up at sensible hours tomorrow, is to rent a car and go down to the south coast; the puffin chicks left months ago, but the mountains should be there in unlessened splendour.
Got in yesterday evening, the light dying as the clouds broke to reveal a landscape of lava with a thin ribbon of street-lights across it, and the bright lights of the big city of Reykjavik shining off low cloud; Thai-style lamb stew for supper.
Today we've wandered around the city; most of the waterfront is working docks, but there's a bit of it you can walk along, with a steel sculpture inspired by Viking longships
and a superb view across blue water to marvellous snowy stratified mountains in the distance.
I've indulged my inner meerkat with a trip up the cathedral tower, swum in a geothermally-heated pool, lounged under the stars in geothermal hot tubs, and taken very sulphurous geothermally-heated showers; it's great to be with both my brothers, I think this is the first holiday I've been on with both of them and without our parents. We've cooked, conversed, not killed one another yet, met James's colleagues from the five corners of Europe and the top and bottom of North America, and drunk mediocre Icelandic beer at £4.50 the pint, or a positively reasonable £3.75 in the student bar.
(Ben and I, by the sculpture)The hope, if we all wake up at sensible hours tomorrow, is to rent a car and go down to the south coast; the puffin chicks left months ago, but the mountains should be there in unlessened splendour.
