I randomly got in a conversation with my dad about Iceland when I got home. And the more I think about it, the more I think it's really freaking awesome that I got to live in Iceland for a while as a kid.
I got to lay on a blanket in front of my house in early December and watch the Aurora Borealis. Several times, I remember waking up in the middle of the night and looking out my bedroom window and seeing it. The northern lights are why I like opals so much. It's the same colors--pink and green and yellow, all flashing and changing. If you've never seen the Aurora, it kicks ass. Sometimes it looks like these streaks in the sky. Other times it would look like curtains. But it would change color and shape so subtley that you'd be staring right at it and suddenly notice it was different than it was before, but you hadn't noticed it changing.
I remember that school was never canceled on account of snow, but it was canceled occasionally because it was too windy. I still think of wind in terms of knots--at 20 knots it was damn windy, at 25 or 30 they'd cancel school. The snow would bank against the doors, and I'd really have to shove the foyer door to get it open. The snow banked up against the window of my fifth grade classroom so that only about the top foot of it wasn't covered in snow. Not that it mattered, as during that part of the year the sun didn't rise until ten or eleven am anyway.
One of my babysitters when we first got there, had a scar across her hand. She'd gone outside on a day that was too windy, and the wind had literally picked her up and thrown her against a car. The windshield shattered and she'd reflexively tried to grab it, cutting her hand.
The summers were something else. It was never completely dark, which I loved because it meant I could stay up reading as late as I wanted without my parents seeing a tell-tale light on in my room. You could camp and not bring a flashlight. It was still chilly and damp, I remember it usually was in the mid-fifties (Farenheit) and windy and drizzly in the summer. I would wear gloves and a light coat to the playground in July.
I remember taking tours off the military base. There was one guy who usually hosted them, and we'd get to ride this cushy bus. Halfway through the day we'd stop to eat pastries stashed in the storage compartment, and they were soooo good. I remember going to lots of waterfalls, including one on a sunny day where you could see up to eight rainbows--I think I saw three. I remember walking too close to the edge of Gullfoss and my parents flipping out. There's no safety fences etc. at things like waterfalls, and I didn't realize how slippery wet rocks were. Obviously, I managed not to fall and die. But things like Gullfoss, which is the most visited waterfall there, was little more than barely-marked trails and a gravel parking lot. We went to a waterfall with a natural bridge once, and there was no sign. We had to find the gravel road ourselves and ford several creeks to get there, and we were the only people. I remember drinking the water right at the bottom of the falls, and there was so much air and dissolved minerals in it that you were still thirsty for a little while afterwards. I still think that there's no tastier water on earth than the bottom of an Icelandic waterfall, but then I'm biased.
I remember a placed called Eden in a little town. It was heated to an almost tropical temperature inside, with a brick floor and actual banana trees growing inside. They had an arcade and a little place to eat, and it had soft-serve ice cream cones they dipped in chocolate that got hard. I thought it was the best thing on earth.
Speaking of dairy, milk came in aseptic containers. It all had the same design, with flowers on the front, but you could tell what kind of milk it was by the color--I think red was whole milk, pale blue was one or 2%, yellow was skim. You could buy sour milk (I never tried it), and a thing called skyr which was similar to yogurt. I also remember once driving by racks and racks of drying fish. Now that was an interesting smell, lemme tell ya.
Sheep were so highly valued that if you hit one with your car, you had to pay the owner not only for that sheep, but several generations of its descendents. Icelandic sheepdogs are almost indistinguishable from actual sheep, if I remember correctly.
The Icelandic word for barber is hairskeri, I think. It's not pronounced "hair scary," but it was a source of endless amusement to me and my brothers.
We went swimming in "The Blue Lagoon" several times. It's got a spa-type-thing there now, but then it was a gravel parking lot, some public showers divided by gender, and a crappy cafe. But the main attraction is the "lagoon" itself, which is literally the waste product of a geothermal power plant. The water is hot and very high in sulfur, which means you can smell it from a few miles away. Your nose quickly becomes numb to it, though. It's supposedly got miraculous affects on one's skin. There was a muck in the bottom of the water that was highly prized. In retrospect, I'd love to bottle some of it and just put it on my acne. Sulfur is really good for it, but it stinks so bad that it's never used anymore. But once you wash it off the smell is gone.
Did you know that "geysir" is an Icelandic word? Also, the water coming out of those is damn hot, as my dad found out the hard way while trying to videotape one going off. He was so busy focusing on where the water was coming from, he didn't notice which way the wind was blowing, and as the water came back to the ground he got a nice hot shower. So did the videocamera. Ooops.
I mean, c'mon. How many people get to live in a foreign country for several years of their childhood? And not only that, but a really interesting and off-the-beaten-path country at that?!?
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