April 22, 2021

Sunvacation to Spain

I´ve been to Spain a handful of times, and returned to Alicante this time with a slightly different mission. Me and my roommate were flying with a paralyzed man, as his personal assistants and caretakers. He is paralyzed from the chest down, and has limited use of his hands, so we have to help him with nearly everything. He has 3 different wheelchairs, one for bathing, one for traveling, and one electric one he can drive himself in his home, and we were on our way to his vacation home in Valencia province.

Just the drive from the airport to Villa Martin was a small culture shock. Seeing flamingos with their heads deep in salt flat ponds and endless fields of orang groves was so exotic to me. Coming from the woman who usually travels for 8 months a year but has only traveled 6 weeks in the last 13 months. I´ve actually spent more time in quarantine than abroad, a total of 6 weeks and 5 days after I´m done quarantining from this trip.

Spanish lockdown was slightly stricter than Iceland. There are mandatory masks everywhere, even outside on the street, and curfew at 10pm. You would be fined for walking without a mask or driving after 10, and the police were all around. Restaurants and bars had to close at 6, but the sun didnt even go down until 8, so it was fun daydrinking and then going home and sunbathing. There were 3 pools at his residence, but not very much sun.

We were surprised at the cool weather, temperatures daily below 20 degrees celsius, and a lot of rain. It doesnt normally rain in the area, but it rained every other day for two weeks for us. We still got a tan, and some beach time, and even though the ocean wasn´t quite warm enough, we went in anyway and enjoyed people´s stares. The palm trees and deep purple flowers in gardens brought smiles to our faces everytime, and the price of wine and tapas made our wallets especially happy.

We shopped til we dropped, not only because it was cheap, but because there were things we found that you couldn´t buy in Iceland. A foldable bike, a Nespresso machine for 64 euros, a blow up stand up paddle board… our suitcases will be heavy on the way home. It will take me 3 covid tests to get back, and 20 hours of travel through Stockholm where covid´s on fire. I just have to make it home, uninfected, and finish my quarantine since its finally my turn to get the Pfizer vaccine. Only a few more weeks and travel will start to get easier and more worthwhile for me… yay!

April 10, 2021

A second volcano in Geldingardalur

Another eruption started around noon Monday, only 500m from the original volcano in Geldingardalur. I was so lucky to be there at that exact moment, after booking a helicopter trip for 11:20 that day and being offered an extra long stop (45 mins instead of 30) by Noona.is. We sat and watched the original volcano site, listening to melting earth splatter and flow, and felt 3 earthquakes in a matter of minutes.

The search and rescue team then interrupted us to say the area had to be evacuated around 12:08, after the new eruption starting spewing lava and gases just behind us. I´m super grateful to have been there in good weather, and not standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. The perfect wind conditions kept gases at a minimum, and the patient search and rescue team didn´t chase us away when the helicopter couldn´t pick us up at its original landing spot.

We went from sharing the view with hundreds of people to only a handful of staff until an hour and a half later. We hiked up a hilltop, where we could watch both eruptions at the same time, and the helicopter eventually found us, landed and evacuated us. Apparently a third fissure has showed up since, so there´s plenty of lava to flow around!

April 7, 2021

Dear Iceland

Its a love hate relationship, this thing we´ve got, a thing I can´t ever fully commit to and never completely break up with. The summers are always summer loving, and when there´s fall, if fall ever comes, the colours of birch trees reddening and hay fields yellowing is glorious. Then our sun has begun its slow decent, and your light is always dramatic after the sheep have come down from the mountains. Things glow gold during the day and northern lights show up at night, and then the nights persistently grow until the autumn equinox when they´re triumphantly longer than the days.

Its your darkness that first pushes me away. The mornings when I wake up in pitch blackness and I´m not sure if its 9 am or 9pm because I swear I just fell asleep, but realize I´ve been unconscious for 12 full hours and still feel tired. 13 hours of sleep a night become normal by the end of November, as all my energy evaporates with the lack of light and vitamin D.

Christmas is a jolly old time each time, and I love the cosiness Reykjavik offers during the holiday season. Ice skating, shopping for pine trees and gifts to put under them, and drinking Swiss miss and Stroh with friends at café´s. New Years eve is a spectacular show, with all the explosives and parties, even during covid, and I thank you for giving me 26 days of Christmas to survive the first week of January.

Then its the cold that drives me away. The orange weather warnings and hurricane winds, the wind chills and white-out snow storms, the frozen roads and my car buried in cold snow. I can´t bear it – even my skin cries out as white, flaky, patches break out on my face and random places on my body. The allergies, the eczema, and the shut-in and shut-out feeling of society begins to grow as everyone else slowly winds down into hibernation mode.

Finally, its your people, our people rather, that destroy you. I can’t fit in anymore – just a little too brown, a bit too cheap, and too much of an accent standing between me and being Icelandic. I should be bitching about taxes and minimum wage, holding out my hands for free benefits like the rest. The jobless say no to job offers, preferring unemployment insurance to working for a living, and some only accept money under the table, just to make sure our ‘kreppa’ recession lasts a little longer. Privileged white men find ways to keep shitting on single, independent, young women, asking us passively-aggressively to shut up and accept their definition of gender equality. The married men keep cheating on their wifes and the ex-wife’s keep gold digging and fighting with baby daddies. The countryside people are tired of living in the country and Reykjavik people are tired of living in the city – the grass is always cleaner on the other side.

This year I made it to April, I´m not sure how, but February and March were abnormally kind. The volcano beginning March 19th was timely – may Mother Earth continue to rage and burn you beautifully. This April´s been a bitch, so I´m out. I´m sorry I couldn´t stay longer, the third covid wave was the last incentive I needed to bounce. Ill come back when the grass starts to green and the sun starts to warm, when more than 10 people can gather again, both in bars and public pools. Perhaps vaccinations will actually start helping people younger than 70 by then.

Im sorry but now I’ve got to go. I´ve always said that I learn to love you more each time I leave you, but I´ve still got to leave you long enough to get homesick. Sometimes it takes weeks, sometimes months, for me to miss you, but somehow I always come back. I can´t promise this time, but I´ll try my best.

love,

the one who always gets away