Thingvellir (Þingvellir)

You know you are in one of the most beautiful places on the planet when your pictures look increasingly more terrible (terribler should so be a word) to you the longer you go without looking a them. No, seriously! I'm about to post a bunch of pictures of Thingvellir, the site of Iceland's first parliamentary gathering and the boundary where the North American and Eurasia tectonic plates diverge and I hate all of them. 

It's such a cool place! Essentially what you've got is this big rift valley where the sea floor is spreading--yes, the sea floor. Only above water. It's amazing! In fact, Iceland is one of two places in the world where we can see this kind of rifting, the other being the Great Rift Valley in Africa. In the above picture you can see that this is indeed a valley, and on the east you have the Almannagjá, which is the boundary of the North American plate. 

It's huge--it's just one big wall of basalt. On the other side of the valley lies Hrafnagjá, which is more or less the same thing only for the Eurasia plate. In between lie fissures, the result of faulting, etc. Some are filled with water from the nearby Lake Þingvallavatn:

It's just a spectacular area all around, rich with both Icelandic history and geologic history... A must see!

Gullfoss & Geysir

On the same trip as the sheep round-up I got to go to Gullfoss, or "Golden Falls," and Geysir.

Seriously, go look Gullfoss up on Wikipedia or Google Images (especially of those in the wintertime!!). My pictures do not do it ANY justice. It's a glacier waterfall, so the water is a murky color, for which it gets it's name from. There is also a story about a woman, Sigríður Tómasdóttir, walking all the way to Reykjavik in order to save this waterfall from being used to produce electricity like many of the other waterfalls in Iceland...

From here we went to Haukadalur, or the Golden Circle, where Geysir and Strokkur are located.

Geysir (from which the word "geyser" originates) has been extremely effected by tectonic activity over the years leading to periods when the watershed had to be manipulated by man-made ditches and soap for the geyser to erupt. Today, such efforts only happen on rare occasions and Geysir doesn't erupt. This is a natural process for any geyser--even the littlest of shifting can effect a geyser (or cause one), which makes them so important in studying earthquake prediction. Strokkur is the main attraction now in this particular geothermal spot as it erupts every 3-8 minutes. 

There are also several other smaller geysers and pools in the area...

Also... if they tell you not to climb around Geysir (in my defense, the ropes barely came to my shins) it's because of these guys:

Boiling mud pots. Yaaay! (More of these later!) But look... rocks... 

I like rocks.

Réttir

So for my first trip out of Reykjavik I had the opportunity to participate in an Icelandic tradition: Réttir, or the annual sheep round-up. Farmers all over Iceland go into the mountains where the sheep have been grazing for the summer and herd them back to their farms for the winter, and in order to separate which sheep belong to which farmers, they bring them first to these gigantic stone circles for sorting.

In Iceland, it is tough for farmers to make a living on farming alone, which is evidenced by the interesting characters you see at these round-ups. For example, we saw several people wandering around with a cigarette in one hand, a beer in another, and a sheep between their legs! 

There is a central circle where a portion of the sheep are kept while the farmer's families go around checking tags and marking to see which are theirs. Spectators stand on the walls, or sometimes get down and dirty as well!

It's chaos. At one point, one of the sheep jumped over the fence the farmers use to get in and out of the inner circle and proceeded to jump over the stone walls on the outside into one of the pens! 

It was a really fun experience, and supposedly the farmers really ham it up sometimes and sing some of the old songs for the tourists. That didn't happen this time, but I highly recommend attending if you're in Iceland in September!!

In Transit

So... I'm in Iceland now! It's been almost a week since this whole process has started, so I figured now is a good time to reflect...

To save on money and time, my parents and I decided it would be best if we flew to Boston and waited overnight in the airport for my flight into Reykjavik. In theory, this was a good plan and I would be willing to do it again. However, there were a couple complications that I would seek to consider and plan for better next time. Namely:

1) Food. I recently discovered that I am allergic to wheat! This immediately prevents me from eating anything of substance. :P Anything with wheat flour is out: hamburger buns, pizza crust, donuts, pastries, breaded chicken, pretzels... you get the idea. Finding cheap food in an airport is like trying to find the Titanic on Mars. Trying to find cheap food that doesn't have any wheat on it.... Okay, stop laughing. I'm being serious here!

2) Sleeping. For some reason that only God knows I bet, the Boston/Logan airport doesn't have chairs without armrests. Not. Conducive. To. Sleeping. Which... I guess is good... because there were other people with the same idea as us, and then a couple shady characters... So you don't want to be completely asleep, in order to feel your backpack suddenly go missing, but I still had another day and night (and day) of travelling ahead of me. Be sure to get a good nights rest the night before you head out at the very least.

3) Airport security. Yes, collective groan indeed. Compared to what I wanted to bring, I packed very lightly, and as a way to cut down on luggage I decided that I would wear layers and pack travel sized toiletries instead of packing full-scale in my carry-on. This was a bittersweet decision, and though it helped immensely when I got to campus, it bogged me down quite a bit in the security lane. With all the many restrictions, I had three of those gray buckets, as well as my bag. It wasn't as time consuming as say the couple with three kids who haven't been to the airport in the last ten years, but it was time enough.

My experience in the Reykjavik airport went much the same way. As soon as I got off the plane we were sent through security and customs, of course, but because my flight didn't get in until midnight and the airport is 45 minutes out of town, I once again opted to just stay in the airport overnight. In Boston I had my dad to keep me company, and the incredibly annoying floor cleaning man who was getting off on waking everyone up, but in Iceland it was just me. Luckily I found a place near the bathroom where a couple of other people were staying and there was an outlet so I could use my computer, but if I ever do this again... I will definitely get a hotel room (airport security was fervent about no sleeping on the floor). Come Monday morning, after only dozing for a handful of minutes between the two previous nights, I was desperate for a big, warm, comfy bed.

But regardless, I managed to find the currency exchange, drink a Red Bull, collect a few maps, get on the right bus and make it safely to campus.