melannen | (no subject)

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First off, I am back from Iceland! Iceland is amazing. We circumnavigated the entire island, stopped manymany places, have hundreds of pictures to go through, about fifty sketches, several small bags of lava rocks, and twelve new books on my to-read list. Also I am no longer used to a) the temperature being too hot? b) mosquitos? and c) it getting dark outside at night, what is that about.

Anyway there is no way I will ever write up a proper post about the trip (perhaps I will scan the sketchbook at some point) so for now, if you want to hear about Iceland, give me a letter from A-þ and I will tell you something about Iceland.

Also! I wrote a remix fic! Which revealed while I was away so probably most everyone who cares has seen it already, but here it is anyway:

Embrace the World in Gray (The La Cosetta Nostra remix) (6363 words) by melannen based on Cards and Flowers on Your Window by

geckoholic
Fandom: Pacific Rim (2013)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Alison Choi, Stacker Pentecost, Mako Mori, Hermann Gottlieb, Kaidonovsky, Hannibal Chau, Tendo Choi
Additional Tags: Pre-Canon, Black Markets, Remix, Dad Sweaters
Summary: Alison may run a thingy mafia, but she's not sure where the Marshall got the idea that it qualified her to negotiate with a mafia mafia.

Remix was also super-fun! I ended up writing one of the top ten longest fics in the collection which is just ??? when did that start happening. But it was great! Have you ever had the experience where you read a really good fic but your response to it was "That was great, but it should have been this other completely different story instead because I want that one more"? And there's no real polite way to express those feelings. Except in Remix! And one of my remixee's fics gave me exactly that response - she wrote a post-movie fic about how Tendo Choi's not-appearing-in-this-movie wife Alison was running a gray-market behind-the-scenes "thingy mafia". And I loved geckoholic's Alison and the role she gave her and the networks she showed among the Shatterdome staff, but what I really wanted - what I'd been wanting, actually, since I'd seen the movie - was something set during the period when the PPDC was transforming from the unlimited-budget, media-darling saviors of the world into the scrappy, scrouning, Chau-funded resistance. I'd never even tried to write it because the whole concept seemed so huge that I had no idea where to start or how to get out of it if I did, but borrowing geckoholic's perfect Alison gave me exactly the right viewpoint to show a little of that transition from a very insightful POV. So anyway. That was fun! Yay remix.

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Ooooh Iceland!

I have to give you a "þ," because cmon, but would also be interested in hearing your thoughts on Akureyri or Myvatn, because I'm heading there soon.

Also, did you manage to speak any Icelandic while there?

Iceland!!! You lucky beast.

I would also like to hear about Akureyri, because one of my friendlier acquaintances just moved there.

þ is for þúfurs! You have been to Iceland (are you there now?) so presumably you know about þufurs, but for other people: they are a landform cause by frost-heave that results in the land being completely covered in small pillowy lumps of soil maybe two feet diameter, and they cover pretty much all of Iceland that has fertile soil and is not birch forest or plowed hayfield. We spent a day trailing my sister and her archeology team around the þufurs on the farms where they are looking for 11th century churches and graveyards and it was super-fun! I helped them stick flags in the ground on a site where they now apparently think they have found a church. þúfurs weren't at all how I had imagined them but they were excellent to hop around on and stick flags into, although I can't imagine how difficult it would be to find places to cut even strips of turf for building without using your hayfields. (It was also weirdly difficult to tell the difference at a distance between lava fields and þufer fields at first when they were both covered in Icelandic moss, but by the end of the week it was super-easy to tell them apart. Learning!)

If you are passing through Skagafjörður on your way to Myvatn you should e-mail stellar_dust and see if you can hang with the American archeologists for a bit.

Myvatn was amazing, especially if you are fond of weird landforms! Basically we just did the circle around the lake and stopped at all the marked scenic pulloffs. It took us an afternoon and a bit of the next morning but you could easily take a lot more time, especially if you did more of the walking trails. (Mom was not really excited about long hikes up hills or on rough ground, and it was a damp and cold and windy day besides, so the only place we went more than a couple hundred meters from the car was at Dimmu Borgir.) Definitely go all the way up to Hverir, and Krafla if you can manage it (we decided to skip Krafla but it sounded really fun.) Note that a lot of the places are several kilometers up fairly rough unsealed roads, though - we managed in our tiny rental Aygo but some of them were not fun.

Also places to eat etc. were harder to find than I expected? The brochures and stuff gave the impression of an American resort town but there aren't actually that many retail/dining establishments (yet), and most of them were pretty busy (for Iceland) and full of tourists already, and they were kind of scattered at random farms all around the lake.

There were no midges! I was surprised. I suspected it was the cold & miserable weather, though, and that you have a choice between damp and windy or full of midges - my sister went earlier in the year and said they were awful. Also didn't see as many birds as expected but that was probably the weather again.

I didn't speak much Icelandic because even I could tell my accent was awful and everybody's English was so good and they all pegged us as Americans before we even opened our mouths. I did get pretty comfortable saying "hæ!" and "takk", though, and was able to puzzle my way through most of the (fairly rare) Icelandic-only signage we encountered. And we watched a British tvm with Icelandic subtitles and no sound and I managed to follow the plot basically, although to be fair it was pretty formulaic and I probably could have summarized the plot pretty accurately even if there was no sound, no subtitles, and no pictures. :P I bought myself a copy of Nancy og Leyandarmál gömlu klukkunar for kr 200 in Egilssta&edh;ir and may try to puzzle my way through it, I figured out the title easily enough anyway. ^_^ And I bought an Icelandic wildflower guide and between the pictures and scientific Latinates I managed ok.

It was great! I recommend it for someone who wants to get away, it is the best place to roadtrip I have ever encountered.

A is for Akureyri. We didn't get to see much of it alas - we spent a night there but were very tired the whole time - but we got a chance to see the botanical garden and have lunch and see some of the streets. It seemed like a really nice town, really beautiful (but then it's Iceland so that's sort of a given), just big enough to not feel too small, and with a lot going on for its size. I think it would be a great place to live. And the Botanical Garden was a great place to wander around, and Northwest Iceland in general was really lovely and one of the less harsh parts of the island (although idk if I would say the same in winter...) If I was going to move to Iceland Akureyri would be pretty high on my list.

Edited 2015-07-13 22:42 (UTC)

ICELAND! I give you a ð.

Running around with team of archaeologists sounds like a pretty awesome way to travel. I love trips where I do something related to the local area, even if it's just helping smeone who lives locally buy their groceries.

I don't know any words that start with ð offhand (possibly there aren't any?) so ð is for Óðinn's ravens, who were making an AWFUL ruckus at this one random pulloff in the Eastfjords where we stopped to stretch our legs, which turned out to be a memorial for the site of the first Christian baptisms in Iceland, at a place now called Þvotta, which it is really hard to google, wow.

I mean. I don't know for a fact that they were Óðinn's ravens. But there were two of them and they really didn't care that we were there and they seemed awfully amused by the whole concept of a memorial to Christianity.

Edited 2015-07-13 22:37 (UTC)

I think I would get too awkward and self-conscious about hanging around somebody local without any good reason to be there, but I love traveling when I have a non-native local guide (or an expat local guide) - somebody who's been there enough to know what's what but isn't quite at home there. It was great the couple days we had my sister squiring us around, and yes, the archeologists' inside tour was super fun, even if a lot of it was "look at this field full of sheep, there is super-cool stuff under that field if you gpr it."

Iceland, wow! It seems like Iceland has become the hot (metaphorically) place to go in the last few years - I feel like lots of people I know online have been going there. I have to admit that I'm intrigued by it. I'll give you letter L!

I know it's after Þ, but can I give you Æ? And if not, Ý.

L is for Lundi, which means puffin! When Mom said she'd pay for the trip if I planned it, the only thing she said she wanted to do was see puffins. Unfortunately nearly all the puffins live on cliffs, and most of the hot puffins spots were pretty inaccessible to two people in a tinycar, one of whom wasn't up to a lot of hard walking. Or they required day-long side trips off the ring road, or boat trips. So I told her I would do my best and if we didn't manage any of the others, we would take one of the "100% guaranteed puffin-viewing boat tours" out of Reykjavik on our last full day.

But! On our next-to-last day I sent her down a dirt road to the beach at Reynisfjara, which is a black-sand beach backed with a cliff of columnar basalt, both of which were things that were still on *my* list. Also there were supposed to be seabirds there, maybe puffins if we were lucky?

For the record Reynisfjara was possibly the most beautiful place I have been in my life, and if a week in Iceland already hadn't burnt me out on beautiful places already I might have been unable to leave. I think I am in love with columnar basalt.

But anyway there were a bunch of white-and-black birds in the cliffs and a couple of sea-stacks with birds wheeling around them, but they seemed to be all black-faced gulls and arctic terns (which were amazing to watch at first but are basically as common as gulls and almost as annoying). But I got my binoculars out anyway to look at the birds in the sea-stacks, and there was one that seemed to be a little stockier than the others, and have more black, and be sitting differently, and maybe had a much larger beak? So I told Mom I thought it was a puffin. But we both had not-too-good binocs, and it was very far away, and it had backed up into the cliff before Mom could get a good look at it, so she didn't believe me, and I didn't quite believe me either. Anyway we'd walked way down the beach to get as close to the stacks as we could, so once the maybe-puffins were gone, we started wandering back, and I got distracted wandering around a cave in the columnar basalt (SO. COOL.) and when I wandered out I looked up and realized that there were two definitely-puffins nesting in the cliffside directly above the cave! And then I realized Mom hadn't been watching me, as I though, but watching puffins instead.

Unfortunately they were still two far away to get very good pictures with our crappy cameras so I doubt we got anything, but they are just as funny-looking and adorable as you'd think! And I'm pretty sure I had one fly by right over my head while I was watching, and flying puffins are amazing in a whole different way.

Anyway so then we went to the Soil Conservation Museum and the flea market in Reykjavik instead of doing the boat tour on our last day, the end.

Æ is for Ætt, which is the basic Icelandic kinship/affinity group. During the Sturling Age, when the old system of the Allthing started to break down and Iceland devolved into a civil war, the Ætts were the divisions they split along, and they came up in every discussion of the Sturling Age that we encountered. Unfortunately I couldn't get anyone to explain to me exactly what sort of affinity group an Ætt is - my sister could only be sort of vague at me about it (she's theoretically working in a period when they were important but she also mostly studies dirt, so, you know, doctoral students and tunnel vision), and none of the stuff in museums made any real attempt to explain it other than translating it as "clan" which is about as vaguely unuseful as you can get. We also did mostly the Natural Wonders rather than the Cultural Heritage version of the tour, mostly because the Natural Wonders were generally available dawn to dusk (which is to say 2AM to 12:30 AM) whereas the museums were mostly 9-5 (or even 1-5) and dawn to dusk works much better for a road trip, so it's possible I just missed all the explanations, but I kinda doubt they were there.

Anyway I suppose I could have asked an actual Icelander but that would have required like. initiating an interaction with a stranger. ugh. Besides, I'm not sure it would have helped - I'm sure the concept has shifted a lot over the length of Iceland's history, and it seems like the sort of thing that would be a combinations of "I've never really thought about it" and "it's too complicated to explain to a foreigner". But I am totally going to try to find something to read about it now that I'm home (...once I've finishe the books I'm currently reading about Bronze Age economics and Aboriginal Australian kinship).

I'm fascinated in general really by Icelandic concepts of kinship and household and land ownership? Like. The fundamental unit of Icelandic society ever since forever has been the farm, which is not entirely like the concept of a farm that I have been used to, and has changed over time ( and into the modern era) in ways that are not the ways I would have sort of unconsciously slotted into it, while the farms themselves have often maintained an amazing continuity of name and borders and story? And once again I don't really have the context to even explain what I don't know accurately, but that's another thing that I'd like to find out more about, but sadly suspect there really isn't anything much written on what I'd really like to know, even in Icelandic. (my sister is trying to tempt me to do graduate research on this stuff. but nope.)

How about H?

H is for Hekla! Hekla is one of the volcanoes in Iceland that has been most active, and it's about five years overdue under the current every-ten-years-ish pattern, and it's one that tends to go off with less than an hour's warning. So of course one night we went wayyy off the ring road to stay at a tiny hotel RIGHT UNDER her shadow, so I got to soak in an outdoor pool that was heated by volcanic heat while the volcano loomed over me. ^_^ They had an exhibit about Hekla that was tiny and not terribly well-maintained but was pretty good for what it was; it was in the basement of a loomy black lava-rock building with just one bunker-like building that showed the volcano and lots of weird lighting effects, and a lot of footage and accounts of the eruptions, and a (live-ish) feed of the seismic monitoring, and weird rumbly sounds way down in the bass that didn't quite sync up with any of the video and left you constantly on edge wondering what they would do next.

I totally expected to have The Volcano Nightmare (which I have had periodically ever since I read The Bobbsey Twins In Volcano Land when I was six, and which involves "waking up" to sudden volcano eruption in the back yard) but I slept like a baby! Maybe actually sleeping under an active volcano has exorcized that one, just like actually being fail at college seems to have gotten rid of most of the "oh no what if I fail a class" ones.

Then the next day we went to a museum that talked about how Hekla is the site of Iceland's largest reforestation program - they're trying to regrow the native scrubby birch forest around her in an area that's like 1% of the total surface area of the island. The idea is that along with just generally piloting reforestation efforts, it'll help reduce the risk from volcano-induced landslides and mudslides and it'll also reduce the impact of ashfalls. So far it's a slow start but they're hoping it'll be exponentional once the trees get big enough to independently re-seed, so that'll be really cool if it works.

That's all super interesting and I hope you share whatever you find out with us. (Ditto Bronze Age economics and Aboriginal Australian kinship.)

Wow, that sounds like a cool puffin-related adventure. :D

OMG, impressive epic answer! And it sounds as if you had a wonderful time!

I am not in Iceland now but I will be in three weeks' time. Of which two nights will be in Akureyri, and the day in between on a bus tour of Myvatn and Dettifoss. Although, oh my, hanging out with

stellar_dust and company sounds deeply appealing as well...

That sounds mostly what I was expecting for Myvatn. The number of tourists in Iceland has increased so rapidly that they don't really have the infrastructure; I feel mildly guilty about adding to the crowds.

Interesting that there weren't midges! But it does sound like the weather has been bad this year; I gathered the highland roads have only just opened for the season, if at all. Last summer when I was there the weather was glorious, almost suspiciously sunny in Icelandic terms. So you never know.

Sounds like your Icelandic studies have borne fruit despite the difficulties of speaking it. Personally I wasn't really able to speak comprehensively until I got a little pronunciation coaching on the course I took. But being able to cope with signage and subtitles is pretty satisfying.

Glad you had such a great trip - I can't wait to go back myself.

I think you will overlap at least with stellar_dust (she's staying longer than the crew) so it's worth asking if you're going to be vaguely in the area and you have time/transport that's not all scheduled. Are you going to start in the Westfjords again? Skagafjordur is totally between the Westfjords and Myvatn.

And I don't mean to give the wrong impression - it was crowded by Icelandic standards, which means sometimes we went to a tourist site and there were already like! three other cars there! occasionally a tour bus! Once in Reykjavik we actually had to wait five minutes to be seated at a restaurant! If you're on a tour bus it shouldn't be an issue. :P

(If the tourism keep growing at this rate, though, I think I'm going to be glad we went when we did - give it ten years and either Iceland will be one big theme park or it will be a wasteland of abandoned hotels overgrown with birch thicket.)

Let me know when you'll be here! I can probably show you around a bit, or you could at least stop by and see the site. melannen has my email address.

Really sorry for the late reply. I've been trying to figure out how to make this work and come to the conclusion that it probably won't. I'm only staying two nights in Akureyri - one day I'm going to tour Myvatn and area, and the next day I'm on the bus back to Reykjavik. So I don't think it's going to work, though if I were driving from Akureyi to the Westfjords, I'd do it in a heartbeat. Alas! It would have been amazing.

So sorry for the late reply... as I said to

stellar_dust below, I was trying to figure out how it would work and it doesn't really seem possible. If I were renting a car, I would totally be there. :(

...a wasteland of abandoned hotels overgrown with birch thicket.

A picturesque image. I could go for it.

No worries! We'll be here for at least the next two summers, so let me know if you want to plan something for then. In the meantime have fun in Akureyri!

Wow, so much Iceland! I'm very jealous.

And I'll keep in touch. :)

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