Okay! So here I am in Iceland and it is Day…shit, I don’t even know, haha…I think it’s Day 9? And today is the first day I’ve had time to blog! Our days have been so full and busy, with almost no time for pause between waking and retiring.
Here’s the basic “programme” (how Europeans say “schedule”) for each day:
- Breakfast some time between 8 and 9 am
- Start working an hour after breakfast begins, until about 1 pm
- Lunch until 2 pm
- Start working again until around 5 or 5:30 pm.
o Sometimes we have a “coffee break” around 3ish. Because I don’t drink caffeine, this break is a nice excuse to sit. After sitting A LOT the last year while working at Great Life, I never thought I’d see the day that I actually wanted to sit. Now I CRAVE sitting. It’s nice to have a break from the rigorous work here.
Iceland has these natural phenomena called “hot pots.” They are basically like Mother Nature’s hot tubs – or like Utah’s hot springs. But the way they are formed and geothermically heated is via Iceland’s volcanoes. And there are 4 of them on the property at which we are staying, so usually every night after work at some point, we will go into these and just hang out. They are incredibly relaxing. I think there are nutrients in the water, brought from the volcanic material or something like that, so it really helps your muscles relax naturally. It’s quite the way to top off the night.
Our host’s name is Gizzly (I’m sure that is not how it is spelled, but because I don’t know how to spell it correctly, and even if I did, you probably wouldn’t know how to pronounce it correctly, I figured I’d just spell it phonetically and make it easier on both of us, haha!), and his mother’s name is Stella (much easier to spell correctly…). I think they’ve both lived in (rural) Iceland much too long. She’s a bit of crazy (from working WAY too much) and he’s incredibly contemplative and quiet. He has on his property his home, a hotel, a small home-cookin’ restaurant (literally home-cookin’; his mother cooks all our meals), a stable with approx. 10 horses and a whole campground area for those who wanna come stay on his property but not in the hotel (probably very similar to the concept of a hostel with its campground). He also has a very large barn, which has a greenhouse appended onto it. Outside the greenhouse are three of the hot pots, while inside is the remaining hot pot, as well as a regular-sized pool, Inside the barn is a very large (and very dirty/cluttered) storage area (like, to store tractors and other farm tools and vehicles).
So, anyway, I thought that I’d be out camping, roughing it in RIDICULOUS conditions, ya know…Like, I brought with me brasil nuts (even thought I didn’t like them) and almonds, and all my protein shake powder and quite a bit of Propel Fitness powder and even a huge tin can of dried apples that I had in my house in case of, like, what is that called…what LDS people save up for. I don’t even know why I have it, haha! My mom just gave it to me and told me to keep it for my “food storage” and I kept it because I like dried apples and I knew it’d appease her. But I guess it’s supposed to be my supply for the Apocalypse or something. Anyhow, I even brought those. Haha!
Anyway, we get here to this guy’s property and it’s like a hotel in the middle of nowhere. I mean, it’s not some ritzy hotel, mind you, but it’s kind of bed-n-breakfast-style. It’s quaint, and it’s simple, and it’s cozy, and best of all: IT’S WARM! Like, as in, they have heaters for basically each room that I can control myself. I can change the temperature any time I want. I love it. It’s seriously luxurious this temperature issue.
In case you haven’t heard, it’s pretty cold in Iceland. This past week, it’s fluctuated between 5-12 degrees Celsius. Ah! Yea! I just remembered I have a converter on my laptop! As I’m sure you’re all well aware, America is dumb and is the ONLY country that uses miles, inches, Fahrenheit, feet, pounds, gallons, etc. etc. So I have been slowly learning the metric system this week! All the other people here are European or Asian, so they all talk about things in kilos and milliliters and meters and centimeters and Celsius, so I have gotten to not only “master” (lol) converting dollars into Pounds Sterling…and Euros…AND Kronurs, but also “master” (lol) the metric system to be able to keep up with them all. So anyway, that was a tangent…I went and calculated in my converter and that means the temperature here has been fluctuating between approximately 40 and 55 degrees Fahrenheit – and that is during the daytime. So I am VERY appreciative that we are housed inside and have the ability to heat ourselves. We keep a “diary” each night with just quick snippets of what the day was like, and ours is written in the same book as the previous workcamps’ this year, so we’ve been able to read what their camps were like, and the one right before us didn’t have a shower OR electricity! So yes, I am VERY appreciative.
The work we are doing:
- Building a stone path from the campground’s bathrooms to the river in the middle of the campground area – approximately 100 meters long.
- Painting the whole outside of his barn.
- Cleaning and tidying the storage area inside his barn.
- Cleaning the algae out of the hot pots.
- Drilling a hole in one of the rocks by one of the outside hot pots so that he can put a pipe through it.
- Cleaning up the bathrooms that belong to the campground.
- Removing these HUGE weeds and then feeding them to the horses.
- Removing a barbed wired fence around part of his property (which according to the team that did it actually ended up being a lot more difficult than it originally seemed).
- Pulling the weeds around the 3 outside hotpots.
- Planting some flowers inside the greenhouse.
- SPECIAL NOTE FOR HEIDI HAAS: NOOOOO, we did NOT pick up ANY poop, specifically that belonging to a bird!! Hahahaha!
- I think that is all…
We have not yet finished painting the whole barn, and honestly, probably won’t before we leave, by the looks of it. We made a surprising amount of progress cleaning the storage area out. You could barely even walk around beforehand (it was seriously worse than my room has EVER been!), and now there are multiple, easily accessible and navigable paths throughout the barn, and everything in there looks really nicely tidy! Also, we are still working on the stone path (since Day One! It’s fuckin’ crazy how long this is taking us!) and we will probably finish that on the last day we are here working. Everything else is already completed! Which means that once we finish painting the outside of the barn (if we choose to continue that project), then we will have all 8 of us working on the stone path project and we will make much faster progress. This is my team, so this makes me very happy to think about! Haha. When we started it, we had only 4 men on it, and we made an average of like 7-9 meters per day, and today we gained two women and we have already doubled our speed to about 15-18 meters or so in one day, so once we have even more of us, we will be done in no time! Yes!
We worked Tuesday-Thursday and then had Friday and Saturday off. We then worked again on Sunday until tonight, and will have tomorrow off, then we will work Thursday-Saturday, have a day off on Sunday, work Monday, and then head out on Tuesday. On our days off, we do any sort of random things. For instance, our first day off, we just lazed around all day (which was great – it felt like I was back home! Haha), playing cards, getting to know one another and hot potting the night away. Tomorrow, half of us will go out driving a few hours to Isafjordur (pronounced ees-uh-fyor-derr) to shop and…well, whatever else there is to do there…it’s a “city” of 3,000, so who knows what there is there Lol. The other half of us will get up early to go kayaking! (Based on the exclamation point, maybe you will have learned that I am in that awesome group) That will only take a couple of hours, so when we return I will either nap or go horseback riding. Our camp leader, Lukas, implied that kayaking tires you out, so he chuckled when I said I’d be going horseback riding afterward. But we’ll see…either way, I know I’ll be going at some point tomorrow, haha. And then on the next day off (either Sunday or Monday), the half that went kayaking will go out to Isafjordur.
So I have been working out amazingly via all this work, right? I’m lovin’ it, and actually, it’s gotten me into thinking about how I’d like to check out the construction industry for a future job or career…more on that later, though…and I don’t know how much fat I’ve lost (I say fat instead of weight because I believe my numerical weight has risen because of the muscle I am adding to my body), but I do know that I have noticed a difference in the size of my face, which I am very happy about. And then the worst thing ever happened today. I lie, ‘cause it was actually the best thing (regarding meals, at least), but regarding my weight, it was the worst, lol. Anyway, the occurrence was: Stella cooked meatloaf and potatoes tonight! It was great, we had an American meal!!! A little preface here for your understanding at why I am so happy…we have had fish for basically every meal since we have arrived. I mean, it’s good fish…it’s fresh fish…it’s great and all, BUT…after, 20 meals of fish, you start to want to shoot the harpoon through your OWN head, not the fish’s. Haha! Oh – and the only type of fish I have ever had before was sushi, which doesn’t really count as fish, if you ask me (which is why I’ll eat it with zeal), and I only have sushi approx. once every month or few…So anyway, tonight’s meal was AMAZING and I ran up to my room and got my ketchup and ran back down to the dining room and drenched my food in it and dug in and got all sorts of giddy and shit! Ah, it was so great! Especially ‘cause I was getting very homesick this afternoon. It was literally the absolutely most perfect timing.
Now…you’re wondering why I have ketchup with me in Iceland, right?…I don’t quite know why you’re wondering this…it’s not at all out of the ordinary…but if you must know…For our “International Evening,” which we will have as probably the last night that we are here, we were told to bring stuff from our country, like movies, games, music, foods, recipes, etc. etc. This is somewhere where I got tied up, ‘cause America TRULY has nothing of its own, save country music (oh, God…), but especially regarding food, so I was STUCK! STUCK I TELL YOU!!! Haha. But finally, I had a stroke of brrrrilliance! I’ll take with me green jello and ketchup and mayonnaise and with the ketchup and mayo, I will make fry sauce! Genius, yes, I know. Give me accolades when I get home. Haha! (God, I love how funny I am!)
Oh! One last thing. There is actually cell phone service here. How crazy, eh? We are in Heydalur, a small valley area, right close to a fjord and in the middle of a few large-ridged “mountains” (I put mountains in quotes because they are not mountains to us Utahans. At best they are medium-sized hills, but here I think they are considered mountains…). Anyhow, we are living in a valley, pretty and all (and there are blueberry bushes EVERYWHERE on the mountains), and guess where the cell phone service is. Yup. At the VERY top of the “mountain.” Which is a good…mmm, maybe two-hour hike. Yeah, so needless to say, I have not been on my cell phone much! We went fishing one afternoon, and the lake was on top of the mountain, and so I thought ahead and brought my phone with me and was able to call my mom for about ten minutes which was nice. She hadn’t heard from me since I had landed in Reykjavik (pronounced reh-kya-veek) and I think she was getting a bit worried…
Anyhow, I think I will probably go now. A few more things I’d like to say, but this is getting INCREDIBLY long, and I might just remember to include those things in the next blog I write.
Until Next Time,
Love, Peace, Happiness and Equality,
Ryan!
[HA! I just found out it is actually only Day 7!]
