Hveragerði, Abbreviated

I woke up Tuesday to learn that my boots were gone. I left them in the dormitory (Hotel Domus) all day monday and didn't especially glance at them more than once or twice. When I went to pick them up today they were not the same boots - a pair of size 9 sneakers had been left in place of a pair of nice size 10 boots.

So, instead of all day hiking around Hveragerði, I went to Hveragerði for about four hours - leaving a bit later and coming back a bit earlier - and still got to see most of the interesting sights. Now I'm back in Reykjavik and thinking about going to bed early...

Hike 6 - Reykjavik Parks & Gardens

So much for taking it easy today. It didn't feel like quite so far because my foot didn't hurt. Somewhere along the line my boots started aggravating the Achilles tendon (I think) of my left foot, so that it hurt to take a step. I've been walking through it for days, but today, despite walking seven miles, was a "break" in that I haven't put on my boots today. I went by Hotel Fron where my duffel is living and switched out my Crocs for a pair of actual shoes - not seven-mile-hiking shoes, perhaps, but it did the trick. My feet are tired but my heel feels better.

Tomorrow I go to Hveragerði and actually attempt to walk around in boots with a pack, which may or may not go well. However, there's plenty close to the city so I won't be disappointed even if I can't walk quite as much as I might want to (note that "as far as I might want to" is pretty relative here - obviously I walked eight miles or so in Vík).

Side note: I cannot seem to remember how to pronounce Hveragerði. Part of this is because the pronunciation is weird, but a lot of it is that the tour guide for our Golden Circle tour explained that it meant "steam garden," which resulted in me filing away the town under "steam garden" and never needing to have some rough notion of how it was pronounced in order to remember the place.

Hike 4 & 5: Vík and West of Vík

Google Maps doesn't give me enough resolution to chart the probably 3-4 mile hike that I did on Sunday, wandering about Vik from the bus stop to the black sand beach to the hostel, to the church, the cemetery and then through some fields that were more 4-wheeler friendly than hiker-friendly back to the hostel.

Hike 5 is was incredible - the hike pedometer says 7.75 miles - I think if I could see the route better it would be closer to 8. I hiked up out of the glacial valley Vik is in into... well, basically into a cloud, which was depressing - that cloud wasn't there when I started! However, right as I got to Mile 3 the cloud ceiling lifted and I got this dramatic view off the end of the cliff to the ocean, and I could also see the area west of the plateau - the next glacial valley over - and I decided to check it out. Walked off of the plateau to an unnamed town that didn't have the good fortune of being on the Ring Road, but was otherwise apparently similar to Vik. There was a really neat cave-like thing by the ocean, and I met a Swiss tourist whose parents had gotten married in the cave.

In Vík

It is nice, but very wet. I walked around for about two hours on the beaches and through the glacial valley uphill from the city and took some great pictures and met a couple of German tourists.

And wireless is seriously in existence everywhere.

Clouds and oceans

I'm at the Reykjavik Hostel and am a member of Hosteling International. I'll be back here Tuesday night, tomorrow night I'll be staying at the hostel in Vík, and Sunday and Monday I believe I'll be in the Skógar hostel, though this is not yet certain I'll either stay in Skógar on Sunday or (this is more likely) return to Reykjavik on Sunday night so that I can go on another overnight trip Monday-Tuesday. This is good from a blogging perspective, as I don't expect to necessarily be able to get convenient access to the 'tubes in Vík.

Now that the conference is over and I'm free it has become rainy for the first time since my arrival in Iceland. Oh well.

Talk

I gave my talk today. It went reasonably well! No hiking to report today, though I did go to a bar called Boston. Alas, no Sam Adams.

Hike 3: Straight to RU

Also, I walked to the conference on Wednesday, attempting to take the shortest path instead of the longest, as usually appears to be my goal, I know. Just for kicks, here it is.

Conference photos

I'm told that there are a bunch of official conference photos. If you find me in any of them, let me know!

Golden Circle Tour

Yesterday was a bad day to forget my camera. It was the day of ICALP's Golden Circle Tour, a six-hour driving tour around the countryside near Reykjavik. However, Wikipedia has pictures of everything.

First, we went to a volcanic crater - a very regular crater formed by a volcano's top collapsing into its emptying magma crater.

Second, we went to see Geysir (the geyser geysers are named after) and Strokkur, which are in the same place.

Third, we went to see Gullfoss, an amazing waterfall. At one point there was this magnificent effect where the persistent rainbow appeared to be a few feet in front of me to the left and to be out over the falls to the right - I had the distinct impression of finding the end of the rainbow.

Finally, we went to Þingvellir (read: thingveller) where the tour guides claimed, tectonically speaking, that you could put "one foot in America and one in Europe." Obviously this is crap, such a phenomena being impossible to specify that precisely, but it was a cute thought, and it was interesting to see the site of the Alþingi (read: all thing or al thing), one of the oldest parliaments in the world.

When we got back I rehearsed my presentation a bit, but I got frustrated and so I took a walk down the hill to the north shore to clear my head. I give the talk at 3 PM GMT. Wish me luck! Tonight we go to Perlan, which I hiked around on Monday.

Hike 2: North Shore

Went on an even longer hike tonight. It went till 11. Sky was still blue. This place is crazy.

Tried to find the Botanical Gardens but (recurring theme alert) zigged where I should have zagged and ended up wandering through a commercial district. However, when I got roughly back on track I found what seemed to be an Olympic village (about mile 1.75), a neat sculpture garden (about mile 1.8), and a Subway (mile 2.5). I remembered my sister's story about going to the Subway in Grenoble because it was the only place with turkey, and stopped to enjoy a turkey sandwich. The Reykjavik hostel is at mile 3 on this hike - I now have some clue what I'm doing after Friday, which is positive. Then I walked the entirety of the north shore of "downtown" Reykjavik, which is gorgeous around 10:30 at night.

Liquid (gas, currency, and water)

Two quick train of consciousness issues, as I'm really not all that interested in the financial situation of EATCS.

I was stunned when I saw that diesel was 192 ISK (Iceland kronur) - I had the rough translation in my head of 75 ISK to 1 USD, and that meant diesel was under $3. Then I remembered I was outside of America, where liquid is measured in liters. Some quick Google conversions say that this translates to about $9.50 a gallon. Of course, Diet Coke is about $2.25 per liter, so that's a similar scale of price increases. The ISK has fallen in value against dollars and euros, a good bit in the last year, so that's good (for me). They just mentioned this fact in the business meeting, actually.

Taking a hot shower smells like hell - literally. Brimstone. Everything in Iceland is either permafrost or volcano or somewhere in between, and Reykjavik is somewhere in between, so if you drill down a bit you get volcano. If you pump water down to volcano and then pump it back up, you get plentiful, environmentally friendly, egg-smelling hot water. I was worried that the water would taste like sulphur too, which kept me away from the tap for a day or two, but that water tastes fine (great, actually), so either they have parallel systems or they keep the hot and cold water apart well.

Hike 1: Perlin South

Took a bit of a hike today - the long way back to the hotel from the university where the conference is being held. This is the route. I'm certain it was more than 5 miles when you take into account me getting lost south of Perlin, the flower-shaped thing around mile 2 - it's a tourist trap built on top of some water tanks built on top of a hill overlooking the (not international) airport. Around mile 1 I went through a cemetery that was unusual in that many of the fairly recent headstones were wooden - I took pictures but I'll upload them

Perhaps it was inevitable that Iceland would end up contrasted to India, or perhaps it only became inevitable when I decided to write an entry or two about it here. However, there are a lot of contrasts between the two that go beyond even my reply to a Facebook thread between some fellow India alumni.

Reykjavik is like Bangalore but about 30 degrees cooler and without the indian people and the pollution and for the most part the traffic and it's at sea level and the colors are kind of de-saturated instead of over-saturated and the rocks are jagged and volcanic instead of worn down by millennia of staying in the same place. Okay, it's like Bangalore in that I'm writing about it in my Bangalore blog, but otherwise it's totally different but still kind of awesome but I'm still kind of a little bit cold.

One of the ones I was thinking about this morning was the isolation -- not cultural isolation, which many of us experienced in India, but literal, there-is-no-one-here isolation. I just went to a shopping mall that was obviously nice and well-kept, but which was nearly uninhabited. And it was so quiet -- the space seemed to totally devour the faint background musak, and the sounds that you do hear are more natural or mechanical - an elevator whirr, some water falling down a drain, a passing automobile. I find myself shy and tentative to approach the ubiquitous automatic sliding door for the frequent fear that it will not be open -- the stores here seem a little relaxed about opening times; that's a similarity with the subcontinent.

Another difference is food - northern European tastes grate against mine in roughly the same way that Indian tastes ended up largely compatible. Perhaps is was an issue of attitude -- I'm going to be here for three months, I better get used to this -- and certainly India increased my vegetarian tendencies which does not benefit me here, as I didn't even see chicken at the grocery store I slipped away to. I wasn't looking for meat, though, so it might have been there. I was generally hungry after missing breakfast and specifically seeking a little fruit, which I found courtesy of globalization.

That's all for now. These strawberries, which appear to be called either "jarđarber" or "flokkur" in Icelandic, are delicious. Being (well, hopefully) able to eat fresh fruit without thick skin is pretty convienent.

On a bus through permafrost

At 5:30 PM (EDT) on July 5, I left my girlfriend Rachel and her sister Rebecca on a train platform in the southwest suburbs of Boston. Maybe 10 hours later, my clocks had been reset to 7:30 AM (GMT) and I was sitting next to a researcher from TTI Chicago, Prahladh Harsha on a bus to Reykjavik for ICALP 2008.

He mentioned that Iceland's population was smaller than Pittsburgh's - but it tuns out that Pittsburgh is a tiny, tiny bit smaller - essentially they are the same size, a bit over 310,000 people. His hometown of Hyderabad, on the other hand, has almost 10 million people. I had to prod just a little bit to get him to tell me where he was from - most American researchers on a bus in Iceland don't know where Hyderabad is. Most of them haven't worked in Bangalore for three months either. We talked about Hampi and air pollution in Bangalore as the bus drove past raw, cracked volcanic earth. And that's when it occurred to me to maybe write a thing or two in this while I'm in Iceland.