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.

Departure

This will be my last post before I leave India; it almost certainly won't be my last post to this blog. I haven't told every story I intend to tell from this trip, and there are other stories that aren't finished yet. In particular, over the last two days I've done a lot of walking and picture taking of the parts of Bangalore I spent a lot of time in that I'll want to post when I have time.

Tonight, I turned in my Microsoft-issued cell phone and had dinner at New Shanti Sagar. It broke my heart when Brownie/Dennis/Goldie, the Microsoft dog with at least as many names as working legs (the poor thing apparently injured his right front paw) followed me most of the way to Bashyam Circle, and I had to tell him to go back. This is a hard thing to tell a dog, both practically and emotionally.

Lufthansa 755 to Frankfurt, Germany (ETA, 8 AM Local)
Lufthansa 444 to Atlanta, Georgia (ETA, 2:30 PM Local)
Drive to Pittsburgh (ETA, Wednesday PM)