Buying woollen things

I said I would write more about Iceland and then I forgot. Whoops! Here goes, then - I did a bunch of shopping when I was in Iceland. I am not much of a shopper when I'm at home, but I do like visiting shops in unfamiliar places, that carry unfamiliar goods. I don't always buy much, but it's fun to look.

Iceland has a reputation for being very expensive, and this is true to some extent; food and alcohol are especially high-priced (with the exception of fish, lamb, and brennivin), and a lot of the items in shops would be much cheaper anywhere other than in Iceland. Check out these Silly Bandz knockoffs selling for almost $3 a dozen!



I don't shop for Silly Bandz regularly but I hope that's not how much they cost in the US, because if so all those poor kids are getting shafted.

But there are bargains to be had in Iceland, especially on wool. Did you know that in Icelandic the word for "money" and the word for "sheep" is the same word? That's what a shopkeeper told me, and this online English-Icelandic dictionary backs me up.

One nice thing about buying wool products in Iceland is that if you export them you can get all your VAT (something like 15%) back, no matter how much wool you buy. These yarns cost about half as much in Iceland as they do in the US, so there are great bargains to be had for knitters. They also have wool for felting at what appeared to be an excellent price, though I am not a felter so I don't know how it compares. I bought a lot of yarn at the Handknitting Association of Iceland shop, enough to fill my small suitcase (fortunately, I had brought an extra suitcase in anticipation of this event). Most of it was for me, but some was for a friend. I swear! I wish I'd bought more.



The Handknitting Association also sells great handmade Lopi sweaters, which are very, very popular in Iceland, though I think most of the ones you see Icelanders wearing are not just handmade but homemade - all Icelanders learn to knit in primary school, and Lopi sweaters are not difficult to knit, so pretty much any grandma or aunt (or uncle or whatever!) has the know-how to make one of these. Non-knitters can skip the rest of this paragraph, but knitting nerds may be interested to know that Lopi sweaters are knitted from the bottom up, in the round, from bulky weight Icelandic wool, and they feature a stranded colorworked yoke, often featuring 3-4 shades of the same color (grays, browns, or blues, for example). Pullovers, buttoned cardigans, and zip cardigans are all pretty popular.

As a knitter, I chose to buy the yarn and knit my own, but if you don't knit but want a great souvenir of Iceland, I think a Lopi sweater is a great choice - they're very attractive, unmistakeably Icelandic, and super-useful (I use mine in place of a jacket in fall and early winter). They're scratchy, but they're also nearly waterproof, and pretty durable. If you can't afford the prices in the tourist shops, check out the Icelandic Red Cross thrift store on Laugavegur in Reykjavik - you might luck out and find a used one you like there.

In addition to the yarn, I bought two scarves, one fancy and one functional, both of Icelandic wool. I spent way too much on the fancy scarf but I love it. It's by a small Icelandic brand called Kurlproject (WARNING: site plays music automatically, ugh). It seems like everyone in Iceland is either a clothing designer or a musician. Or both.

I also bought an adorable felt Christmas ornament:



The brand on this one is Kata Handverk, and the crafter had loads of different types of ornaments and figurines, all the same basic shape. I wish I'd gotten her little nativity/creche! It was so cute. On the other hand, I don't really have any spare surfaces in my apartment that I want to turn over to a nativity scene and I'm not really religious. So, maybe I was right. I like buying souvenir Christmas ornaments, because you don't get used to them - you get to rediscover and remember them every year when you trim the tree.

I bought some other stuff but it was mostly junk. The main exports of Iceland are fish, fishing-related equipment, aluminum, software, and woolen goods. I don't really need any aluminum or fishing-related equipment, software I can buy pretty easily from home, and I can't legally import fish into the US. So woolens it is! Oh, and some cute little hand-carved wooden sheep for a toddler cousin.

Snaefellsnes! (God bless you)

So, on Sunday, I took a tour of the Snaefellsnes peninsula. I signed up for the day tour, but was upgraded to the luxury tour with gourmet dinner and aurora borealis on the way home! I think because I was the only one who wanted to do the day tour, and it's a small company, so they were only going to do one or the other. On the one hand, this was great - I got the fancy tour for the price of the less-fancy tour! On the other hand, it was an incredibly long day, longer than I was prepared for. I was picked up at my hotel at 9AM and didn't get back until 11:30PM. 14-and-a-half hours in a minivan with a bunch of strangers! Woo-hoo! On the website, they say the tour is 10-12 hours, so it's not like I thought I was going to be back in time for dinner or anything, but still.



Oh, wait, was I bitching about something? Aside from the grueling 14-hourishness of it, this tour was amazing. At 9AM, it was still very dark, and the streets were deserted. It felt like the middle of the night. We picked up sandwiches ("We won't stop for lunch - we have so little light," our guide said) and piled into the minivan. By the end of the day I was VERY glad I got one of the bucket seats and didn't end up crammed into the back seat. If I were a nicer person I guess I would have volunteered to switch seats with someone else, but I'm not, so I didn't!

We drove north from Reykjavik, in the dark at first. After maybe an hour and a half, we stopped at a rest stop in Borgarnes, the last "city" we'd see for the next several hours (it was a tiny supply town for the surrounding farms - maybe a few thousand people). We stopped at a couple of places to take photos of a volcanic crater (above) and the Snaefellsjokull (a glacier, behind the mountain below).



We visited a natural hot tub, where we hung out in 100+F water while freezing wind blew across the field. I am still washing the peat out of my swimsuit. While we were in the pool I tried an Icelandic delicacy called hakarl, or fermented shark. According to the wikipedia entry Anthony Bourdain called hakarl "the single worst, most disgusting and terrible tasting thing" he had ever eaten. Tony speaks the truth! I chewed, and chewed, but I couldn't make myself swallow it, and after I'd gagged twice I spit it out and threw it away.

I attempted to wash the shark taste out of my mouth with brennivin, traditional Icelandic schnapps made with potatoes and flavored with cumin. Brennivin will never be my favorite taste (and for what it's worth it's apparently the favorite tipple of the Icelandic problem drinker) but it's a hell of a lot better than hakarl.

Snaefellsnes is gorgeous, and, in the winter at least, it feels completely deserted. We hardly saw any other cars; we passed occasional farms with Icelandic ponies or sheep roaming around outside, but didn't see any of the farmers.



It was bleak, but stunning. Our guide talked about how Icelanders traditionally have a kind of adversarial relationship with nature, and haven't always seen it as something to be preserved, but rather to be defended against. You can see where they were coming from.



Really otherworldly. Driving through a lava field while listening to Sigur Ros was pretty amazing. (Also, Icelanders talk about Sigur Ros a lot. And Bjork.) We had a great dinner (amazing fish soup, yummy lamb, and apple caramel cake) and then we saw the Aurora Borealis on the way home, huge and gorgeous. There was a new moon and the sky was completely clear. It was as many stars as I'd ever seen in my life. I was freezing cold and exhausted, but taken all in all it was a great night. I just wish I'd know how long it was going to be; I would have gotten some more sleep the night before!

Day 2, written from home (OK, from work)

Well, Iceland was a bit of a whirlwhind trip, and I never got around to posting about it again. Alas!

On Day 2 we went to some more sights and museums and did some shopping. In the morning we went to Perlan, a sort of restaurant/museum/function hall deal on a hill in Reykjavik. It's a big dome, and there's a rotating restaurant, a cafe, the Saga Museum (sort of a wax-museum deal, which we skipped because it was 1500 kronur rather than the 700 kronur the book said it was going to be!), and an imitation geyser (which only runs from noon to six pm - we were too early for the geyser).

The view was lovely:



I don't seem to have uploaded any photos of Perlan itself. More later, maybe (I'm posting from work and don't have my computer).

As for shopping, we noticed that there were a lot of Iceland-made products in the stores; apparently because of Iceland's financial crisis, it's very much restricted how much money they can get out of the country and, therefore, how much they can import. The Christian Science Monitor had a neat article about it. So that meant a lot of wool, and touristy jewelry made from lava rocks (which I really wanted to buy some of, but none of it was quite to my taste). There was very little actually of the sort of standard made-in-China tourist crap you always see in any tourist location, which was kind of nice.

We both ended up buying things at the Handknitting Association of Iceland shop. They had hundreds and hundreds of Icelandic "Lopi" sweaters - I'll probably post more about this on my knitting blog. I bought enough yarn (probably much more than enough, really) to make my own Lopi sweater, plus a pair of machine-knit woolen gloves (I'd been looking for something like them for seriously YEARS, so it was great to find them). Kris got some yarn and a nice lace shawl. I kind of wish I had gotten more yarn, since it was seriously cheap. The Alafoss Lopi yarn I bought retails for $5-6 a ball in the US, and I got it for something like $3 a ball. Geez, now that I think about it I should have really loaded up on yarn and sold it all on eBay - subsidized my trip a little bit! And it's very light to pack.

After we'd been to the Handknitting store we started noticing that EVERYONE was wearing Lopi sweaters. The old fisherman at the best lobster soup place in the world had a nice one in shades of blue; very tall college-student-looking boys wore gray ones as jackets; a girl in a bar paired a natural white sweater with a bright red and white striped skirt and knee-high boots. I don't think that the Lopi sweaters are just because of the current economic troubles, either - from what I understand they just been very popular ever since they began to catch on in the 1940s.

That night we went on a Northern Lights tour with Reykjavik Excursions. We piled into a bus and a rather depressed-sounding guide told us that there were three things necessary to see the Aurora Borealis: magnetic activity, darkness, and clear skies. And that we were at a low point in the magnetic activity cycle, that the skies were partly cloudy, and that we might not be able to get far enough from Reykjavik for it to be properly dark. But! We did in fact see the Lights, although not the fantastic postcard kind you see sometimes. Here is a picture of Kris in front of the Northern Lights:



See, you really need a tripod to take a picture of the Aurora Borealis, and I did not bring mine. Also people kept taking pictures with flash. Please, if you go see the Northern Lights, turn off your flash.

OK, that was day two! I will post about day three soon! Maybe tonight even!