Geysir is an Icelandic Word

The word 'geyser' came from Iceland - that, in fact, is the name of the Iceland's biggest geyser - Geysir.

There is a hot springs valley with pools of simmering or actively boiling water.

Among them is Geysir that shoots up about a dozen times an hour to a few stories' height. Quite an amazing sight. Too bad it was so overcast - it is harder to grasp the enormity of it.



This is the Geysir's pool. The darker area in the middle is the opening, that's where the water spits out from. The surrounding water is where it falls after shooting up. Just like in a fountain.

The weather was... well, Icelandic. It rained pretty much non-stop all day long. We were both soaking wet through and through, but who cares when you're surrounded by beauty such as this?

The land is smoking...

...green grass is growing everywhere in the warmed-up soil...

...red sands of iron...

...blue water of minerals...

However nice and blue the water seems, don't touch it: it's 80-100 degrees Celsius (near boiling).

Icelandic Weather: All Seasons in One Day

The weather in Iceland is quite crazy. You can experience all 4 seasons in one day. Sun, rain, snow, fog, winds... you name it. You can experience 2 seasons withing FIVE MINUTES. Look at these photos. I actually bothered to give you the exact time each photo was taken to illustrate the frequency and abruptness of the changes.

9:38 am (photo from the bus window on our way to the glacier):

12:38 pm: rain on the glacier:

3:28 pm: heavy snow:

3:31 pm - THREE MINUTES LATER (seriously) - sunny again:

4:20 pm: it's snowing again:

4:24 pm - FOUR MINUTES LATER - nice and sunny again

5:46 pm - more rain on the way back (no snow):

The Icelanders have a saying: "don't like the weather? Wait 5 minutes"
As I just proved it - it is true.

Glacier or Walking on the Ice

Iceland's glaciers are among the biggest in the world. Remember the last year's volcano eruption, the one that disrupted all the flights? Well, a volcano just next to it is well past due with an eruption, too - only that one's crater is hidden under a glacier and will provoke dangerous and unpredictable flooding.

Anyhow, glacier: such a fun experience! There's a glacier tongue that descends right to the ground level. From afar, it looks like dirty snow. Nothing to write home about.

We were given crampons,

...a harness (presumably so that they could pick up our bodies in case we fall into a crevasse)

...and an axe (presumably for photo-posing).

Shall we go?

We spent about 3 hours on the glacier. We walked this and that way. There were deep cauldrons and crevasses all over. On this picture below, it's just an opening, it keeps on going deeper and deeper into the glacier.

We learned how to spot disguised cauldrons - that innocently look like snow but are, in fact, dozens of meters deep. The snow isn't packed, so you'll fall right through. A mom and a daughter fell last year. Mom died instantaneously, they managed to rescue the daughter. Don't go there without a guide and proper equipment!

We saw an ice rose: when an under-the-surface water current gets blocked, the water moves up and forms a well. The edges of the well look somewhat like a rose. It is also dozens of meters deep.

We didn't see any crevasses that were truly deep, but stepping over them was still a bit spooky.

We even went through a cave. The unpleasant part was that the path leading to the cave's entrance was clearly located above some kind of a tunnel. I kept thinking we're about to fall through into the tunnel...

While we were there, we experienced sun, rain, and snow. That's the Icelandic weather for you.

The deep-blue color of the ice means it's very dense. There is more water and less oxygen.

Overall, this was a fun experience!

Maybe next time we'll do something more difficult. Like an opportunity to actually use the ax! 

No Last Name For You in Iceland

Icelanders don`t have last names - in the way we know them. People`s last names are given in association with their fathers' names - and their own gender.

So, if your name is John, and your dad`s name is Mark, then your full name would be John Marksson.

And if your sister`s name is Maria, then her full name would be Maria Marksdottir.

And your dad`s name might be Mark Gustavsson. And your mom`s name might be Lisa Andreysdottir.

Now imagine if you and your sister were from different marriages.

Bottom line: everyone has their own last name. But somehow Icelanders make sense in all of this and moms don`t get questioned on their not-matching last name when they pick up their kids at schools.

The Icelandic Horse

If they had to eat rotten sharks, then it must mean there isn't much of a fauna in Iceland. And it's true.

One of the truly Icelandic animals is the Icelandic horse. There was no interbreeding from any horses from anywhere around the world for a 1000 years since they were brought there. So they are direct descenders of vikings' horses.

Looking at them, one might wonder if vikings were, actually dwarfs? Maybe that`s how the dwarf stories were born. Just kidding.

Anyway. The fact that they were so isolated means that the horses are very vulnerable. They have no immunity against out-of-Iceland germs and viruses. So if anyone takes an Icelandic horse abroad for a competition, it has to be left behind. No horses are allowed to enter Iceland. Very sad.

An advice: NEVER call the Icelandic horse a pony in front of another Icelandic human being. They are noble steeds (makes me think of Shrek). Horses.

And lots of excursions can be found on their tiny back. We haven`t got the time to experience that, though.

What Is So Hot In Iceland?

So what's so hot in Iceland? Well, other than the volcanoes that erupt and disrupt the whole western hemisphere's airline business, it's the hot water. The hot springs.

Iceland has an amazing quantity of geysers and hot springs. So much of it, in fact, that they use it to produce electricity, warm up their houses (it's really, really warm wherever you go - indoors), use it as tap hot water (it smells of sulfur really strongly), warm up green houses enough to grow tomatoes!

They even warm up the pavements to eliminate snow in winter! Although this last thing hasn't been introduced everywhere, not yet.

But wait, this isn't all: they pour hot spring water into a small roped-off marine lagoon to make sea bathing bearable! It's a very popular beach in summer, although most people still prefer a dip in a man-made swimming pool, where sea water is being heated up using the hot spring water. But some people (the brave ones) go right in the 15 degrees seawater.

I heard a lot about saunas being part of German social life, and of Japanese life, too - well, in Iceland the social life happens in outdoors swimming pools, year-round. Yes, outdoors. The water - you guessed it - is heated using the hot spring water. It takes a lot of courage to cross those couple of dozens of feet from the changing room to the hot pot and enjoy the heat (there are some as hot as 42 degrees - Celsius, that is) - see the pots on the left, each with their own temperature:

Roofs of Reykjavik

About 70% of Iceland's population (which, incidentally, totals 318,000 people) live in the capital, Reykjavik. I am not sure what we expected going to the infamous land of volcanoes, but we were surprised to find the view quite similar to those of Switzerland postcards: colourful houses with snow-capped mountains as the backdrop.

Huldufólk - "Hidden" Icelandic Population

People and sheep and Icelandic horse aren't the only inhabitants in Iceland. It's densely populated by elves, dwarfs, and trolls. Tolkien spent a lot of time in Iceland when writing his Lord of the Rings. And his elves - as tall as people - are the Icelandic elves.

We sure did feel like hobbits often enough hiking in the foggy mountain paths.

Icelanders shrug their shoulders and explain that the movie wasn't filmed in Iceland because of its lack of forests. I would say the ever-changing, completely unreliable weather played a role there, too.

Looking around at all the rocks and mountains and cliffs, you can't help but start seeing things. There, see? A troll turned into stone. 

Icelandic Food: the Singed and the Rotten

A couple of years ago I did a presentation on the 10 most disgusting foods on earth for my Toastmasters club. Little did I know that a day will come and I try one of those!

Iceland is a very remote corner of the earth with harsh climate and little vegetation and fauna. Life was hard, winters were long, and people had to get really creative to have something that would pass as edible. As I read somewhere, they ate leather shoes and an odd manuscript to get by.

What made matters even worse, was lack and expensiveness of salt, making lots of food-preserving techniques unavailable for them. 

The food might be awful, but they sure know (nowadays) how to serve it:

So some of the icelandic foods are... drumroll, please... 

Iceland in April is Beautiful!

We just got back from a week-long vacation in Iceland. What can I say? It's such a beautiful country, I don't even know what to compare it to.

I was unsure just what Iceland looks like in spring - in April. I heard that in summer it's green, with sheep grazing everywhere, and field flowers colouring the landscape, but April? Was it going to be all bare earth, gray and brown? Was there going to be snow? Dirty snow? Last year's grass? Evergreen moss?

As it turns out, the right answer was "all of the above".

Iceland is a remarkable country - it has mountains, volcanoes, glaciers, ocean, hot springs, lakes, geysers, agriculture fields, waterfalls, lava fields, mountain rivers... Forest is the only thing, perhaps, that it lacks.

So the mountains are covered with ice caps, the glaciers are blue and white and gray, the lava fields are either black or green with moss (depending on how old the fields are), the geyser areas are red with iron and blue with minerals, and there are endless golden yellow fields of grass. 

The sightseeing is amazing. 

But there are also many things to do, like walking on a glacier, with crampons!

Twigs Are Falling Off Of Our Nest!

Two weeks ago I was unsuspectingly playing the good housewife when all of a sudden I felt like a locomotive was passing through my living room at full speed of a modern train. Like in Japan. Whaaa? The washing machine gone mad! It was growling and whining and screeching and banging and biting.

I decided to stick with daytime laundries for the time being to avoid driving neighbours mad. They might not appreciate living next door to Grand Central. But then the washer decided to add some white lint all over the load. And then it stopped wringing the clothes - so now they come out with water dripping off of them. Just asking to be hanged out the window Italian style. Only I'm not in Italy (not even Italian!) and it's below zero out there.

Hmmm. Can you stick something THAT wet into a dryer? Since it's a stupid 2-in-1 unit and we'll have to throw away the whole thing anyway, I decided what the hell. I loaded everything in the dryer and turned on TV.

Weirdly enough, 2 hours later I could still hear the dryer humming merrily away. Whaaaa?! The dryer just got stuck mid-cycle, happily bringing hot air but not bothering to spin. So a couple of t-shirts on top of the pile were warm, but the rest was still soaking wet and ice-cold. At midnight. After over 2 hours of humming (very helpful)! I guess Hydro will be merrily humming, too when they will be issuing my next bill...

Unemployed and happy about it

You know what? Being unemployed is really a godsend. 

That is, of course, if you hated your last job, if you are receiving well-deserved employment insurance, and if you have another income to rely on.

Everyone is saying: enjoy it while it lasts. How often does a vacation like this happen? Paid for and effortless and long?

So I decided: making breakfasts each morning was all nice and fun, but didn't truly make me feel free and liberated. I decided to start doing all those things I could never find the time for.

I started today.

I sat on a boulder at the shoreline, with the Lake Ontario waves swishing at my feet. There was no wind. No people. No noise other than seagulls chasing each other.

Breakfast Recipe - Breakfast Nests

I am here. Kinda. Life has been busy over the past week, lots of activities, lots of new experiences... Snowboarding for the first time in my life? Check. Dinner in a rotating restaurant? Check. (I'm glad the rotation was fairly slow...) Experiencing the 4D theatre (motion, water spray, wind blowing). Check.

Throughout this week I cooked some of the breakfasts I shared earlier - crepes, frittata, rice pudding.

Today, I finally decided to make something new - and it was oh-sum! Awesome, that is, pardon my Russian accent :)

Please note: you need a muffin baking form for this one and a rolling pin (wow, I just learned a new word... rolling pin!)

Ingredients:

toast bread

carrots

zucchini

deli meat

cheese

oil

salt

 

Recipe:

Unicycle or Weird Spring Sightings

I am hyperactive these days. Waking up real early, making exquisite breakfasts, networking, interviewing, taking driving lessons. I am not working - and I actually got myself a monthly metro pass - that's how much I move around. 

So today I was in West Bloor Village, paying at the cash of my favourite Chapters store (very cool building, if you haven't been there - it used to be a theatre... they still have a stage and little folding chairs on the walls) - when I saw a nonchalant unicyclist driving down the road. Right on Bloor.

This unicyclist got me curious to the point that I dove towards my laptop the moment I came home and discovered that in the Canadian Highway Traffic Act, a bicycle is defined as "a device having any number of wheels upon which a person sits astride and which is propelled solely by human muscular power through the use of pedals". So there you go, unicycle is just as legal on the road as any other.

A few clicks later, I discovered that unicycles are extremely popular. There are quite a few variations, like a giraffe unicycle and multi-wheel unicycle.

2 Weeks of Breakfast: Day 14. Breakfast Cheesecake

That's it - I did it! Two weeks of waking up real early with the sole purpose of making a breakfast for my hubby, and a different breakfast each day at that! I survived through all those days when I really wanted to just bury myself in the pillows and blankets and hibernate for a day or two.

No, I am not going to stop making breakfasts. But now I will allow myself to skip a breakfast here and there. And repeat the recipes. And make some really easy ones - like toasts with yogurt :)

Anyway, here's breakfast #14 which turned out to be more like a dessert. Like a cheesecake. My hubby felt this one was the best out of all 14.

You're supposed to bake it in the evening - and serve cold in the morning. 

Ingredients (for 2-4 servings):

Filling:

  eggs - 4

  baking cheese (minimum 10% fat) - 500 g.

  sugar - 1 cup

Crust:

  sugar - 1 tbsp

  hot chocolate powder - 2 tbsp

  flour - 3/4 cup

  baking soda - 1/2 tsp

  cold butter - 50 g.

Recipe:

2 Weeks of Breakfast: Day 13. Simplest French Toast

You know what? I think I got me a winner: this recipe is really simple, tasty - and fast. Even if right now speed isn't my topmost priority, it sure is for most people's breakfasts.

There are quite a few French Toast recipes. I remember an exceptionally complicated one I attempted a year or so ago - there were numerous spices like nutmeg and cinnamon involved, and it had to be baguette, and the baguette had to be left soaking in your fridge overnight and baked in the oven in the morning.

And you know what? After all these efforts, it turned out the proportions in the recipe were off. The baguette stubbornly remained half-dry by the time we woke up, and it didn't taste all that great anyway. So complex recipes are not always the best ones to follow.

Today's simple french toast is perfect illustration of that.

Ingredients (for 2 people):

bread - 4 pieces

milk - 2/3 cup

eggs - 4

sugar - 2 tbsp

liquid vanilla - 1 tsp

salt - 1/4 tsp

butter (for cooking)

icing sugar (for decoration)

berries, yogurt, fruits, honey, maple syrup, ice-cream - whatever you want

Recipe:

2 Weeks of Breakfast: Day 12. Crepes (Blinis)

Seriously. I know I mentioned this quite a few times earlier this week: it's maslennitsa. And today is the last day! So we had blinis (crepes) for breakfast. Nice and thin and lacy. And - most importantly - tasty.

There are millions of recipes, of course - I chose the one to my liking and slightly modified it. 

For about a dozen blinis:

Ingredients:

eggs - 2

salt - a pinch

sugar - 1 tbsp

boiling water - 1 cup

milk - 1 1/4 cups

sour cream - 1 tbsp

flour - 1 1/4 cup

baking powder - 1/2 tbsp

oil

Recipe:

2 Weeks of Breakfast: Day 11. Kaiserschmarrn with Dried Apricots

Kaiser-what? I looked it up. Wikipedia insists this really is a dessert. A pancake, for that matter, and a thick one at that. Well, I had this recipe saved as a breakfast one - albeit sweet, indeed. And, as I mentioned a few days earlier, it's MASLENNITSA this week, so pancakes just fit. Just if you're curious, "kaiser" means "emperor" (I sense Cesar is from the same family... kaiser, cesar... see?) and "schmarrn" is "mishmash" in Austrian German. 

I got bored with wikipedia so can't tell you what emperor has to do with this breakfast dessert. Or dessert breakfast. But mishmash it is - for this 'pancake' gets torn into pieces.

Don't try this on a regular morning. And don't try this while everyone's sleeping - unless you wanna wake them up: you'll be operating a mixer. But it really is a simple recipe.

Ingredients:

flour - 100 g

rum - 1 tsp

eggs - 2

sugar - 2 tsp

milk - 100 ml (cold)

salt (just a pinch)

butter (for frying)

icing sugar (for decoration)

Recipe:

2 Weeks of Breakfast: Day 10. Grilled Sandwich

Uh-oh. I don't have eggs. I have just enough milk for 2 cups of coffee. I ran out of fresh fruits. That's what happens when you go to a late-night zumba class and forget all about groceries. So what on earth am I supposed to cook for breakafst with no eggs and milk?!

It turns out there is a solution - if you have an indoor grill. I do. So I made a grilled sandwich - I used to love them when I lived in Israel. Back then, I had a grilled sandwich machine which was impossible to clean for the fear of being electrocuted. Now I have an indoor grill machine with removable and dishwashable plates. And there are plates for Belgian waffles, too. But that's not the point - today I'm making grilled sandwich!

Ingredients:

bread (toastable)

deli meat

cheese

ketchup

butter

tomato

Recipe is simple:

2 Weeks of Breakfast: Day 9. Poached Eggs Sandwich

This morning I slept right through all of my alarms. I still managed to get out of bed before my hubby got out of shower, but I definitely had far less time than I needed for the planned since yesterday breakfast. 

Change of plans on the fly!

Flipping through the breakfast recipes saved on my laptop, mentally flipping through my fridge contents, flipping through a wonderful book I received a few years ago called "out to brunch", I finally got me a winner: poached eggs sandwich.

Now, if this is your first time poaching an egg, perhaps it's not gonna be a life-saver breakfast put together in 8 minutes. Just a warning. Well, not a warning... a watch-out.

Anyhow, the recipe is really for Eggs Benedict, but that definitely is not a quick breakfast solution as the sauce takes forever to make. I had to be inventive with the fridge contents and tight deadline (oh my, I talk like a project manager again).

Ingredients for 1 serving:

bread - 1 toastable piece (I really prefer whole wheat)

egg - 1

deli meat - 1 piece (I used prosciutto cotto; you can even use smoked salmon - actually, that'd be even better...)

spread or sauce (now, as I said it's supposed to be a sauce made all by yourself for eggs benedict. But since these were poached eggs sandwiches I was making, I grabbed a spinach spread from Fountain Sante, I just love it. Salty and rich - that's what you're looking for. And yes, you can make the poached egg sandwich even without sauce altogether - the runny yolks will be enough)

vinegar

salt

The recipe is quite simple:

2 Weeks of Breakfast: Day 8. Cottage Cheese with Dried Fruits

I had way too much wine and fried calamari for dinner last night to even consider frying or baking anything today for breakfast. Regardless, to maintain a balanced diet, you need to get your dairy at least every now and then.

So today' breakfast was simplicity itself: cottage cheese with dried fruits.

Ingredients:

cottage cheese

dried cranberries (sweet ones)

dried pitted prunes

dried apricots

fresh blueberries

jam (if you wish)

nuts

Really, I don't think I need to write a recipe, but here it is, just in case.