General – Page 7

8th Anniversary Festivities

November 17, 2017 by Taco

Greetings!

Another year has come and gone, and it’s time for some anniversary fun!

Indeed, SB and I recently celebrated our 8th anniversary! This year had a couple of especially exciting details to it. First, we are in Iceland! Second, we actually got to spend our anniversary together! We have a pretty abysmal track record with actually having time together on the anniversary itself (or other such misadventures as a car dying), but this year it fell on a day we both had off!

So, as a way of celebrating both of those things plus the anniversary itself we opted to go a bit “crazy” this year and begin our celebrations a full week early. Part of that had to do with weather on the weekend prior.

There is a building near us known as “Perlan” (The Pearl in Icelandic) and if you follow this blog (or have visited Reykjavík) you’ve seen it several times, even if you don’t realize you have.

Perlan is many things… landmark, museum, cafe, bar, restaurant, coffee shop, gift store, observation point, water storage facility, etc. I have to say that in all my travels I’ve never quite been in anything like it. When I see something new, I have a nearly oppressive desire to explore it – and that Perlan literally sits on the horizon of my daily view made the desire to explore all the more intense.

SB was also interested, but a couple things had previously held us back. One, distance – despite not being that far away from us as the ~~crow~~ raven flies, Perlan requires walking around the domestic airport to get to. Second, and more importantly, weather. Perlan sets up on a hill, Öskjuhlíð (betcha’ can’t pronounce that), which means that you get good views of the area – but it also means you’re really exposed to the elements. So SB and I had sort of been waiting for a good weather day that we both had time on. Sadly this took a long time. However, the weekend before our anniversary we woke up and there were blue skies! So we decided to hop out of bed and make our way over to Perlan.

Naturally by the time we got out of the apartment and were on our way clouds rolled it, but at least it wasn’t raining (for a change)! The walk over was nice. As mentioned you have to loop around the northern end of the domestic airport, which often yields some nice views of planes flying right above you as they land (Tristen’s favorite part). After that you make your way up to Öskjuhlíð, which is one of those areas that makes you quickly forget you’re in the middle of a city.

There are a lot of paths on Öskjuhlíð, not all of which go to Perlan. It’s a fairly nice paved trail system. We opted for one of the quicker routes on our side of the hill, which branched off from the dual path in the photo above.

It got decently steep in a few parts – enough so that it’d be rough in snow. But before too long we made our way to the clearing at the top of the hill where Perlan awaited us!

Even at this point we’d gained a decent amount of elevation for the area.

Since Perlan is literally built in and around giant hot water storage tanks it’s a bit bigger up close than it seems to be from a distance.

As you can see the central area of the structure was built between the tanks.

We didn’t know it, but we’d actually came up the “back way” (go figure, considering my history of going about things back-asswards), so we had to loop around to the front of the building to get inside.

If you follow a straight (impossible but work with me) line from this next photo (facing west) you will eventually get to our house. So we came up the hill “behind” Perlan.

Once inside you have a few options. Perlan itself is free with a few caveats. You can go into the building for free. In the “free zone” you have food, beverages (of the both the normal and adult varieties), restrooms, a gift shop, and good views from within the dome. Until very recently (September, I think) you could go out onto the viewing platform for free, but they’ve since started charging 490 ISK for it (~$4.65). In addition to the viewing platform, which is essentially the top of the tanks, there is a full-fledged museum and ice cave inside Perlan (including one of the tanks) – which is more pricey at 2900 ISK (~$27.35), however the museum fee includes the viewing platform – so that’s what we did.

When you first enter you are in the “core” area between the tanks and pretty much have to go up or down if you aren’t starting at the museum.

Since we weren’t sure about the weather we decided to start with the viewing platform in case rain rolled in. It offers quite a view!

Here’s a more focused shot looking west-northwest (that’s downtown Reykjavík to the right).

And here’s a more directly western view, you can see HI’s campus in the center to center-left of the photo.

Here’s another shot of downtown, as a point of reference the big church is Hallgrímskirkja and the little island to the left is Akurey, both of which you might recognize from my first Iceland post!

Moving around the viewing platform a bit, here is a shot looking to the north. While you can’t really see it, the start of the long road SB and I took north to the Westfjords lies along the base of the distant mountain (Esjan).

Then, looping all the way around to the south side, you get a view of the southern harbor (we live out on what is essentially a peninsula).

We watched a little sailboat sailin’ around for a bit, it was a good day for sailing. Plenty of wind, but not the crazy stuff we normally have.

As you can kind of tell, the observation platform wraps around the central glass dome. They built it on top of the hot water storage tanks – the majority of which are still used (lots of steam coming out of the vents!). As you walk around there are lots of little signs explaining what you are looking at, as well as overpriced viewing machines (which I just learned are apparently called “Tower Viewers“) – though not as overpriced as those in Boston.

They also have a variety of rocks/minerals on display from the various regions of Iceland.

Pigsten revealed himself from my pocket and was all over that shiz.

One of the tanks also had a cool sundial with surrounding topographical information – not that I could read any of it.

Pigsten used his geological knowledge to guide us.

About that time we started to get pretty chilly, so we headed inside to have some yummy coffee!

In order to get our coffee we had to head up into the top-floor dome area, which is actually above the viewing deck.

There are two places to get coffee inside, a more “grab and go” type place, and then a full-service coffee shop up on the dome – we obviously went for the full service.

It was really neat, they were in the middle of installing a hydroponic “green wall” in the middle of the upper dome area. I’d like to go back at some point and see the plants once they’ve had time to grow.

After our chilly walk and viewing experience, warm coffee sounded delicious, and it was!

We’d also worked up a bit of an appetite from our walk, so we through in some yogurt and a salmon sandwich, because why not!

Pigsten Approved™

We enjoyed a good chat while taking in the views – which are really good even from inside the dome.

We even got to see a few little planes taking off from one of the secondary runways.

After we’d had our coffee and noms’ we headed back down to the museum. We’d timed it well because the next ice cave entrance was only about 10 minutes away, so we browsed through the photo gallery they had outside the cave while we waited.

The photos were from all over Iceland, showcasing its various environmental extremes. One that I thought was really crazy was a photo which showed a boulder that had been blasted through the air during the 2010 eruption. Yes seriously – this thing got blasted over a massive distance.

The little thing to the right is a person, for reference.

After that it was time to enter the ice cave! Now, obviously this is a man-made ice cave. It’s designed as a replica of the actual ice caves which exist in several parts of Iceland. These aren’t caves with ice in them, mind you. These are literally caves through solid ice. It’s pretty crazy. The Perlan replica is 100 meters long and made out of 350 tonnes of ice and snow, so pretty dang substantial.

The entry reminded me a bit of SB and I’s ice museum adventures in Chena Hot Springs, Alaska. You could get suited up in a warm parka if you wanted one, then you went through what were essentially two airlocks before making your way into the entrance of the cave. Once inside you were immediately greeted by the snuggly-warm -10C (14F) temperatures.

The way they had done the lighting was really cool (literally and figuratively) – as it was behind a layer of ice with blue filters, which gave everything a really neat blue hue in some areas.

For the most part the cave was fairly straightforward, but in a few areas there were different paths you could take – each showcasing a different aspect of a real-world ice cave.

If you are getting hardcore Echo Base vibes from this, so did I.

As mentioned, different areas of the cave were designed to showcase different types of ice formations as you’d find them in actual ice caves.

This translucent area was probably my favorite – the patterns and detail in the ice was amazing.

Here’s a closer shot.

They’d also done a really good of creating the “illusion” of an ice trench.

These are the fissures you’d find in glaciers that go down.. well.. really deep. Our cave guide was pretty blunt – if you fall into one of these you’re pretty much f*cked. I say they had created the “illusion” of one because they’d use a cleverly placed mirror to simulate a deep-ass trench. You can’t really blame them, as they don’t need kids plummeting to their icy-blackness-doom as they slowly freeze to death in agony in the middle of a family friendly museum. If you look closely you can see the mirror in this next photo.

They also had a recreated “air vent” which would naturally form in the glacier. These are also really, really deep – but much more narrow.

If you thought you spotted a Pigsten in that air vent, you’d be correct.

Since a little dinosaur isn’t equipped for such ice cave living, we made our way to the exit – which they had designed in such a manner as to make it seem like you were leaving an actual cave.

Side note: It starting snowing outside while I was writing the ice cave section, fitting!

Once out of the cave you enter an exhibit on global warming, glaciers, and Iceland’s geological/climatological history and future in general.

This circular exhibit is situated above the ice cave, which is itself contained within one of the water storage tanks. So the whole of the museum (save for the photo exhibit) is actually in an refitted tank, kinda cool.

The exhibit had a lot of really good (and high tech) displays about the changing climate and how that’s generally bad news (for everyone, not just Iceland).

They had some pretty awesome digital images which curved along the wall and displayed things as they would change in real time.

In fact, one part of the wall was interactive. You could stand in certain parts and the wall would track your movements, so you could interact with things on the map by pointing at them or moving around. It was really neat and quite interesting – I especially liked the ones focused on naminals’ because they would move around when you pointed at them.

As you made your way out of the exhibit there was a wall with little plastic disks that you could leave messages on. People from pretty much all over the world had left messages, the Boys did too.

There were a couple which I thought were kind of funny.

After the exhibit we started to make our way back to our apartment because we were trying to keep ahead of the inevitable rain.

We took the same path down Öskjuhlíð, but this time I opted to explore a bit of the side routes.

After walking through some bushes I noticed something that seemed an awful lot like the remains of a bunker.

Now, I have no military experience (not that you need any to recognize a bunker), but I’d been in an IDF bunker on the Syrian border and it had similar vibes – albeit in a bit better shape. Turns out it was a bunker.

Yep, while mostly being rumble and a graffiti hotpsot now, we’d stumbled on the remains of part of the U.S. Occupying Forces defensive network during World War II. The part we’d found was one of the entrances plus a machine-gun nest – both of which were haphazardly sealed off with rocks.

Had you really wanted you could still get inside, but I wasn’t really wanting to, lol. I was more than happy to just explore the surface area.

If you were wondering “why this spot?” – well, that’s because Öskjuhlíð directly overlooks Reykjavíkurflugvöllur (the domestic airport), which was a hugely important airport for not only World War II, but also for the GIUK gap during the Cold War.

The bunker network wasn’t the only “war relic” as there was also a huge blasted-out pit where they’d placed and hidden fuel storage tanks during the war.

The tanks set down in the pit for protection, and then were coverage by camouflage. They also used the rocks they’d blasted out to build the war-time runway which had to be expanded due to the increased traffic and plane-size.

Speaking of rocks, Pigsten acquired his newest rock from the bunker – marking yet another impressive acquisition for the little guy.

Once Pigsten had his rock we continued back home, taking in some ducky butts in the wetland area in front of HI.

Once home we went to the small store near us (Háskólabúðin) for some drinks. One of things I got – and regret – was this atrocity.

I’ve described “near-beers” already, but this one took the cake at 0.0% ABV. I mean, that should of been a warning sign, but curiosity got the best of me. The result was the worst beer I have ever had. It is so bad that I don’t even know how to describe it. But let’s put it this way, choosing between this and Natty Ice, I’d chose Natty Ice. Fortunately the terrible “beer” was the only upsetting portion of our Perlan day!

That was the end of “Phase 1” of our 8th Anniversary festivities. The next had to wait until the following Friday, where I fixed us up a yummy (near) anniversary dinner!

It consisted of grilled salmon, garlic bread, and roasted vegetables with a mustard sauce. Delicious! Since eating out is just really, really expensive we’d decide to forgo it (yep, even for our anniversary) – however everyone agreed that we hadn’t missed out on much as dinner was awesome! Of course any good dinner needs a good treat, so we also had the first cake I’ve baked in Iceland!

Technically it was the second baked good we’ve produced. SB attempted to make banana bread prior to my cake, but she put Hjartarsalt in it by mistake (she thought it was baking powder). Turns out Hjartarsalt is another name for “ammonium chloride” (noticing the theme here? Why Iceland? Why?) which promptly rendered our bread inedible – at least to us, some people love Hjartarsalt.

Fortunately I learned from SB’s error and just used what we have and know to be baking soda (Matarsódi) instead of baking powder (which we still haven’t found). The end result was a super yummy white chocolate-caramel-fudge cake!

It was good enough that we ate on it for the next 3 days. 🙂

Naturally, good food, good treaties, and happy occasions cannot properly exist without good drinks. SB ventured out and got us not only some good beer, but also a pumpkin!

Yes, as a I not-so subtly alluded to last time, we acquired Thomas IV! Thomas has a long history which goes all the way back to 2014 and becomes increasingly storied each year. Generally we get a Jack-be-little pumpkin to be Thomas, but we could find no such variety in Iceland, so we went with a standard punkin’ for Thomas IV (his power grows). Kudos to SB for hauling Thomas and beer home from the other side of Vesturbær!

Despite having a cake, we used our looming anniversary as an excuse to get pretty much anything we wanted that weekend – including pops and more treats! Case in point, we found some polar bear gummies for Valentino!

And.. not to be forgotten some dino gummies for Tristen!

If you’re wondering about Pig, he ate both. 🙂

And that was pretty much the weekend, mostly just chilling, eating, and drinking things. We also had pretty decent weather for the weekend, which we’d hoped would stick around until Monday (our actual anniversary) but alas the clouds rolled back in. Fortunately it didn’t rain and it hadn’t gotten stupidly cold yet, so we were still able to get out and about and enjoy things!

Just what did we enjoy you ask? Well, the answer would be feeding the duckies – and geese – and swans – and (asshole) seagulls, of course!

Yes, we decided to put the ole’ nanner’ bread to good use and headed over to Tjörnin feed it to the friends. They did not seem to mind the Hjartarsalt in the least. Before too long we were pretty much swarmed by friends. Sadly I didn’t get any good photos of the swarm because I was feeding them, but here is a shot of the build up to the swarm.

In this next photo you can see Chuck and Chica, our two ducky friends who follow us around the world on our adventures and have ever since 2013.

After the friends had consumed an entire loaf of nanner’ bread we parted ways and took ourselves over to the highly recommended Reykjavík Roasters for some warm coffee.

We sat and enjoyed our coffees and chatted for a bit, before the warmness made me start to fall asleep, haha. Once we were finished with our coffee we headed down the street to the (also highly recommended) bakery, Brauð & Co.

As you can tell from the photo, if you somehow miss the delicious smells wafting out into the street – you’re sure to take visual notice of the bakery itself. We got a cinnamon roll and a vanilla + chocolate croissant (fresh from the oven) and then made our way back to our apartment to nom’ them. Along the way we decided to use the pedestrian bridge over Route 49 (Nesbraut), something we hadn’t done before and had wanted to do because we’re weird.

As you can see there is really nothing exceptional about it, we just wanted to walk over it. It does have some nice views though. He’s facing east (notice Perlan in the distance!).

And here’s facing west.

And he’s a nice view of HI, as well as the wetlands where we saw the ducky butts.

Once home we all quickly dove into our baked goods (never mind the fact we still had cake), which were OUTSTANDING.

Seriously, easily the best croissant I’ve ever had in my life, and quite possibly the new cinnamon roll champion as well (which says something, as they make some might fine cinnamon rolls where I come from).

After that we went comatose for a bit and just enjoyed everyone’s company for the rest of the evening – and since the sun goes down quite early these days that didn’t take too long.

And that, dear friends, was our 8th Anniversary!

Since then life has essentially gotten back to Icelandic normal, but not too normal – for instance I’m pretty sure we have ghost living with us now.

Fortunately he seems to spend a lot of his time over at the construction site or on top of Thomas IV, so he isn’t too much trouble (though he can be ornery).

Also, since Halloween is over that means that it’s Christmas already, or at least that’s what the stores are telling me. To be fair, the rampant consumerism around Christmas doesn’t seem to be quite as bad here (yet), but that doesn’t mean that the stores haven’t started creeping in some holiday malts, holiday energy drinks (for real), and holiday cakes. We may or may not have indulged ourselves in a gingerbread-cream-jam holiday cake.

Hey now, we’ll stretch those anniversary excuses as thin as possible. 😛

Anyways, that’s all for now. Here’s to another crazy year with the ole’ SB and the Boys!

Until next time,
-Taco

Living in the Land of Fire and Ice

November 8, 2017 by Taco

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens
~Gimli (J.R.R. Tolkien)
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Greetings and welcome to Dinosaur Bear!

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As promised I’ve decided to write a post about the more mundane and slightly less exciting aspects of living in “The Land of Fire and Ice.” The goal of this post isn’t to give an in-depth look at Icelandic culture or lifestyle. Heck, it’s not even really to provide a day-in-and-day-out account of being a ferner’ here. There are plenty of travel blogs that can do such a thing far more adeptly than I can. Instead I’m just going to ramble about a few things that we’ve been doing and encountered since moving here 3 months ago. Like anything in life there is some good, some bad, and some downright weird. Unlike a lot of my posts which have at least a semblance of a narrative, this time I’m just going to type things as I think of them (which is itself a result of which pictures I chose). So not everything here is chronological, nor does one thing necessary flow conceptually to the other. However I’ll try to keep my rambling structured to some extent! 🙂

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With that said, let’s get started!
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Vesturbær – our new home.

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So what happened once we got settled? Well, a lot. Not the least of which I found out that I passed the bar, and we also went on our first in-country trip. However, a lot of “easier to miss” things also happened. We had to do things like find out where a grocery store was, and once there, figure out what milk was. You’d think that would be easy but we ended up with an entire jug of yogurt (true story). We also found out really quickly that just because you recognize a brand, does not mean that that brand is going to be what you expect it to be. Case in point, a lot of the cereal is way different.
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Mmm, delicious rugs with fras.

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Sure we’d both lived abroad before, but that time around we were part of a program (especially SB) so there was a bit of hand-holding involved. This was a full-fledged plop down into a country of which you don’t even know how to say “Hello.” The result is that things have been interesting (in both good and bad ways). For instance I once opened what I thought was a stall in the restroom to find a mini-kids bathroom all self-contained inside of the stall.
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So when I say that we often don’t know what is going to be behind the next door, I mean that literally. As in, we can’t even read anything but the most basic of signs. I once also went into what I thought was a computer lab, only to realize I’d stumbled into the 9th circle of hell and it was a lab full of Macs. I still have PTSD.

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However, the good news is that SB is actually learning a bit of Icelandic. Partially because of her job at a preschool and partially because she is taking a basic Icelandic course through the university. I, however, am making less strides as my work doesn’t expose me to Icelandic, nor am I taking a class in it. I’m getting some of it just from constant exposure, but I wouldn’t really say that I’m actively learning it, as it’s more of a passive absorption. The last remnants of my German help some, but sometimes they cause more problems than they solve because it’s FAR from a 1:1 linguistic comparison.

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Still, all the confusion from the language aside, life is fairly normal. At least as normal as life can be when you live right across the street from an airport and a construction site.

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The construction site actually doesn’t bother us. In fact I’m probably going to make a post just about the construction site at some point in the future. However, in the meantime don’t be surprised if it sneaks into posts semi-frequently. It is a fairly big part of our existence after all. We’ve named all the workers and the machines and created an entire story, it helps deal with the jackhammers starting at 7:55 am.

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Of course “life as normal” also means that we can’t just enjoy living in Iceland and being students. Lots of a boring life stuff still has to happen. For instance, shortly after moving here my computer just shut off one night. Just, boom, dead. This is the same computer that I’d just paid $600 between shipping and customs for – a 4 year old computer no less (I later found out that the computer wasn’t supposed to have customs paid on it, but of course they didn’t tell me that). Anyways, I’m decent with computers and I knew enough to know this wasn’t something minor. So the tinkering began.

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After a few hours of poking, prodding, and dismantling I came to the conclusion that it was either the power supply (PSU) or the graphics card (GPU). Naturally, being in Iceland meant that regardless of which one it was, I was going to pay about 50-80% more than I would have if the same part had broken before I moved. That said, the GPU would be much easier to replace than the PSU because my particular computer uses a server-rack style PSU, whereas the GPU is just a standard make.

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So the first thing to come out for testing was the PSU.

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And from there we next went to the GPU for testing.
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The good news is that it ended up being the GPU that had bit the dust. This was the first time ever I’d had a GPU die on me – wonderful. So I went about figuring out how to get a new one, and despite my best efforts I ultimately decided that I’d just need to buy one in a brick-and-mortar store here to get the best price (due to customs + shipping). However, I soon found that there were no stores within walking distance that carried computer hardware. Fortunately, I was able to use the free shuttle to Smáralind (mall) which leaves from City Hall to get within about 10 minutes walking distance of a computer hardware store. I guess the one lucky thing was that it happened before the shuttle stopped running for the season. So, thanks to a bit of leeching from the mall shuttle I was able to acquire a new GPU.

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Of course I paid over $100 more for it than I would have even in the more expensive stores in the U.S., but in my life when it comes to my desktop there are two options 1) I have my Desktop 2) I end up on the FBI’s (or I guess Lögregla’s these days) most wanted list.

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Installing the GPU was a bit of a chore since I have what is called a “small form factor” (SFF) case. But I managed without breaking anything.
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Now, life being life, that wasn’t the only expensive thing that broke. As I mentioned before our camera lens also decided to break at some point. We had purchased the additional coverage when we bought it, but because we are abroad it turned into a massive shit-show to get them to honor the warranty. The end result is that we had to pay $50 to get someone to say “Yep, it’s broke.” Then pay $30 to send it to the warranty people so they could say “Yep, it’s broke.”

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Happy Icelandic boxes for sad broken camera lenses and other goodies.

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All for them to not replace it anyways. In the end we managed to recover about 1/2 of what we paid for the lens, which does us little good here since the same lens costs literally 2.5x as much in Iceland. We also are down a suitcase, because one of them got damaged too – oh and they didn’t replace that either.

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Anyways, enough bitching about stuff being broken. Iceland is hard on your stuffs’ apparently. 🙂

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Back to the living situation. Which is to say, back to the construction yard.

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And early morning (and late night) jack-hammering. Or as better reference of what morning currently looks like:

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That is about 8:30am, for reference.

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Also, and by late night I do mean late-night.
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Ok so that photo was actually at like 6 o’clock, but more about the ENCROACHING DARKNASS in a bit. Besides, Pigsten might get angry at me if I discuss his “secret” construction site too much just yet.

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So living, yeah, it’s living! The boys are still as crazy as ever.

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Actually Valentino is a little more crazy than usual. We think it’s the newfound proximity to the Arctic Circle that is causing him to go a bit feral. Polar Bears can be dangerous yo’.

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We also live in a giant concrete bunker. No seriously, a lot of the buildings here look like they were built to withstand being shelled. While Iceland hasn’t been subjected to much in the way of shelling (outside of Red Storm Rising, anyways) it gets absolutely shitter-blasted by the more natural elements. As such, a lot of the buildings look like ass but when your existence consists of 365 days of wind blowing things into you sideways, I guess you sort of need solid construction.

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Our building also has grass growing on the roof. No seriously.

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It’s actually fairly common here, it’s also a good idea. In our case there’s so much grass that they even have to come mow it.

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It looks much nicer when it’s mowed.

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Naturally a lot the clipped grass ended up pilled up in the walk ways, or bunched up on our welcome mat. That was a kind of a pain. The street cleaner did come clean up everything in the street though, which was neat (except for Clifford, he hates street cleaners for some reason that we have never understood).

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Speaking of plants, Iceland doesn’t have much in the way of trees. I mean, I guess this isn’t a huge surprise. The environment itself isn’t conducive to tall vegetation (see wind), but a lot of the forests that were here got chopped down by the Vikings a long time ago. So most of the vegetation you see scattered around was intentionally (re)planted, and even then there isn’t a ton of variety in the trees. The cool thing is that while evergreens are definitely popular, a fair chunk of the trees are actually seasonal – which means you still get fall colors (even if nothing like New England). For example, here’s a photo from a bit ago showing some trees on campus just starting to change.
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All those leaves are completely gone now, and have been for awhile – which is a bit more depressing. However, the change was fairly gradual in the leaves, so we had a few good weeks of colors!
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We also had a crazy explosion of mushrooms around us! There for a week or two mushrooms were everywhere!

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I’m pretty sure Pig has since ate them all.

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In other plant news, we acquired three buddies to liven up our apartment!

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Yep! SB found someone who was getting ready to move and couldn’t take their plants, so we got them! They are three aloe plants, and their names are from left to right: Þórunn, Gunter, and Logi – none of which are pronounced the way you probably think they are. 🙂

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They live on the little table where our router is, right next to our big balcony windows. We won’t be able to take plants with us (which is why we didn’t even consider bringing any of our current buddies) so we were mixed on whether to get any here, but I’m glad SB got them! So much happier with plant friends. They seem to be doing well, as they are just babies. Their biggest threat in the beginning was a certain porcine predator.
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Yes, Poor Pig, he wanted to eat them so bad. But he got scalded and then had a big ole’ piggy pout.

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However he’s since came to understand that Þorunn, Gunter, and Logi are friends, and not for eating. We feed him lots of oat biscuits from Bónus (our regular grocery store, featuring a pig mascot!) to keep him happy too, which probably helps.

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The Boys also like the rainbows. Like I mentioned before, rainbows are pretty constant thing here – and even manage to crop up on otherwise icky days.

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Sometimes you get lucky and can see almost the full arc, complete with Icelandic leprechauns (i.e. gnomes) at the end.

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I guess rainbows are a good segue into the weather in general, which is itself tied to the rising tides of darkness. A good bit ago we woke one morning to a little bit of snow on Esja in the distance.

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That was pretty much the beginning of the dark times. Since then we’ve been losing daylight, and fast. As an example, take this photo from around 9:00am from October 11th.

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A decent amount of light, right?

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Welp it’s still dark now. Heck, when I get up at 6:20 – 6:40 the northern lights are still out, and at 8:00am if feels more like 3am than 8:00am. I mean, seriously, it’s pitch black – and when you manage to pull yourself out of bed you know you’ve got hours more of darkness ahead of you. That’s only going to keep getting worse for the next 1.5 months. SB and I are not especially excited about that. In fact the darkness has really been the only thing that’s been hard about living here. Second to that is probably the fact that online shopping basically doesn’t exist, lol.

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The Fall has also brought some crazy wind. Yes it’s raining, but that’s normal. It rains so much you just sort of forget it’s raining. It’s also usually windy, but this had been some hardcore wind.

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SB and I have lived in windy places since 2010, each progressively more windy than the last. Here the wind is so bad that literally all the lines (power, etc.) have to be underground. Plus, I’ve walked through some Nor Easters, and those definitely, definitely sucked – however, there was a wind storm here a few weeks ago where I legitimately thought I could have glided if I jumped in the air. It was picking outdoor furniture up and moving it – for real, and I don’t mean plastic lawn chairs, I mean furniture. We couldn’t open our windows or balcony door – as in, we physically couldn’t open them due to the wind pressure. It was bonkers. Yet the planes still came into the domestic airport. Sure they were (literally) landing sideways, but one thing I’ve noticed about the Icelandic and Greenlandic pilots that we get to watch at the airport is that they give no shits. This isn’t the international airport down in Keflavík (you don’t actually fly into Reykjavík from most places – we didn’t either). We live near the domestic airport, which is obviously domestic, but also handles a lot of Greenland flights.

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Those arctic pilots don’t care. “Oh lookee there 500mph winds, nuclear fallout, a Russian invasion, Y3K, herpes, and a vortex to hell – no worries we’ll just land upside down, sideways, while simultaneously on fire and frozen.”

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One night it was bad, yet here comes the ole’ 1947 prop plane from Greenland, just flying in there sideways like a boss because peeps gotta have their noms. I like watching them. Heck, I think if the one of the volcanoes erupt again these guys will just fly into it, because that’s a shortcut to Australia.

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But alas, not all of us were born with the stock of arctic pilots. So instead we hide inside with our tasty coffee.

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Yes it should come as no surprise that SB and I purchased a French Press within the first 10 hours of being in Iceland. 🙂

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We’ve also found a brand of oat milk from Sweden called Oatly which is super delicious with both hot and coldbrew coffee!

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In other food news, we’ve been eating a lot of lamb. Whereas chicken had traditionally been our staple, chicken is INSANELY expensive here (~$23 for a pack o’ tendies), it’s now become lamb and fish, because lamb is decently cheap and fish is well.. still expensive, but comparatively less so. We’ve also been eating a lot of eggs, because eggs are cheap despite chicken flesh being expensive.

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In fact the expense of food has limited us quite a bit. For example, we no longer really go “out” on our Friday Date Nights. It can legitimately be $25 per person, with no drinks, to eat – and that’s just a hamburger place. If you add in beers, then god have mercy on your soul. Really you should plan to spend $30-40 per person at your average place. For instance SB and I went out once, got 2 beers and an appetizer and it was like $36 during Happy Hour. Yeap.

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So, in order to make up for our inability to go “out” we now go to the store and get something special for dinner. This something is normally boxed pizza, because it’s cheap and decently good. We’ve, of course, also continued our tradition of getting a Friday night treat as well! The treat is much more variable, though one thing we’ve found that is super yummy are these mini-cinnamon rolls.

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There is also a local chocolate company with the awesome name of Omnom Chocolate Factory that we’ve had a few times, but like most things their candy is really pricey. We actually want to go do the factory tour, but even that is really expensive.

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Still, we don’t let finances stop us from exploring culinary stuff entirely, and besides we’ve found a few cheap things to try out. A good example is lakkrís (licorice). Icelanders seem to love their lakkrís, it exists as everything – to the point that even lakkrís ice-cream seems normal. However, there is one thing you have to be careful about with their lakkrís. Some of it contains ammonium chloride (sound familiar?) – for realsies. For example, take Opal – a super popular traditional Icelandic lakkrís.

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If you get the red box, you can prepare yourself for lakkrís pellets that taste like cough drops. Not too bad, but nothing you’d be clamoring to consume either. HOWEVER, should you get the green box…

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…well then, let’s just say that some stones are best left unturned.

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The good news is that some of the lakkrís is absolutely delicious.

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That package is quite good. I mean, it’s licorice (read: not Twizzlers or Red Vines) so if you don’t like licorice-licorice you won’t like it, but I happen to be a fan of licorice (just not, you know, licorice laced with Borax).

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Of course if licorice isn’t your thing, they also have lots of non-lakkrís candies, as shown by Pigsten.

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And, if I’m going to mention food and candy, then I have to mention beer.

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If there is one thing I have to say about beer in Iceland it’s this: prepare thyself for poverty. Alcohol in general is more expensive here than anyplace else I’ve ever been (with the exception of Kaktovik). If you are eating out (and not in a happy hour), don’t be surprised if you pay $14 for a beer, and if you want to head to the store for a six-pack, prepare to spend about $25 for the six-pack, and that’s just for normal beer, not the fancy stuff.
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Which brings me to my next point, the state regulates the sale of booze, so you have to go to state-owned liquor stores to buy real alcohol. These stores are called Vínbúðin, and there are about 48 of them in the entire country. Outside of those stores, you’ll be forced to go out (and pay $14 for a beer) or go to the store and buy “near-beer.” Near beers are those.. uh.. near beers, which range from 0.0% to around 2.5% ABV. These “beers” also range in quality from “I’d rather be in a gulag” to “Pretty decent.” One of them holds the title of being the worst beer I’ve ever had in my life, but I’ll talk about that in another post.

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Point being, a lot of what I get is these “near-beers,” and that’s for two reasons. First, price. You can get a big can of near-beer for as low as 99 cents. Second, availability. I can walk 2 minutes and get a near-beer. Getting to the closest Vínbúðin requires significantly more effort. Plus they randomly drive their cars on the sidewalks here while parking (no really). That said, a Taco cannot survive on near-beer alone, so occasional trips to Vínbúðin are a must.

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They have a pretty good stock of local, European, and Murkan’ beers at the locations we’ve been too. Of course they are expensive, but beer is life. As far as quality goes, Icelandic beers have been good. Anymore I don’t think any one country has beer on lock-down. I think it’s more brewer-to-brewer since the micro-boom. I’ve had a couple that were really good, and then I’ve had some that were meh. Just like any other place. The moral of the story is that there is plenty of good beer here, I just can’t afford most of it. 🙂

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But for those I do purchase, I even have a special little shelf – that’s how important they are to me.

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In reality I have to keep them in there because our refrigerator is the size of a shoebox. But hey, that doesn’t stop us from telling stories on it with magnets!

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Indeed, our apartment has a lot of quirks. From the Scandinavian-style shower that really isn’t a shower in the traditional sense, to the cabinets designed for giants, to water pressure that will rip your skin off, to the tiny little sink that gives you a bath (NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO) due to said water pressure. Yes, when coupled with the fact that we pulled most of our furniture out of the basement or trash area, it’s been an interesting time.

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I think the most interesting thing has been our bed. That’s a story that deserves to be told.

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Before we arrived we had decided that for both practical and cost-related reasons that we were going to forgo a bonafide bed and that we were going to try to get futon/pad/thing instead. This ended up being more difficult than we anticipated, because there are certain things that Iceland just doesn’t have (like folders, I’m legitimately serious, they don’t have normal folders here). It also got expensive, really quick, and after a bunch of frustration and two trips to IKEA we managed to cabbage together a bed unlike any bed I’ve ever had before.

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Yes, you are seeing that correctly.

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Our bed is a cheap futon pad, which has literally been cut into two pieces with scissors. Then, we mashed a bunch of plastic into wads and shoved that between the pads. Then we stuck a mattress pad on top of that, and then put a sheet on that and called it a bed. Yep. We also have one single comforter-type thing, no sheets. It’s most definitely janky, but it works.

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You may be wondering why the plastic? Well, that’s because the mattress pad alone wasn’t enough padding, and then the futon pad wasn’t big enough, so the mattress pad hung way over the edges. So you’d roll off the bed. So in order to fix that we could either spend $100 more for another pad, or get creative. I might be going for a post-doc, but a completely helpless academic I am not. I took some plastic out of the trash, rolled and taped dat’ shit up, and boom, bedtime. It’s been working for 3 months now, don’t hate.

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Now, the bed itself is decently comfy (one must have realistic expectations when sleeping on plastic and destroyed furniture). However, the sleep I get here is consistently the worst of any apartment SB and I have ever had. This is due to a couple of things. First, we have no fan. I’ve been sleeping with a fan for about 12 years now. A standard box-fan will run you $75+ dollars here (and you have to find it in the first place, fans aren’t really growing on trees in feckin’ Iceland). SB does have a rain app on her phone that helps some, but it’s not the same.

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The second reason, and the WAY more enraging one, is that we are surrounded by undergrads (in fact there is a party going on while I write this). Honestly I don’t feel like I need give any further explanation. To make matters worse, Iceland follows the Europe drinking culture of “Drink at home until 11:30pm then go out.” That sounds good on its surface, right? You’d think that it meant that the loud parties stopped around that time. The truth is not really. Generally at least one group will “stay in” which is all it takes for things to stay loud. Then, around 3am – 4am (or later) you get everyone rolling back in and seemingly playing an entire f*cking game of soccer in their apartment while wearing plate-mail armor and hitting the walls with sledgehammers. It’s insane. Like I explained, this building is basically solid concrete and steel. I can jump up and down on the floor and barely make any noise – yet these people scream and bang so loudly that it sounds like they are in your apartment at 4 o’clock in the morning – and this just isn’t on party days, this EVERY DAMN DAY. In fact, sometimes they are so loud you can hear them over SB’s phone rain AND the ear plugs you are wearing. Yes, I have to wear earplugs to sleep – almost every damn night. It appears to be giving me a nearly constant ear ache in my right ear too. It is TOTALLY AWESOME.

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To be fair to the building as a whole (but not really, they’re all loud), it seems like we got totally screwed with the luck of the draw. Of our entire building, the two loudest apartments are on each side of us – and that’s not just because we’re between them. You can literally walk to the other side of the building and it’s still those two apartments you hear. Then I’m convinced the people above us set off TNT charges randomly at 2am, that or ICBMs are randomly hitting the roof of the building. I have no idea what the flying f*ck they are doing, but they’ve legitimately got to have a bulldozer up there or something.

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~~But hey, at least the people below us don’t make much noise~~ [Edit: nope, the day I posted this they apparently decided to open a blasting zone in their apartment at 2am – this is why I can’t say nice things on my blog]. But hey T-Rex that lives in their window also turned out to be a light!

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So yeah. Knowing what I know now I can safely say I’d never, ever have chosen these apartments if I’d not been a moron and realized that they would include undergrads. Harvard quarantined the undergrads into their own little hives of misery, Háskóli Íslands does not.

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But I suppose that’s as good as spot as any to shift the discussion to school itself, you know, the whole “fake” reason we came here in the first place. I say fake because SB and I were pretty transparent that moving here had little to do with school, that was more of a residence permit checkbox than anything else. Yet, despite it’s secondary status, it is the thing that eats up most of our existence. So what’s that bit of our life like? Well, I can’t speak for SB, but I can share some of my experiences in my post-doc program.

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First, a little about the school itself.

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Yes, I’m reusing this photo.

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We go to Háskóli Íslands (The University of Iceland).

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Háskóli Íslands is the largest (and objectively best, because I go there) of the seven schools in Iceland. To best honest I didn’t even realize there were seven, I only ever really hear about four: Háskóli Íslands, Háskólinn á Akureyri, Háskólinn á Bifröst, and Háskólinn í Reykjavík (which is Háskóli Íslands’ rival). Háskóli Íslands (henceforth HI) has something like 13,200 students. It’s by far the largest university in Iceland, but still fairly small by Murkan’ standards where schools like Ohio State have 743,000 students.

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At HI, I unsurprisingly attend the law school, which is technically called the “Faculty of Law” and is located with the “School of Social Sciences.” I have no idea how big the law school itself is, but it’s not big.

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I take a mix of classes (all law), and I’ve noticed a few interesting things. First, grading is on a 0 – 10 scale and they use the European Credit System (ECTS). I don’t understand it. You take like 1 zillion credits, and 1 credit hour doesn’t seem to actually equal 1 hour. For example I have a class that is, by itself, 10 credits – yet I don’t spend no freaking 10 hours a week in that class (not that I’d show up if I was supposed to anyways). Second, written law exams are not as common – they are instead oral and much shorter. Third, despite the lack of written exams, papers are way more popular. Fourth, cold-calling barely exists at all – and if you cold-call an Icelander or one of the European students they seem to die inside. The one exception to this is that I have one professor who does cold call, and perhaps unsurprisingly, he is an HLS graduate (we are cockroaches, I tell you – though it is kinda fun to watch people who’ve never experienced a cold call before fall like dominoes). Fifth, people are way more passive compared to what I am used to. Whereas a simple question could generate deathly blood-feuds at HLS, here it’s more like “Oh you think we should eat babies? Ok.” –> goes back to browsing Facebook. Sixth, hand-raising isn’t a thing. It’s just who can shout the loudest. Seventh – having a better grasp of English than your professors pays HUGE dividends when it comes time to communicate. Sure they can speak 27 languages whereas I speak one, but oh yeah I speak that one better. AMERICA FERK’ YEAR’.

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Blow it out your ass and send them to the God they wish they knew.

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So far things are going well academically. I’ve gotten “First Class” grades in the two classes I’ve got grades for so far (the schedule is weird, I have two classes which are already done) – though to be honest I’m not entirely sure what that translates to, other than that First is better than Second. I’ll probably discuss school more in the future once I’ve finished up the first semester and know more about my timeline. Overall it’s a bit of a mixed bag, it’s not what I thought it would be, with more of a lean towards the negative than the positive, but it’s not bad by any means. I think I’ll be more engaged once I can start focusing on my own research, which will hopefully be sooner rather than later. I mean, doing my own research is the main reason I did this program in the first place. Sitting in a class with people who don’t even have a Masters yet (FILTHY FECKIN’ PLEBS) is not.

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If it wasn’t obvious from my rant about living with undergrads, we live near the school. In truth our commute is pretty freaking awesome. I can be in class in 6 minutes. It’s amazing. Our neighborhood is Vesturbær which is kind of divided by Route 49 (Nesbraut – which at 4 lanes is the largest in the entire country). One one side is HI, construction, houses, 1 tiny overpriced store, and the airport. On the other is all sorts of cool stuff. I’ll let you guess which side we live on. Fortunately it’s pretty easy to cross over to cool-side land.

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It’s a pretty neighborhood when the weather is right.

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Plus, like I’ve mentioned before, Tjörnin is right in the middl(ish) of it.

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And with Tjörnin comes duckies, geese, swans, and 9 octrillion seagulls (who are assholes, but still friends).

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It’s a very pretty place, and while our walk-commute to the store is fairly long (especially on the way back with all the groceries), it’s nice that part of the walk takes us through such a pretty area.

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But mostly I just like all the duckies. 🙂

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This area (a bit further from us) also has stuff like the Icelandic parliament, Alþingi – I discussed that part of town a bit more here.

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So that’s kind of a general overview of where we live – in a noisy undergrad-dominated complex, near a construction site, an airport, the university, and across the country’s largest highway from some duckies. I don’t make it sound too great, but really it’s not that bad, we both know I like to whine. Most of the stuff doesn’t bother me, it’s really just undergrads – who, for reference, I still hated while I was one.

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In general, life here is just that, life. SB and I do most of the same things as before, some less-so due to cost, but our general schedule is the same. It’s cold, rainy, and windy – but we do get rainbows! Some stuff is impossible to find (ibuprofen, for example) but there are new things to find, which keeps things exciting – especially when you can’t even read the box. 🙂

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But then there are other things that you wouldn’t expect to find, but do – like pumpkins!

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Yes, despite not traditionally celebrating Halloween, the holiday has started to creep into Icelandic culture (as it should, Halloween = best holiday). We might have ended up getting a pumpkin, but that’s a story for next time. 😉

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All in all, this time in the “Land of Fire and Ice” is definitely a crazy adventure we’ve set out on, but it’s nothing we can’t handle. Right now both SB and I are in agreement that the encroaching darkness is the most difficult part about it. We’ve stocked up on Omega 3 + Vitamin D supplements, but at a certain point oppressive blackness is just flat-out depressing (side note: Icelanders consume more antidepressants per capita than any other country in the world). So if you were wondering why I started this post off with that relatively “dark” quote from the Lord of the Rings, it’s because 1) Quoting Tolkien is always relevant (fight me), and 2) the continuous darkness has been the biggest challenge we’ve faced on this adventure so far – but we won’t give up!

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I am many things, and stubborn as holy living shit is one of them. 🙂

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So that’s about that. I rambled a lot, and this post sort of covers a bit of the more mundane and random info I’ve thought about while writing other posts. It also does a good job of setting the current scene, which is full of looming deadlines, fading sunlight, and declining temperatures. Oh yes, winter is coming – we only need to look to the horizon.

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Actually it ended up showing right after I wrote this, but hey, I have a 180 degree view of mountains. So at least I can take in a pristine view while I eat laundry detergent candies, rotten fish, drink my $75 beer, and slowly go insane from endless darkness!

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ICELAND FERK’ YEAR’ – HEALTHCARE FOR ALL, CHECKMATE AMERIFATS

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But really, it’s not too shabby here. Life’s too short to be afraid of the dark.

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Until next time,
-Taco

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[Author’s Note: The formatting got super screwed up on this post for some reason. Because I’m at my wit’s end with such blogging issues, I used a very “lazy” way of fixing it. So if you are observant and tend to read between the lines, know that it’s not you, it’s me. 🙂 ]

I’m Still Here

October 5, 2017 by Taco

So, for those of you who might have been wondering, yep I’m still alive.

This has been a doozy of a hiatus here on Dinosaur Bear, though be fair I did sort of say that was going to happen. In fact I think this might have been my longest break from blogging since.. June 2014. Anyways, as is normal for me this doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ve been sitting around twiddling my thumbs. Quite the contrary in fact! Indeed, I’ve gone through a few major life shifts since we last met.

But here is the good news, I’ve actually got some posts queued up about those shifts. Check it out, I have not one, not two, not three, not four, but five posts (six if you count this one). I’m not exactly sure on what the timeline will be for those posts you know.. actually getting posted, but they are here and ready to go. The first one should drop next Monday (the 9th), which just so happens to be the same day as my first Icelandic exam (yeah sarcastic excitement)!

Half the battle has just been coming up with enough time to write the darn things. Well, pictures can also be kind of a pain in the arse when they are spread across multiple devices. Namely because they get all out of chronological order when you combine them (even with sort by date selected) so then you get to go through them at a snail’s pace to sort them all out. Anyways, slight digression there.

Point is, I am here, I am alive, and while I am no longer as easy to reach as I was once was I still plan on keeping the blog alive. I’m not sure exactly what my posting schedule will look like, but that was also sort of in flux before I even moved. Oh, about that, I live in Iceland now (if the exam comment didn’t make that obvious). Like I said, life shifts.

So, at some point in the coming days after this my first post will go up (should be Monday), and then from there the next four will trickle out in some yet-to-be determined fashion. It’s been a fairly large hiatus, yes, but I’ll make up for it by slamming out some posts.

With that said, I’ll get off here and get back to editing a paper I need to turn in this week. Fun stuff that. 🙂

Enjoy the forthcoming posts! In the meantime, if you haven’t checked out the “About Me,” “Who’s Who?” or “Rules of the Blog” pages recently you might take a gander at those as they have been substantively updated – especially the rules since I’ve recently changed my photo format to compressed/lower quality photos on the blog due to storage issues. The plus size is that a post which was once about 465 MB is now only around 25 MB, so that’s definitely a good thing – even if the quality is lower (ask me if you want a high quality version of a photo).

Until next time,
-Taco

P.S. enjoy a nice photo of a park near my home. That was back when we still had sunshine.

A Summer Interlude

July 24, 2017 by Taco

Greetings,

Welcome to Dinosaur Bear! This is going to be a short post (yes, an actual short post from Taco, believe it or not!). Basically I just wanted to post that I have no idea when I’ll be posting next (lol). Well, actually that isn’t true, but more on that in just a second.

I’m getting ready to go through a bunch of changes. The bar exam, job interview(s?), moving (déjà vu), moving again, starting a post-doc program (in another country), and so on and so forth. There are a lot of unknowns in this process which means that I have no real firm timeline on a lot of things (for instance, as of right now I still don’t have a place to live abroad). As such, I don’t know when I’ll have a time to make another Dinosaur Bear post, but rest assured I’ll definitely be generating content for that post whenever it does come.

In fact, on the day this gets posted I’ll be on my way to take the bar exam, which is effectively the beginning of my “blog blackout” period that could last upwards of a month (or longer). However, have no fear, I can guarantee at least one post in the interim. It’s going to be my “Boston Post-Game” post, which, unsurprisingly, covers pretty much the exact opposite of my “Boston Pre-Game” post from (what seems like) a lifetime ago, and is the third subject I talked about posting here.

That next post (which is a doozy, as it covers everything that happened from New Orleans to me leaving for the bar exam) should drop on August 1st and give you something to chew on until I get around to posting about the bar exam, moving, and really starting what is by most accounts a practically new life.

Anyways, if you still can’t believe that I’d write something this short (e.g. a normal sane-person type of post) then I suggest perusing some of the Dinosaur Bear archives. You can either just do a random search (see here if you are confused by wizardry), or go with some of the following suggestions by some people who appear on the blog regularly. I asked Meem and SB to pick a post they really liked (they both ended up choosing two), whereas I asked the Boys to pick some older posts that they thought didn’t get enough traffic or were just silly. I also tossed in a personal pick which I haven’t referenced in awhile and need to follow up on someday (plus a bonus full of some silliness).

SB’s Picks: North to Alaska [Part 4 of 4] and To Salem, then Danvers, and Back Again
Meem’s Picks: The Beginning and Moving Voyage: Stage 3 – Carrying Things & Settling
Tristen’s Pick: Scotland – 1, Umbrella – 0
Valentino’s Pick: Pickin’ Bluebarrahs (he also asked me to link this one: Happy Hollow and “Rushi”)
Pig’s Pick: LaCroix y u do dis?
Pigsten’s Pick: Denver Check-in #3 (Toys)
Taco’s Pick: “Top 10” – Albums (with a shout out to that “silly offspring” of the Alaska series, North to Alaska [Bonus Post])

So there’s some random posts for you to revisit (or explore for the first time). If you like posts to be suggested, I’d also check out my “5 Years of Dinosaur Bear” post if you haven’t already.

With that said, I bid you adieu for now. If you have some good vibes to spare, please address them to Taco over the next week as I could definitely use some cosmic encouragement.

Look for my Boston Post-Game post on August 1st! After that, well, time will tell. 🙂

Until next time,
-Taco

A very happy Valentino giving you a preview of the next post! 🙂

5 Years of Dinosaur Bear

July 6, 2017 by Taco

On June 6th, 2012 Dinosaur Bear entered the world with its very first post. Sure, the name has changed twice since then, but the general purpose of the blog remains the same. So, although it’s over a month belated – Happy Birthday Dinosaur Bear!

Why the Danish flag? Well, that’s because in many ways Copenhagen is the birthplace of Dinosaur Bear!

Since last time, I’d mentally decided on the next three posts. First, I wanted to address “5 Years of Dinosaur Bear,” second, I wanted to discuss graduating on a bit more of a personal level, and third, I wanted to talk a little bit what I’ve been doing these past couple of months (aside from studying for the bar). Being a fan of efficiency – and realizing that the topics were closely intertwined – I’ve decided to combine the first two posts into one – this post. The third, on the topic of my busy summer, will come later in July (hopefully).

Let’s start with the topic of Dinosaur Bear being five years old. That’s kind of crazy. I have no data, but my guess is that most blogs are abandoned long before they turn five years old. Similarly, I’d imagine that a fair number of blogs that have been around longer than five years have attempted to monetize themselves. While it’s true that Dinosaur Bear hasn’t been generating content for five straight years (there was a hiatus), it’s never been down for any significant period. I’ve also made no attempt to make money from this blog. Some people have suggested it, but I simply have no desire to do so. This blog, was, is, and likely forever shall be, a story to some future version of myself. I’m not particularly vested in generating traffic, and in fact, I’ve made some posts less attractive to search engines in order to decrease the number of people who find them (a few posts have generated a somewhat incredible number of visitors). This is not to say that you are not welcome here, anyone who might be reading this, but rather that money, plus a large readership, are not the goals of Dinosaur Bear, nor have they ever been.

My guess is that a lot of people wouldn’t be able to guess what they are going to be doing in five years. Sure, some people could, but I doubt most of us can say with much specificity what we’ll be up to in five years (either due to personal choice or plinko). However, I think I’m in one of the higher percentiles of “Are you freaking kidding me?” The person I was five years ago scarcely resembles the person I am today (and not just in good ways, but life seldom gives you a bag of apples without a few rotten ones). I can safely say, that even just five years ago (let alone 10, holy gawd) I would have very likely never have guessed that I’d still be using this blog (thanks again Meem), and I sure as HELL wouldn’t have guessed what I’d have done in those five years that was usual in generating content for it.

But, as someone much more poetic than I once said, “life is odd, with its twists and turns.” Truer words are seldom written (or spoken). As a result, the past five years have, without a doubt, been the most unexpected, craziest, and adventurous of my life. I’ve learned a lot about myself in the process. I’ll spare you the 50,000 word metaphysical treatise on what I mean by that, but the gist of it is that I think I’m getting much better at listening to “me, myself, and I” and, consequently, telling the rest of the world to “eat shit.” This isn’t without its drawbacks. I’ve found that I care about far fewer people than I used to, but care about those who are left even more. I’ve also lost a lot of empathy – though in real talk I think law school contributed to that. I’ve learned that what I care passionately about, is not what a lot of people I know care passionately about, and I’ve also learned that I don’t care. While I can completely understand your doubt if you don’t know me personally, if there is one thing I can say about the past five years – particularly the past three – it’s that I’ve spent a lot of time ignoring advice, both well meaning, and ill-informed, and, it’s worked wonderfully for me. This is not to say I’m all-knowing. Oh lawds I am not. I tumble, fall, pout, cry, rage, fail, and fail some more – but in the end I’ve made it, and I’ve “made it” in every single thing that someone told me I couldn’t. You might say I’ve defined myself as an anti-cookie-cutter, and yes, for my fellow anti-cookie-cutters out there, I’m sure you realize that doing this severs a lot of your relationships. It certainly did for me. Maybe I just happened to be surrounded by a larger-than-average contingent of people who don’t understand my desire to be different (or, possibly even more accurately – don’t want to understand), but the end result is that my “sphere” has massively diminished.

But, the thing is. I’m happier – my sphere might be smaller, but the bonds are stronger.

And, it took me a long time to realize that – much longer than five years – but I think that is my connection style, and I’ve yet to see any reason why I should should have suppressed it for as long as I did.

How is this relevant to Dinosaur Bear? Well, for one I am Dinosaur Bear. 🙂

But more pertinently, it’s relevant because if you read between the lines of all these 193 posts, you’ll see the growth of the person I now am. And, I guess if you are good at such things, probably even a prediction of the person I will become (and who knows, maybe I’ll be making a “10 Years of Dinosaur Bear” post – stranger things have most certainly happened). This is not to say that every post is philosophical, of course not. In fact, a lot of them are just me whining, and I like to think of myself as an exquisite cry-baby. Others involve nihilistic overtures of a colonoscopy, or such random topics as what kind of scissors I like, not to mention a nearly endless number of beer discussions. But, if you step back, you’ll see Taco – probably a whole lot better that most people ever will. So yes, dear internet stranger, if you follow this blog regularly you probably know more about me than most people who have known me in-person my whole life but who don’t read this blog. But, give a man a mask, and he will tell you the truth – and all that. 🙂

This is all to say that I’ve changed, this blog has changed, and likely you’ve changed. I’d like to think that there has been an upward trend, and the good news is that I think Dinosaur Bear supports that hypothesis.

Which brings me to my next point, graduation. It would be hard to distill “law school” from “Dinosaur Bear,” and in fact one could make a very strong argument that Dinosaur Bear was – at least by implication – a law school blog. If it was, I don’t think it is anymore, but perhaps it was. It was most certainly a blog about me complaining about law school (and other such random topics as people needlessly cutting you off in a foot race), but I think if you go read a blog that is really about law school, you’ll see that Dinosaur Bear is not, and was not one. Regardless of what theme Dinosaur Bear adopted (regardless of the author’s intent – a favorite author of mine, Stephen King, speaks to this much more eloquently), I’m now graduated, and can at that little “J.D.” to the end of Taco if I so wish. Taco, Juris Doctor – or is it Taco, Doctor of Jurisprudence? Maybe both. Who knows, I certainly don’t. What I do know, is that I feel categorically, wholly, undisputedly – no different than I did before having the degree. This is odd, because in the past I felt quite a bit after getting a degree, and you’d certainly think that a J.D. from Harvard would give you some feely-feels. At least, I thought it was odd at first. What do I mean by that? Well, that requires an examination of what brought me to law school in the first place. And yeah, don’t worry, I’m not about to write my memoir here – plus there is no concise and tangible answer as to why I came to law school. And that is actually more of an answer to the question than anything of substance.

Confused? Don’t worry, it’s kind of odd and confusing at the same time. The truth is that I didn’t go to law school because I was driven towards it, and law school was not an end in and of itself, but rather a stepping stone to the future, but oddly enough, not a legal future. Just what future? I didn’t know – and still don’t entirely know. Does that motivation bother you? If so, see the paragraphs above. 🙂

Now this doesn’t mean that I haven’t found some purpose beyond a stepping stone. Of course not. If you’ve read this blog for more than a post or two, you’ll know that I’ve actually grown pretty invested in a few things – most of which I was resoundingly told to avoid as being too “nontraditional” – but so far I’m rocking a pretty good success streak. No, what this merely means is that unlike someone who knew they wanted to be a lawyer, or maybe even more specifically knew exactly what kind of lawyer they wanted to be – where law school was a means to that end, for me, law school wasn’t necessarily a means to any particular end, insomuch as it was a chapter in and of itself.

As such, that I don’t feel a whole lot different because of the degree really isn’t that surprising. The fact is that I feel different because of the experiences that occurred as part of law school, almost all of which were extrinsic to the school itself. Further, I’ve refused – and I mean utterly refused to get “off track” while in law school. This might sound totally, impossibly crazy to you, but at Harvard, it’s easier to get a job with a $180,000 salary and $15,000 bonus, than it is to get the kind of job I want which will literally pay 1/4 (at most, possibly less) of that. And that 180k is a starting salary mind you, it goes up each year (so does the bonus). If your initial inclination is to call me an “ungrateful shit” at turning down such an opportunity (that’s an exact quote, by the way) I can’t say I entirely blame you, but it also shows me that you have no real insight into what I meant by “staying on track.” And – that isn’t something I’m going to explain, the answer lies within this blog if you are really curious. But, I will reiterate, the hardest part of law school, or at least my law school, was – in the words of Gold Five, to “Stay on Target.”

But I did. In fact, I knew it would be a challenge – though I didn’t understand just how big of a challenge it would be, as literally everything pushes against you. But, as I knew it would at least be a challenge, I wrote a “manifesto” to myself prior to starting law school. Of course I’m not sure a “manifesto” is the best title for it since I didn’t revisit it for three years. In fact I promptly sealed it away in the bowels of Gmail and intentionally didn’t open it again until after I’d graduated. However, I didn’t forget about it, nor did I forget about its purpose.

And – I have to say, I upheld my charge to myself. For all I didn’t know when I wrote it, I knew enough about myself to set a high bar, and I most certainly did – but I also most certainly surpassed it.

I won’t share the whole manifesto here, it’s decently long, and this is going to be a long post as-is. But I will share a segment of the penultimate line of the manifesto, as it mirrors this post quite prophetically – despite predating it by three years:

“Law is phase in my life, a brief branch in the trail. My reasoning might not make perfect sense to others, but it is my reasoning to make.”

And, true to my desire to not let THE LAW define me. I kept one little piece of pre-law me very close to the chest, and I’d like to share a brief story about that.

Ask most any law student, or law student-to-be, and they’ll say that probably the most exciting moment in the whole process is when you get the acceptance call, e-mail, or letter. In my case, I mostly got calls which were followed by e-mails and/or physical mailings. Regardless of the format, an acceptance is a wonderfully exciting moment if its a school your invested in, and even if you aren’t, its still a nice bit of affirmation. Likewise, rejections are the exact opposite – and I know those just as well. But, returning to the point, that bit of correspondence (be it digital or physical) is like a small little time capsule that forever enshrines what you felt when you got it. Maybe you don’t remember them all, but my guess is that there are at least two that you’ll never forget. I have two, and I chose to attend one of them. With Harvard, the call came first (and if you include my pre-acceptance interview, I kept that a secret for over a month from everyone except SB – which was also fun), but just before Christmas 2013 I received an email which confirmed that the phone call was real and not in my imagination (a more common thought process than you might imagine with places like Harvard and Stanford, or really any school to which your mind is blown that they actually accepted you). The e-mail, which was itself later followed by physical goodies, was mostly administrative – it’s central purpose was just to send me my ID number. But, the email was more than that. It was, right there, a “Victory” sign to me in a lot of ways. However, over time, something strange happened. The e-mail became less of a “Victory” symbol, and more of a reminder – of the person who got that email – of a person who wouldn’t take that e-mail for granted, even when it got old and law school became mundane, frustrating, and – at times – downright unhealthy.

But, for the Taco who opened that email over 3 and a half years ago, that email was a victory. At the time it was a gigantic “fuck you” to people who no longer matter, though in the ensuing months it become more of a testament to my self ability and less a middle-finger to others (though let’s be real, that can be a fun thing to think about). But, the point is, it was awesome, it was unimaginably, incomprehensibly, amazing. It was, by any stretch of the imagination, a victory – a hard earned victory – but an unexpected one nonetheless. Yet, we are fickle creatures. All those feelings would have normally faded, but I wanted to be sure that they didn’t. So I didn’t let them.

I didn’t delete that email. I didn’t archive that email. I left it right there in my inbox. The first email I ever received at my Harvard address.

And it’s still there.

And it will always be there. I will never delete that email. It will always be the little email sitting at the bottom of my inbox. Because I cannot, will not, compromise who I am.

For at the end of the day, I’ve realized that I am Harvard, but Harvard is not me.

And that email, in its own little way, reminds me of that.

And I won’t forget it.

Because to categorize me as Harvard, loses all of my nuances – it typecasts me into a mold that I’ve sadly learned is not that off-base, but the key word there is that. As law school has taught me, the exceptions prove the rule – but there are always exceptions.

So, while I may be Harvard, that’s just one chapter in my story – and, as I alluded to above, I feel as though my story is one that gets better and more fulfilling as the pages turn onward. I had said that Dinosaur Bear supported that hypothesis – so let’s take a step back and look at these past few years together, shall we? To keep the size from ballooning out of the control, I’m only going to sample one thing from every five or ten posts – but of course the ole’ search bar is right over there if you desire more. 🙂

Over the past five years, Dinosaur Bear has chronicled:

My climb of Vor Frelsers Kirke in Copenhagen.

Some Danish children and I bonding over (their first) marshmallows during Sankt Hans aften – despite not understanding each other’s languages.

My exploration of Edinburgh Castle (in the haar no less!).

A “new beginning” much like this one!

My first food festival.

My very first post devoted entirely to beer.

Getting to visit some wolf friends.

My final visit to my most favorite zoo.

My first visit to Salem, MA – subject of many legends, and more than a couple of theses. (the photo has significance, read the post)

Another 5 Year Anniversary.

SB and I’s first “solo” Thanksgiving.

My many medical escapades.

A lot of posts about the Blizzard of 2015.

The first time I ever had mead.

Its 100th post and the end of 1L.

Tristen and I’s running of the “Big Gay 5K” in Denver, Colorado.

REDЯUM.

SB and I walking the “Battle Road” that gave birth to our nation.

An extremely in-depth (and massively trafficked) post about The Brave Little Toaster.

Me and Valentino going to the Supreme Court of the United States.

“Beersgiving.”

Pig, Pigsten, and I’s arrival in the future home we didn’t yet know was ours.

A whole lotta’ sports.

A Tale of Two Brothers (and a Dinosaur).

A Cape Cod adventure and SB’s BC Graduation.

My literal and figurative climbing of mountains.

A warrior’s conquest of a castle.

Us getting to see Old Faithful.

Our trip to the Arctic Circle to see wild polar bears!

A lighthouse’s 300th birthday.

A whirlwind New England extravaganza with Meem. (we remembered the face of our fathers)

The waning hours of law school.

And, of course, my own graduation from Harvard.

And that’s only about 17% of the posts on Dinosaur Bear – and the post count is only going to grow from here.

That’s pretty crazy, and pretty awesome.

So yes, I’d like to think that things are getting better, a little better all the time. 🙂

~~~~~~

And on that note, I think it’s a good time to wrap up this post.

In parting, I’ll share one final thought.

After graduation Harvard sent out a questionnaire which asked a lot of things about our collective experience at the school, be it academic, social, professional, etc. Unsurprisingly, two of the most prominent questions were, first “Did you enjoy law school?” and, “Knowing what you know now, would you still go to law school?”

I – perhaps with appearance of paradox (or masochism) – answered “No” to the former, and “Yes” to the latter.

In actuality, the answers make perfect sense.

See, I didn’t enjoy the law in law school. Frankly a lot of law school really sucked – a quick search will reveal just how bad law school is for a given individual’s health. The law aspect of law school is not something I’d recommend. So much of that difficulty is needlessly created by the system itself and doesn’t reflect actual practice (which I enjoyed) – and on that topic you can find many an in-depth post on this very blog.

But the thing is, my law school experience was so much more than a law school experience. If there is one thing you’ve probably garnered from reading this far, is that I never viewed law school as a be-all, but rather as a chapter in the larger story of my life.

And in that regard, if Taco from three years ago said “Should I go?”

I would answer with an unequivocal “Yes.”

Because law school as a chapter – has been the most demanding, most frustrating, most stressful.. yet also, most wonderful, most powerful, most emotional, most liberating, eye-opening, mind-blowing, all around…

…greatest experience of my life.

Thanks for tagging along with me.

~~~~~~

Here’s to five more years of Dinosaur Bear – and the crazy roads that two adults, three dinosaurs, a polar bear, and a pig may travel.

Late night on a road along the Syrian border – Dinosaur Bear gets around.

Until next time,
-Taco

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8th Anniversary Festivities

Living in the Land of Fire and Ice

I’m Still Here

A Summer Interlude

5 Years of Dinosaur Bear

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