Dinosaur Bear

A Blog about Stuff and Things

The Emerald Isle

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It’s time for another Dinosaur Bear adventure post!

Well, I guess they are all sort of adventure posts, as adventures come in many sizes, but this is a bonafide adventure post. As I had mentioned before SB and I weren’t actually in Iceland for Christmas, we were in Ireland (notice the one letter difference)! Yes, we left our international home for an international holiday. I have to say that was a first for us.

Ireland is the second in a “Five Adventure” series SB and I have planned for our time in Iceland. The first was the Westfjords, the second is Ireland, and the rest have yet to be revealed (or decided). As such, Ireland wasn’t really a “spontaneous” trip and instead had been in the works for awhile now. Originally we had tossed around a few different ideas that centered the British Isles, but we ultimately settled on an Ireland-specific trip. From there it was making a few decisions on how we wanted to approach the trip (e.g. depth versus breadth) and that led to our ultimate route. We’d never been to Ireland before, and since it’s a place a lot of people visit we had the benefit of foresight (including a friend of SB’s who lives in Ireland) and novelty (everything would be new). This is the route we decided on. Start with the Red X (Dublin’s airport) and go counter-clockwise from there (around the whole island, inclusive of Northern Ireland) and you’ll have the rough extent of our trip. We’re pretty pleased with how it turned out. Our trip consisted of a 6 day road trip and a 4 day stint in Dublin.


Thus, the following photos in this post proceed sequentially around the Ireland, counter-clockwise, until we get back to Dublin. I’ve not marked them on the map because there are too many, but you’ll get the gist of it. Which brings me to my next point, I’ve had to massively curtail the number of photos down from the number we took to the number I’m actually going to post. That’s for two reasons: 1) My tendency to write long posts  (neither of us wants to deal with 30k words 😛 ), and 2) post/photo/blog size technical considerations. As a result I’ve had to cut out quite a bit that In a perfect world I would not have, yet in spite of that I still think this post is going to give a pretty extensive overview of our journey around the Emerald Isle, and we’ll of course still have all the photos not seen here. 🙂

So, with all that taken care of, let’s get started with another photo adventure! Like a lot of my posts where I grind through photos, I’ll liberally link to informative articles rather than bloat this post into a thesis (which we both know I tend to do), so please explore those links if something is especially interesting to you.

How does one begin a holiday trip from Iceland? At 2:45am in the rain, of course! No really, 2:45am is when I got up. We had to be on a bus at 4:00am.


Fortunately we made it to the bus terminal on time and from there it was a 40 minute ride to the airport, where we soon met Grýla and the Yule Lads.


Much to Tristen’s chagrin, even the Yule Cat was there.


After passing the ole’ Lad family, we had breakfast (we delayed coffee though), and them from there we just waited around for a bit and then were on our way to Ireland! After an uneventful flight we landed in Dublin, got shuttled to the rental car place, and then proceeded to immediately get off route in Dublin. In fairness it was both a new city, our cellphones weren’t working properly, and it was also our first time driving on the opposite side of the road, but we were only off track for about 5 minutes or so. Then we were on M1 headed north for Northern Ireland and Belfast!


Since we were both hungry – and in desperate need of coffee (that 2 hours of sleep hadn’t done much for me) – we made a slight detour to Drogheda (one of Ireland’s oldest towns!). There we took in the Irish cuisine of McDonald’s with a nice view of the River Boyne.


After that we continued on, crossing into Northern Ireland (where kilometers switched to miles – though we’d dealt with that before – several times in one day in fact) and got settled in Belfast. I suppose this is a good time to introduce our car! Her name was Maggie Sue, and she was a Renault Captur (a car that I’m sure most of you have never seen before 🙂 ).


Maggie Sue sporting our coffee cups as (reindeer) antlers.

After getting our stuff dropped off at the hotel we ventured out on foot in Belfast to do some exploring. For a city that was once home to “Bloody Friday” and over 1,600 deaths Belfast has calmed down quite a bit. That said, signs of The Troubles linger on, though we weren’t in any of the areas where border/neighborhood walls still exist.


Instead we opted to explore the dockside area, complete with “The Big Fish” a.k.a. the “Salmon of Knowledge.”


This was a neat scenic area of town that features a really cool pedestrian bridge over The River Lagan.


Once Valentino was done trying to eat the giant fish we started making our way towards city hall.


Pub, or city hall? Better question: is there a difference in Belfast?

Our destination was the Belfast Christmas Market!


This was our first European Christmas Market, so we were pretty excited.


We ended up getting some baked sweets (of course) which we stowed away as we explored the market.


Eventually we worked up an appetite, so we started our pub search, which took longer than you might think based largely on crowds and cost. Eventually though we settled on a place called “Monico Bars” which I think is plural because it’s really two bars squished together. There we had our first beers of the trip, fittingly a Harp and Guinness.


After beers and dinner we picked up some groceries on our way back to the hotel (oddly enough at a store called Iceland) and then settled in for the evening. The next day we were on the road bright and early as we headed north toward the northern coast of Northern Ireland (lots of north in there).


Our first destination was the Carrick-a-Rede (from the Scottish Gaelic ‘Carraig-a-Rade’ meaning “The Rock in the Road”) Rope Bridge, which requires a bit of a hike from the parking area.


The nice thing was that since we were definitely in off-peak season, it was just us at first. This made for some nice solitude. Indeed we didn’t have to wait at all to cross the bridge and for a bit were the only ones on the little island you cross over to (Carrickarede).


Here’s a shot of the island you cross over to.


There were some seagull buddies chilling out there, though sadly it’s not the right time of year for puffins.


Here’s a shot looking back towards the rope bridge – the guy looking rather official, is, he’s the person who makes sure you’re actually supposed to be there.


And for reference here is a shot from a distance, complete with a few people who came in behind us for size reference.


After making our way back to Maggie Sue, we got a couple of coffees from the gift shop and then made our way westward along the coast to a much-more-famous spot, Giant’s Causeway.


The off-peak travel continued to favor us, and while there were definitely more people here, it was nowhere near as crowded as the photos you see in summer.


I remember learning about the geology of Giant’s Causeway back in undergrad, but I never learned the mythology – turns out it’s named Giant’s Causeway because well.. a giant built it – specifically the legendary giant Fionn mac Cumhaill. Apparently giants don’t like to get their feet wet, so he built the causeway all the way to Scotland. Makes sense.


After hanging out in the footsteps of giants, we headed into the small town of Bushmills (home of Ireland’s oldest distillery) for lunch at a small local place called the “Copper Kettle” which was delicious (mmm apple pie + custard). With full bellies we continued along the coast to Dunluce Castle. This was our first castle (aside from a glancing view of one from a distance in Drogheda) and we were SUPER stoked. It was totally worth it, and in fact Dunluce indeed up being one of the coolest castles we saw the whole trip.


I’m going to resist my urge to explain the entire friggin’ history of the castle/ruins, but the Wiki link is just above if you are curious. What was nice about it was, again, we were literally the only people there at one point. So we got to be Kings of the Castle (plus a slave, SB – as Tristen put it). Pretty much the whole area was open to explore, including the intact towers.


Here’s a shot from the cliff adjacent to the castle, which gives you an idea of how well fortified it would have been.


Here’s it’s important to note that it gets dark early in Ireland, especially Northern Ireland, at that time of year. Yes, nowhere near as bad as Iceland (In Reykjavík the sun didn’t rise until 11:22am that day, for reference), but still bad. So while it was only around mid-afternoon, it was also cloudy (Ireland, duh) and getting dark. We also had a long way to go – all the way out of Northern Ireland to the western coast of Ireland. So we got on the road shortly after Dunluce Castle (with a quick side trip back to Bushmills for a magnet at the local Post Office!).

After a crazy nighttime drive through some extremely winding Irish country roads (with locals who clearly weren’t pleased we weren’t going 100km/h in a 60km/h zone) we made our way to our B&B for what turned out to be a very, very chilly night. The good news is that breakfast the next morning was quite awesome, and, as we were the only guests in the whole place, our bellies got all the food they could possibly want.


From there we headed up towards Bunglass Point, which is itself part of Slieve League. Slieve League is a mountain on the Atlantic coast of Ireland which has coastal cliffs clocking in at 1,972ft high (over three times as high as the much more famous Cliffs of Moher). What’s fun is that if you want to get to Bunglass Point you have to go up into a sheep-kingdom road, which is quite treacherous in a few spots and leads to a very small parking lot (during peak season a shuttle runs). So, since it was a again just us, we got to meet the sheepies first thing in the morning.


We later figured out that the person who feeds the sheep drives a red vehicle, and as Maggie Sue was red, we think the sheep thought it was noms time, which is why they swarmed us (much more-so than the photo above might suggest as that photo was taken early on before the swarms came).

Once the sheepies cleared us for access, we progressed up to the point where the foggy morning made it very clear we weren’t really going to be “seeing” Slieve League. Our B&B host had told us it generally didn’t clear up until after noon, but we didn’t have time to wait, so we went for the foggy ambience experience, which we enjoyed regardless.


That’s about the only time we managed to see water, and that was at the lowest part of the point.

The nice thing is that the whole area is open, so we didn’t let the fog stop us and rather than shuffle away we took off hiking.


While we couldn’t really see the ocean, we could hear it – way, way down in the mist someplace. So we had a really nice hike along the cliff’s edge which eventually leads to “One Man’s Pass” – which is exactly what it sounds like. Pigsten was a big fan of all the rocks.


After our foggy Slieve League adventure, we started the longest drive of the entire trip, which would take us about 445km (~6 hours) south to the town of Killarney. It was a heck of a drive – and it also just so happened to be the shortest day of the year sunlight-wise!


Not only did we get lots of countryside, we got lots of tractors – oh lawds the tractors.


I think pretty much every little town/village had its token tractor just taking ye’ olde’ holiday stroll.


We eventually made it to Killarney though, only to find out that a huge Christmas concert was going on in town which of course generated way more traffic than usual. So, once we had Maggie Sue settled at the hotel (which was more B&B than hotel) we took off on foot for dinner at a place called “Cronin’s” – where in addition to beer and food, we tried Christmas Pudding for the first time, and much to our server’s surprise we really liked it. I’d had “Spotted Dick” a few years ago (and no I’m not linking you to porn), but this was my first time with Christmas Pudding.

The next day we continued our journey by heading towards Killarney National Park, with the first stop being Ross Castle, which was only about a 4 minute drive from our hotel.


The Boys and their growing castle collection.

While Ross Castle was officially closed for the season you could still wander around the exterior of it, which we did of course.


From there we continued on to Muckross Abbey. There was a bit of confusion as to just where it was, but we figured it out eventually.


The ruins sit a short hike back off the road and its well worth the walk.


The cloister is incredibly well preserved.


The cloister also features an extremely large old yew tree in the central courtyard.


After the abbey we took a road less traveled as we made our way to Torc Waterfall.


I say less traveled because it was. We later found out we took the uber-hiker back entrance, whereas further down the real road there was the fat-people tour bus entrance. Oh well, after all those heavy breakfasts we needed some steep inclines – plus it made the waterfall harder earned and more worth it!


From there we continued deeper into the national park.


The next stop was “Ladies View” a panoramic viewing spot with amazing views of the park. The view is apparently so-named based on how much Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting enjoyed the spot when they visited in 1861.


Funnily enough, despite being the only humans at the site there were a few goats right below us that Tristen really wanted to eat.


From there we continued onward and upward, passing some gorgeous mountain lakes on the way.


After a lunch at a cafe located right at one of the park’s few crossroads, we made our way just beyond the park’s borders to the town of Kenmare. In Kenmare we stopped at the Old Kenmare Cemetery, which turned out to be really pretty insofar as old cemeteries go. It was also noteworthy as having one of the mass “famine plot” grave sites which holds an untold number of victims of the Great Famine.


One thing we weren’t expecting to find at the cemetery was a holy well – but it turns out there was one just beyond the cemetery near the water line. Apparently Ireland boasts several holy wells, and St. Finian’s Holy Well happened to be the one we stumbled across. It was still very active with watering bubbling up enough for a constant stream to be coming out.


We then continued our journey on the winding road towards Blarney.


Our destination was naturally Blarney Castle, and despite some concern that we might not make it before they closed (for not only the day but the holidays) we made it in a bit before the last admission time to find the whole park pretty much deserted. It was awesome.


Thus our Blarney Castle experience was one of skeleton crews and having pretty much an entire castle to ourselves, Pigsten, and the 2 employees who make sure you don’t die when you kiss the Blarney Stone.


As cramped as some of the corridors on the climb to the top are, I’m oh so glad we did this famous spot during off-peak season.


Indeed, when we made it to the top there was no wait for the stone, so we all kissed it. I suppose that means the Boys’ have the gift of the gab now!


Interestingly enough, if you believe the legend behind the Blarney Stone I’ve actually seen the other half of it (though I didn’t know it at the time). Pretty cool. After kissing the stone we made our way down, where the last few employees were practically (if covertly) begging us to leave so they could go home for the holidays, but I made them endure my many explanations of castle defenses to SB before we departed (in fairness to us it was technically still 10 minutes before closing 😛 ). Yes, the employees left the park before we did, as they hopped in a car and drove out while we had to walk out. Thus, for a brief moment in time I can say I possessed Blarney Castle. 🙂

To drive the point home even the gift shop was closed and we had to go through some janky, dark, metal-turnstile side-entrance from the 1920s that hadn’t seen WD40 since it was constructed.

That night we stayed in downtown Cork. Cork is loud around Christmas. Very loud. 🙂

The next morning we headed out from Cork on towards Cashel.


Our first stop there was the Rock of Cashel, which in addition to its long authenticated history, is also reputed to be the site of the conversion of the King of Munster by St. Patrick in the 5th century.


While Cormac’s Chapel was closed for restoration work while we were there, the rest of the grounds – including the main Cathedral – were still open.


There were some pretty idyllic views from up on the rock.


SB and I made our way around the perimeter, and for most of the walk it was just us and the crows – and I suppose the dead.


Just West of the Rock of Cashel is Hore Abbey, which was our next stop – but I’ll get to it in a second.


The Cathedral was pretty incredible and gave us a good point of reference for the cathedral we’d be visiting on Christmas morning just a couple days later in Dublin.


After exploring the rock a bit, we made our way towards Hore Abbey, which was more complicated than it might seem, as, unlike the Rock of Cashel, Hore Abbey is literally in a cow pasture these days. So there’s no parking. Luckily we were the only ones who ventured into the muddy cow-lands, so we were able to just park in front of the pasture gate and make our way in.


Like many of the sites, we had this one all to ourselves, though Hore Abbey clearly also doubles as a hangout for locals (my guess is local youth) as there were clear signs of gatherings – from broken glass to some small fire pits. It wasn’t anything extensive, but it was kind of sad since there is a cemetery right there (getting buried in the middle of cows is kind of pleasing though). It was here in the ruins of Hore Abbey that we found our first shamrocks.


If you recall the photo above from the Rock of Cashel looking torward Hore Abbey, here’s a reverse shot – complete with Pigsten.


After departing Hore Abbey we headed back into town for some lunch at small pub before continuing on our way. Speaking of which, the car pack in Cashel was legitimately built in the middle of old ruins itself.


The next stop was Kilkenny, the medieval district of which was very busy with Christmas shoppers. We, however, weren’t here to buy presents – we were there to drink beer, literally. Our first stop was the Smithwick’s Experience Kilkenny – a tour through Smithwick’s original brewing location.


The tour was pretty cool, complete with the bloody tale of brewing during the reformation, as well as having some really cool animated portraits of the family. But mostly it was about the beer, it’s always about the beer!


I opted for the sampler at the end of the tour, whereas SB got a pint of the classic red, which our tour guide lit up really cool-like with the bar lights.


After that we made our way to our cozy B&B which sat right on the River Nore.


After some more food and beer at another pub ( 😀 ) we tucked ourselves in for the evening, and the next morning we were off for Kilkenny Castle, which was in view just up the river from us.


Kilkenny Castle was open on Christmas Eve, it just had narrow hours and we had to do the guided tour. So we were on a bit of a time schedule that day, but we made it in time to catch a tour that had just left so we didn’t have to wait for the next one.


The castle, which was largely restored during the mid-to-late 20th century, was also decorated for Christmas which really added to the experience.


The tour takes you through several floors and rooms of the castle, so you get some good views of the grounds.


The definite “wow” moment of the tour is near the very end when you enter the “Long Gallery.”


The “Long Gallery” is the second longest room in Ireland, coming in just after the “Long Room” in the Trinity College Library. After our castle tour we ventured down to a sweets shop – not for sweets but for a magnet! From there we backtracked to our B&B where we paid our host (it turns out they only took cash, so we had to go find an AT&T – but our host was super trusting and just let us leave without paying).


After getting Maggie Sue from the parking garage our journey took us southeast to the Hook Peninsula.


Our destination there was Hook Lighthouse, though just before we got to that Pigsten had to add some rocks to a rock train someone had started at some point.


Anyways, Hook Lighthouse is the second oldest operating lighthouse in the world. Yes, world – as the existing tower dates to the 12th century. SB and I apparently have a thing for old lighthouses.


Hook Lighthouse is clearly a mix of old and new, and most of the really old stuff has had new stuff built around it, but they’ve still done a good job of keeping some of the really old stuff exposed for exploration.


Due to the holiday the lighthouse itself was closed, but you could still explore the coastline and grounds, which we did. Just shortly up the road from the lighthouse was something that caught my attention, so we pulled over and it turned out to be the ruins of what I presumed was once a massive signal fire station/pit.


You had to climb up into it (and then not fall into the pit – easier said than done with the wind) but it offered good views of the lighthouse just down the road.


One thing I noticed while reading the placards around the lighthouse area was that they kept mentioning the Templar. Well, turns out, yep, it was the Knights Templar. Apparently they were established on Hook Peninsula, complete with their own series of temples.


After leaving Hook Peninsula behind, we started the rocky road to Dublin – doubly literally – in that route to Dublin was rocky, and also because we started listening to the song.


From there it was a long, but largely uneventful drive to Dublin (we avoided the tolls, yay!). Once we looped around to the North side of Dublin (near the airport) we had to part ways with Maggie Sue, which is always a bit sad, but she was excited to be back with her family for Christmas the next day. Plus after a ~1090.5 kilometer (~677.6 mile) trip with us, I am sure she was ready for a break! For reference, the entire country of Ireland clocks in at about 486 kilometers at its longest point (275 kilometers at its widest, if you were curious).

Back to bringing Maggie Sue home – the interesting thing about Dublin, is that if you’re returning a rental car, but want to go in to the city (as opposed to leave the country), you have to drop off your rental car, take a shuttle from the rental lot to the airport, and then a bus from the airport to the city. So that’s what we did, and after some gross incompetence on the part of AirCoach (said bus company) we did make it into Dublin, though not without walking several blocks to our hotel in the dark because of said incompetence.

The interesting thing about Dublin on Christmas Eve, is that it was so, so quiet.


There was all of one store open near our hotel (which was centrally located) – a small convenience store. So that’s where we got food the first night. However, after eating in our room we headed down Pearse Street (where our hotel was) to a local pub we’d passed and noticed was open.


We didn’t know it at the time, but “Padraig Pearse” (a.k.a. Patrick, a.k.a Pádraic) was the name of one of the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. While we were definitely the out-of-town people in a local’s pub, with a local crowd, on Christmas Eve – people were still friendly, especially one fellow who was a wee bit tipsy but still very friendly (and as such inadvertently funny) if not incredibly difficult to understand thanks to said slurring plus the ole’ Irish accent. 🙂

We had a couple beers each, Guinness and Smithwick’s of course!


The next day was Christmas! I have to say this was my first time spending Christmas outside of the U.S., and definitely the first time spending it in a hotel, but honestly with SB and the Boys things were just fine. We used the morning to sleep in some, and then headed out to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral for a Christmas Mass.

The weather was very… rainy, which I suppose is very usual for Ireland, though not my first thought for December 25th. However we didn’t let that stop us and we made the decently lengthy walk to the Cathedral in our rain gear – definitely not church clothes (especially not Christmas church clothes), but I have this odd feeling Jesus would care more about the walk through the rain than the clothes. Plus, Dublin was almost eerily deserted, which makes sense, but it wasn’t until you got close enough to hear the cathedral’s bells tolling that there was anything near a significant number of people.


After the mass was over, they let us wander around for a little bit as they were closing the place down. I’d like to have spent more time in a church founded in 1191, but they have families too – so I didn’t internally whine too much about not having time to read any of the information. We still had time for a few photos though.


Despite what this next photo might make it seem like, the place was packed and we were way over in a side alcove, which ended up being right behind the priest during the sermon though, so that was cool.


Here’s a rainy outside view, it was hard to get the whole place in one shot!


After that we scurried back to our hotel for Christmas Lunch, which we had specially booked (not many options on Christmas insofar as dining is concerned) and which was quite pricey – so we didn’t want to be late (and mass had ran a good bit beyond the listed time).

While we were initially hesitant about the lunch due to price, it was awesome!


We got not only good food, but lots of Christmas lunch/dinner favors, such as hats, and “firecrackers” which had toys inside! But also food, oh so much good food! Also if you don’t recognize any of the following words, I don’t either, I’m just copying the menu. 😀

For my starter I had the “Grilled Goats Cheese Salad” with rocket leaves, olive tapenade, roasted tomatoes, peppers, and drizzled with vinaigrette.


SB chose the “Honey Dew Melon” which was just like what it sounds like, except was presented in a fancy fan formation with fresh raspberry coulis.


For the main course, I opted for the “Traditional Roast Turkey and Ham” which was served with seasonal stuffing and cranberry jus, whereas SB decided on the “Fillet of Salmon with a Lime and Coriander dressing,” which had a steamed darne of salmon and seasonal vegetables.


For dessert each of us got a “Trio of Yuletide Desserts” and coffee, and well, I’ll just let the photo speak for itself!


Coffee, a super light and fluffy piece of cheesecake, Christmas pudding, and a brownie with a centerpiece of whipped cream and a strawberry!

And, with it being Christmas, that was pretty much that for the day. We spent the rest of the day being lazy, pompous, Skyping with Meem, and watching movies on TV with the boys. It was a pretty awesome way to spend Christmas.

The next day, Boxing Day, most things were still closed but portions of the city were stirring from their slumber for Boxing Day sales. We passed on the shopping and decided to attempt to explore Trinity College, but was locked up tight and we couldn’t even get onto campus. So instead we decided to explore one of Dublin’s many free museums – the National Museum of Ireland – Archaeology.


It had a decent crowd considering the holiday, but wasn’t crowded. There we checked out all sorts of “manries” viking and Celtic stuff, as well as some really fascinating preserved “bog bodies” which were unlike anything I’ve seen before.

From the museum we headed to St. Stephen’s Green.


There were loads of bird friends there (including Chuck and Chica), plus the grounds were really gorgeous considering it was, ya’ know, late December.


In addition to being an important city center park, St. Stephen’s Green also played an important role in the Easter Rising, with the park serving as a dividing line and combat site between the Irish Rebel Forces and the British Army. One such location is the superintendent’s house, which was occupied by rebels while British Forces sprayed the adjacent street from machine gun nests they’d established in a hotel to the house’s north.


In fact, the Fusiliers’ Arch in the northwest corner of the park still bears bullet holes from the fighting.

After leaving the park behind we made our way down the famous Grafton Street, which was SWARMING with Boxing Day shoppers and tourists  (or both). We were bound for simpler times though, as we left all that behind (with a quick side jaunt to see the statute of Molly Malone) to see the old medieval walls of Dublin, which had all of 3 people in their several block radius. My kind of place.


After that, it was time to eat, which is to say drink. Fortunately we were close to the Temple Bar area, and thus a pub wasn’t far away. The big score was that I finally found Murphy’s! Murphy’s is almost unknown in the U.S. and I obviously took a bit to find it in Ireland. Basically, if you like Guinness, you need to try Murphy’s. If you don’t like Guinness, you still need to try Murphy’s because life is short and then you die.


Despite looking a lot like Guinness, Murphy’s is less smooth, and a bit more chocolately. Definitely different beers, Murphy’s isn’t just a knockoff. Both are good and both are worth trying. Hopefully I’ll actually find Murphy’s again someday so I can get more than a 1 beer sample!

After food drinks we made our way to the less-famous-than-Grafton-Street-but-way-more-important-to-me Moore Street.


Moore Street, in addition to having a really cool history (especially that of the vendors themselves), is also the topic of the song “Moore Street Girls” by the Elders – a song which I happen to be very fond of!

After that it was getting dark so we trekked back to the hotel as a it was a good jaunt from us. Our path took us down O’Connell Street, which we’d be returning to the very next morning (which sadly was also our last full day in Ireland).

However, active until the end, we had a fully packed last day. As mentioned, we were up and out the door early on our way back to O’Connell Street. O’Connell Street just so happens to be the widest street in Ireland, and like Pearse Street, is named after a famous Irishman (Daniel O’Connell) who favored independence from Britain. It’s also home to an odd, massive monument called “The Spire of Dublin” which even the locals we spoke didn’t really seem to understand.

Anyways, our adventure quickly left O’Connell Street behind, as we had booked a tour to the surrounding countryside – a nice change after all the foot mileage we’d put in over the past few days. We almost went to the wrong place, because we got on the wrong bus. Fortunately we realized the error before we were whisked off into the mountains (literally, that’s where they were going) and got on the correct bus – which we pretty much had to ourselves, there were like 6 people on the tour.


Our correct destination was Malahide Castle.


The tour of Malahide Castle was really interesting, because like Kilkenny Castle it had remained utilized up until fairly recently (insofar as castles go) so a lot of it was restored in the Victorian-period onward. One of the rooms had some incredible oak paneling and a nearly 1000 year old wooden chair (brought over with the Normans) with intricate carvings.


Despite being pretty dang cold in there, it definitely had a cozy vibe, and I imagine had all those countless fireplaces been going that the place would have been quite temperate.


After the castle tour we explored the gardens for a bit, and while they weren’t super active since it was winter, there was a greenhouse where Pigsten made a butterfly friend!


Not to be left out, I soon made a peacock friend thereafter! No seriously.


After leaving the castle grounds behind, our nearly private bus took us towards the fishing village of Howth.


The drive over was quite scenic and was ripe with good views of Dublin Bay.


Now, Howth is no longer what I’d really call a village – it’s instead a wealthy suburb of Dublin complete with very pricey homes (at least one member of U2 lives nearby), but the dock area still has charm. I especially liked this “FREE BEER” sign.


Look closer.

Of course while Howth might be more ‘burb than village these days, it’s still a fishing hub. Since it was winter most of the boats were docked, but it was still pretty active (including a little birdie friend who was singing with a street guitarist for us).


Howth is also known for the seals that drift into the harbor, and while we didn’t see any (though a certain polar bear acted very suspiciously when asked if he’d seen any) we did find some “ancient” seagull tracks on the pier.


It was a pretty cool little area – literally and figuratively as the Howth coast was probably the coldest I was during our entire time in Ireland.


After being bused back over to Dublin, we finally made our way over to Dublin Castle after missing it for several days straight.


Our bus driver/tour guide had described Dublin Castle as “more of a collection of buildings than actual castle” earlier in the day, and I have to say I agree with him, especially compared to the other castles we’d seen. I think “complex” might be a better descriptor, and lo’ and behold that’s the term Wikipedia uses too, you’ll just have to believe me that I didn’t steal it.

Castle, complex, alien spaceship, whatever you call it, it was still really cool.


After leaving the castle we embarked on a fairly lengthy walk to the next bit of beer, the famous Guiness Storehouse.


The storehouse is basically the “brewery tour” for Guinness, and while it’s situated within their massive St. James’s Gate Brewery (Guinness Brewery) it’s sort of a self-contained tour within a larger city of beer. I got serious. serious. Willy Wonka vibes. Someone needs to make a version of Willy Wonka except with beer instead of candy. Though that’d probably end with the children all being beaten savagely and Charlie a raging alcoholic, so I guess not.

The tour was pretty awesome, and while it was definitely the busiest thing we’d done the entire trip, it was pretty manageable since it was only 2 days after Christmas. Pigsten made a giant Guinness turtle friend too! So many new friends for the Boys!


One neat thing about the tour is that as they walk you through the history of Guinness and the brewing process they’ve obviously tried to make the “checkpoints” as eye-catching as possible. For instance the “carbonation” information point has this really cool area that uses globe lights and mirrors to make you think you are floating in eternity.


It made me think of a similar area I’d been in several years ago in a museum in Humlebæk, Denmark (boy I get around). At the end of the tour comes the best part, which is a pint of Guinness (various offerings, not just the stout) or soda, but lol soda. It’s also offered up in the “Sky View Lounge” which at the top of the Storehouse is the highest bar in Dublin and offered up great nighttime views. While it was pretty crowded and despite my best efforts I didn’t manage to capture a signal good photo of the nighttime skyline, it did continue SB and I’s trend of going up someplace high to drink beer during our last night in a place.

On the way back we were going to take a city bus as it was pretty far (and dark), but we found out we were too poor for the bus. Yes, seriously – the bus. If you think the adventures I talk about on the blog or my degree(s) indicate some sort of independent wealth, then LOL. So yeah we walked back basically across the entire center of Dublin. The cool thing about that was that we found the western gate to Trinity College open! So we creepered on inside.


Sure, everything was closed absent a proper ID for the scanners, but we could at least walk around campus.


The problem came when we tried to get out as all the gates we came to were closed. Fortunately we found a stranger and crawled up to them from the darkness and asked them where the nearest gate was that was actually open. They pointed us in the general direction and we avoided being trapped on Trinity College’s campuses overnight with the Leprechauns (of which we had seen one just about 6 or 7 blocks away).

That evening we ate a convenience store dinner once again and had a few beers in the hotel room before getting to bed decently early. The next morning we bused it back up to Dublin airport and before too long were waiting in front of our big purple plane that would take us home.


While the first part of our trip had been pretty warm (especially in comparison to Iceland) by the end it had gotten pretty cold in Dublin, to the point they had to deice the plane – which the Boys liked!


After that was taken care of we were up, up, and away as we left the Emerald Isle – which was oh so green even in winter – behind.


And came back to this.


A lifeless, icy, craterous wasteland. Wtf am I doing with my life. Nah I kid, I like it here, but that contrast – it’s hard not to laugh.

From the airport we bused back to Reykjavík from Keflavík, and then walked back from the bus terminal to our apartment. Despite Ireland’s best efforts to be cold, Iceland quickly reminded us what cold actually was. 🙂

And that, dear friends, is that! If you’re wondering what we did for New Year’s, well, things got pretty crazy and I covered that here.

All in all, this was a pretty incredible holiday season. It was a season of firsts, both good and the not-really-bad-but-different, but on the whole it was definitely one heck of an adventure that I don’t regret in the least! I hope you enjoyed following along with my Ireland post. SB, the Boys, and I had a fun time spending Christmas on the Emerald Isle, and despite the comparatively abridged nature of the this post, I hope you did too via proxy! 🙂

Until next time,
-Taco

Bringing in 2018

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Greetings, and welcome to Dinosaur Bear’s first post of 2018!

The holidays have now come and gone in a fair number of places, though they’re technically still going until the 6th in Iceland (though my classes have already started, thanks to a professor who thinks it’s ok to start classes before the university semester eve begins)! That means that it’s a good time to reflect on all the good fun and good beer the holiday season brought. Chiefly, I am quite proud of the good run of Christmas Beer (Jólabjór) I had, pictured here in chronological order from left (oldest) to right (newest).


Woo look at those Untappd stats go!

I ended with the Viking Yule Bock on New Year’s Day, which seemed like a fitting time to complete my collection. In truth, I wasn’t really planning on making a new year’s post as I felt like the “closeout” post from last time, which was quite extensive, offered up a good bit of coverage. I was just planning on mentioning the beer in a future post and leaving that at that. However, sometimes something happens that is just profoundly blog-worthy, and sometimes such a thing (literally) comes in with a bang.


Yes, SB and I got to experience New Year’s Eve in Iceland, and boy oh boy, was it a spectacle. Unlike many cities, Reykjavík has no formal fireworks display on New Years. What!? You might ask. Well, you needn’t worry. Despite having no “official” fireworks display, the fireworks that went off here were absolutely mind-boggling, and far, FAR surpassed anything I’ve ever seen. How so? Well, you could almost call it “crowd sourcing” a giant, mutli-hour long fireworks display. SB and I knew that fireworks were big here (literally and figuratively), but we had just no idea how big. Per the city of Reykjavík’s website, over 500 tons. Yes 500+ tons, of fireworks are launched by the local denizens. I find that number entirely believable.

Now, if you read my previous post, you’ll noticed that I mentioned “10-15 spontaneous displays” starting at 2pm and going quite late in the days leading up to the New Year. The funny thing, is that I actually edited that upward from 5-10. Turns out the fun was only just beginning. The evening of New Year’s Eve started.. well, more around like 12:30pm and then lasted until sometime after we went to bed at 2am the next morning. The fireworks started well within our narrow band of daylight (impatient, lol) and then really began to pick up once it got dark in the afternoon. Before too long it sounded and looked like we were in a war zone.

As a photo won’t do it much justice, I’m going to try to post a video here. I rarely post videos via the blog interface, so we’ll see how this works. You’ll definitely need volume to fully appreciate the war zone like vibe to it.

Assuming that works properly for you, you’ll have hopefully heard what I was referring to with the war zone bit. That went on for hours, and hours. Until eventually the entire horizon (and right next to us) was just a smattering of slowly escalating fireworks and flares, lots of flares too.


The interesting bit is that yes, the fireworks build and build, but then right around 10:30pm they almost entirely stop. Indeed, if you pay attention you’ll notice that pretty much everything stops. Suddenly there’s no traffic, no party noise, and only a few pockets of fireworks continue paired with a lone flare or two lazily floating towards the earth. What is so particular about 10:30pm you might ask? Áramótaskaupið.

Yeah, try saying that one five times fast. Áramótaskaupið, which translates to “New Year’s Eve’s Ridicule” is a television show that airs from 10:30pm to roughly 11:30pm on New Year’s Eve in Iceland, and has without fail since 1966. Áramótaskaupið, or often, just “skaupið,” is a comedy/variety show that focuses on the closing year from an extremely satirical standpoint. It’s known for being quite ruthless in its portrayal of events, individuals, trends, etc. It’s also insanely popular with Icelanders. Not only are the ratings some of the highest in the world, skaupið also retains a massive percentage of the country’s population as viewers. Some years have seen the viewing numbers as high as 95.5% of the country’s population. I don’t mean viewing population, I mean, literally, 95.5% of the entire country watched the show. While not confirmed by any record-keeping source that I can fine, this viewership has been said to be a record in television history.

So, things get quiet for a little while because almost everyone has just went inside to watch Áramótaskaupið. We watched it too!


Granted, it’s almost entirely in Icelandic (aside from a few bits making fun of tourists), so we were a bit limited in the uptake, but a few skits required no comprehension of Icelandic to appreciate.

Of course, the real craziness comes after Áramótaskaupið ends, usually sometime in the 11:20 – 11:30pm range. As everyone goes back to their fireworks arsenal, things begin to build exponentially, especially around 11:35pm as all battle stations are manned again by then. The result is an ever-building crescendo that builds so much steam it not only blows through the stroke of midnight, but keeps going well past the bell’s toll to the point that you can’t help but wonder if Iceland is fending off the largest aerial raid in human history. Here’s a video taken at some point around the midnight hour.

As one Icelander I spoke to put it, “On New Year’s Eve we go to war with the sky.” I thought that was pretty apt. It was absolutely crazy. Plus, as mentioned, it just kept going and while it did calm down after a bit, they were still sporadically launching fireworks until about 11pm on January 4th .  So yes, fireworks are a big bid deal – and that isn’t even counting their upcoming return on Þrettándinn. [Update: Þrettándinn ended up being pretty crazy too, with fireworks until 2:30am or so, and they were quite loud as the nearest bonfire was only about 2 blocks from our house.]

But, as we didn’t really know what we were getting ourselves into, we had some other, smaller-scale festivities planned for the Dinosaur Bear household. You have to keep yourself busy in your concrete bunker during the fireworks apocalypse in order to avoid cabin fever, after all!

First, I made us some slow-cooked lamb stew, with beer, potatoes, red cabbage, onions, mushrooms, and a bunch of spices. We had it with toasted bread and “Sød Fransk Sennep” or Sweet French Mustard. It was quite yummy – plus we had leftovers for more New Year’s cabbage.


We paired it with some also-yummy ice cream, and then later moved onto the drinks, of course! In addition to the aforementioned Christmas Beers, we also had a couple of specialty items. The first, is the famous Brennivín. Brennivín, which I’ve mentioned before, is an Icelandic unsweetened schnapps made from fermented grain or potato mash and flavored with caraway and is generally in the 37.5-40% ABV range. It’s unofficially Iceland’s Iceland’s signature distilled beverage and is the traditional drink for the mid-winter feast of Þorrablót. It’s also seen paired with kæstur hákarl, which I discussed in my Westfjords Post.


It was SB and I’s first time having it (woo we’ve now had both it and kæstur hákarl), and despite not being hard alcohol people we both agreed it was pretty good (for hard alcohol). We tried it a few times straight to get it’s full flavor, and then experimented with mixing it into a few different things (orange juice: no, Sprite: yes). We both got a bit of a fruity/minty vibe from it and we much preferred it to vodka, with which it is sometimes compared but is actually quite different.

We also tried Barley Wine for the first time.


We’d been meaning to try it for awhile, and SB actually picked some up a few weeks ago – we just decided to save it for the holidays. Our mutual reactions were Taco: 2.5/5.0 and SB 0.5/5.0 – so as you can see, lukewarm to outright disgust, lol. I actually ended up finishing SB’s for her, as I didn’t think it was nearly as bad as she did. It’s an interesting thing to describe, sort of beer, sort of really heavy wine, and our variety clocked in at 10% ABV. Would I drink it again? Yes. Would I drink it often? Definitely no.

The last of our alcoholic adventures was this little fellow, Birkir Snaps.


This drink was an impulse purchase, because it sounded interesting. Birkir Snaps is an Icelandic distilled grain spirit which uses Icelandic birch, picked during the spring, as its primary flavoring element. So yes, that is a twig you see in the bottle.


It’s just a special Icelandic twig. Obviously this one had some very woody flavors, with a bit of freshness to it that I’m not well-versed enough in non-beer to describe. I liked it a bit less than the Brennivín, but it wasn’t so bad I couldn’t drink it. We still have a bit left, and will probably try mixing it with something, though the birch-flavor isn’t a typical mixing platform.

Now, if our air raid fireworks, food, and copious amount of alcohol don’t sound like a good enough time for you, we also went full on rave.


Yes, courtesy of a well-placed endcap at Bónus we picked up three glow-bracelets and a pair of glow-sunglasses for New Year’s. Naturally these quickly became the boys’, and it is the boys who retained them for almost the entire evening, complete with epic red Yule-lad candle lighting for their rave.


In fact, by the time we finally rolled into bed around 2:00am, Tristen wasn’t quite ready to stop the rave, so we booted up some classic Sandstorm and let him get in a few more sweet moves.


The funny thing is, despite the package saying that the bracelets/glasses would glow for 6 hours, the red and green bracelets lasted more like 12 hours, and the glasses lasted for about a solid 24 hours (though very faint by the end). Definitely good value for the small amount of money we paid for them. A ravers gotta rave, ya’ know.

Anyways, that’s a good recap of our crazy, fireworks-laden New Year’s Eve exponanza. It was a lot of fun, and most certainly contained a bunch of unexpected surprises!

I hope you had an enjoyable New Year’s celebration as well! Here’s to 2018!

Until next time,
-Taco

2017 End of Year Wrap-up

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Look at me, all sliding into the final hours of 2017 with one last post. Don’t get too excited, despite the name this isn’t going to be any cool introspective recap of 2017. That can be found by reading all of 2017’s posts (all 21 of them). 😛

Instead I’m just going to talk about two primary things. First – Part 1, what I’ve been up to, and second – Part 2, some thoughts on school now that the first semester is in the books. So let’s get started with Part 1!

First off, if you’re wondering what the weather has been like lately, well, mostly crap to be honest. 😀


A startlingly accurate depiction of recent walking conditions here on the coast.

A lot of that has been due to the wind (see above, that’s a photo from Reykjavík), but there’s also just the cold in general, plus the lack of daylight. But, life must go on, so despite the changed conditions I still get up and around for the gym in the mornings.


In case you were wondering, yes that’s the gym I go to. It’s pretty small (and old), but its only a 6 minute walk from me and since it’s through the university it’s actually quite affordable for Iceland.


Also, despite what it might look like, those photos were taken in the morning, not at night. As you can see from the clock on the wall if you are eagle-eyed, it’s 7:15 – meaning that “sunlight” is still over 4 hours away at that point. I put sunlight in scare quotes because the sun doesn’t really come “up” it just sort of stays below the horizon and moves sideways. Indeed, most mornings in the apartment look like this..


..until we are long out the door. It’s grand. It also, on the flip side, gets dark very, very early. In fact I’d say there is far more moon than sun these days.


But, the positive aspect of that is that since sunrise is at like 11:30am, you are always up to see the good ones!


It doesn’t always mean you can fully enjoy them though, for instance this nice sunrise was taken right before a final exam, so I was a bit distracted – though not so much that I didn’t stop to take a photo of it!


Of course the bad news is that by the time the sun “rises” it’s already starting to set. For instance, this next photo is basically right after sunrise, yet the sun is already going down over Pigsten’s construction site.


Speaking of his construction site, boy it’s changed a lot! For one, they are now done with what I’ll call Stage 1 of the pit nearest to us.


They are simultaneously working on two buildings, and it’s taken them since we’ve moved here to finalize the earthworks. The contractors have also changed over, and now they’ve installed barricades all around the pit. Which I guess makes sense since the wind kept pwning the chain-link fence.


Pigsten rarely lets any work happen without his oversight.


Pigsten also got a new friend and helper! Broli (the baby Brachiosaurus) came with a card and some treats from one of the boys’ friends in the United States!


Broli and Pigsten are busy bodies and make sure everything is done right!


The plant buddies are also there for assistance, as they have since moved up into the bedroom window ledge to maximize their exposure to our limited sunlight.


Speaking of “buddies” awhile back I found a visitor on the way out in the morning.


Yes, a cat (or “rat” as Tristen calls them) was waiting for me on the stairs. An enemy deep in King Tristen’s domain. I don’t think it was the dreaded Yule Cat, as this was a bit too early for it, plus this cat was especially non-ferocious. Or maybe that was just a guise? Tristen always says there are two things you don’t trust: cats and raptors. Either way, it followed me around but clearly did not want to go outside into the cold.


Can’t say I blame it – though when I got back someone had shooed it outside (probably Tristen). Speaking of the Yule Cat, the boys started reading their Yule Lad book just as the first Yule Lad came into town.


They diligently kept up with the book as the days progressed, even getting treats from each Yule Lad. For instance one left them a Christmas candle that they then used while reading about the next Yule Lad!


They also left the Yule Lads plenty of treats to entice them, such as some yummy Laufabrauð.


Or in one case an entire tub of Skyr. Yep. In my boot.


But, in addition to all the Yule Lad fun we had to do some much more mundane things, such prepare for an take final exams. I’ll discuss the exams more in a bit, but they were definitely a less-than-fun part of December.


However, as SB and I have a long history of doing, we curtailed the exam-time woes with lots of delicious noms, such as gingerbread-cinnamon-roll-bites and coffee!


We’ve branched out quiet a bit with our coffee over the holiday season, from local roasters..


..to more commercial “Christmas Blends.”


But that’s not all, as if it is any surprise I’ve also being trying lots of Christmas beers (Jólabjór)!


There’s quite a variety of them, from both microbreweries to macrobreweries.


In total I am set to try 10 or so of the Christmas beers, I’ll post a photo of them all in a later post.

We’ve also tried the ubiquitous Malt og Appelsín (Jólabland), which you know, actually turned out to be pretty good. I really, really did not think I would like it, but it is something I’d certainly drink again. Now, mind you, it’s not something I’d drink a lot of, but as a seasonal thing, definitely (it also apparently comes back around during Easter, just under a different name).


It’s hard to understate just how prolific the Christmas drinks are, they are not only widely available, but they are numerous in variety. Heck, some of them even have their own Christmas decorations!


On the whole I’d say the stores are much less plastic and gaudy here insofar as Christmas goes. Yet, don’t mistake that for a lack of stuff – there is plenty of that, from the Jólabókaflóð, to all the delicious food (and booze), to metric tons worth of lakkrís – there is plenty of holiday to be had. There was also a massive surge of coloring books, complete with… toothpaste. Yes, toothpaste.


And oh yeah, that’s right next to the frozen meat, in case you were wondering.

But, we passed on the toothpaste accented coloring books and instead opted for cookies. Oh lawds, so many kinds of cookies. One really interesting variety was these delicacies:


I don’t remember what they were called in Icelandic, but they tasted EXACTLY like Oreos, except with magical sparkles and a star shape. I’m talking, these were more like Oreos than any non-Oreo (even fake Oreo wannabes) I’ve ever had. They were nummy.

We’ve also had lots of gingerbread stuff (in addition to the rolls above), including gingerbread cake and classic gingerbread cookies, such as the free ones from Háskólabúðin!


Yes, they have a coffee bean filled counter, it’s pretty neat I think.

Another fun thing is that we received our first care package. Yay!


I mean, sure it took 1 day short of an entire month to arrive, and Tollstjóri (customs) took some stuff out of it due to their really opaque (and seemingly ever-changing) rules, but it did arrive! Thanks Meem!

Yes, between the weather, the Yule Lads, and the pressies, the holidays were definitely in the air. The city has definitely shifted into the season as well.


Heck, even Perlan has changed colors!


It’s kinda hard to see, since my old phone’s camera is pretty abhorrent absent 1 octillion candle-watt conditions,  but Perlan has acquired new red accenting. In fact, it even changes between red and green! It’s really cool. Here is another shot, complete with Pigsten’s construction site in action. This was probably around 5pm or so.


In addition to red and green, they even had Perlan lit up like the Icelandic Flag for a bit, in addition to other random patterns consisting of white, blue, green, and red. Right now it’s all lit up red, except for one light which is blue and which cycles between that and white.

Other fun additions include wreathes around Tjörnin, which I’ve mentioned before but are always pretty.


Beyond decorations, the environment itself feels very holiday-like, or perhaps more accurately I could just say it feels extremely cold. As in, the geothermal-heat-of-the-earth-itself-creates-steam-cold.


But, not a whole lot you can do about that besides bundle up, and I really do mean bundle up. I don’t remember the last time my layers didn’t have layers. 🙂

Besides, the holidays require holiday shopping, and in Iceland online shopping really isn’t a thing, so we’ve braved the conditions on several occasions to go to some non-standard stores. One trip took us back down to the harbor area. There were a couple of vessels there which I thought was part of Iceland’s Coast Guard (which commands a whopping armada of 4 ships), but I found out they were actually ships from the Royal Danish Navy.


I’m not sure about the shift on the left (as pictured), but the ship on the right is the HDMS Hvidbjoernen (F360).

We also did some Christmas-pressie shopping on Laugavegur, where one shop had a nice side-by-side of Iceland’s two most famous birds.


I’ll leave it to you to guess which is which. 😛

Our shopping also allowed us to experience a bit of the pre-holiday festivities, such as this skating rink we stumbled upon.


The whole of downtown has a very nice Christmas vibe to it.


Even the university itself, which is generally pretty brutalist, has gotten into the holiday spirit.


As have SB and I of course! This has been a very different holiday season, in that we aren’t going to see family at for the first time ever – a step further from last year where we had to leave before New Year’s. I’d say we weren’t going “home” but I’ve come to realize that home is a very transient thing for me, so it’s easier to say that we just stayed here. Of course we weren’t actually here for Christmas, but that’s for another post. 🙂

Despite being away from family and elsewhere over Christmas, we’ve been keeping in the holiday spirit now that we are back in Iceland. One really cool (literally and figuratively) thing we did just a couple of days ago was walk on Tjörnin for the first time. In fact, we’re pretty sure it was our first time walking over a frozen lake in each of our lives (sans Valentino of course).


Taco weighing his desire to keep walking against his uncertainty about the large cracks in the ice (spoiler: he kept walking). 

The ice was crazy thick. It’s hard to tell from the photo because you’ve lost the three dimensional aspects of it, but if you look closely at the crack running  vertically(ish) in this photo you can see how deep the ice is. My guess was that the ice was a solid 8+ inches thick, if not more. It made zero noise while walking on it, and I legitimately believe you could have driven across the lake in a car.


We’ve also been taking in a lot of fireworks over the past several days. In fact, I dare say the Icelanders are more obsessed with fireworks around New Year’s than even the Murkans. It’s not unusual to have 10-15 spontaneous firework displays (in random spots) starting anywhere from like 2pm until late.


Another crappy phone photo, featuring a firework above Perlan and a glare that kind of makes it seem like we have two moons. Iceland isn’t that alien.

While some are just a few big’uns, others are a bonafide several minute-long bonanza. All this starting days before New Year’s – it’s been going since at least the 28th (when we got back from our Christmas trip).

But, that kind of brings us up to the present! New Year’s Eve, woo! Which I suppose means it’s time to segue into Part 2 of the post: school.


If you’ve followed along since August or so you’ll have noticed that I didn’t really talk much about school. I discussed it a bit in this post (which I recommend reading as background to this next section, at least the school portion) but outside of that I’ve been a bit mum about it, especially in contrast to my incessant whining while at HLS. A lot of that has to do with the reasons mentioned in that post – school just isn’t a huge part of my life here. I mean, yes, it is, but it’s not a big part of my ideological reasoning for being here, nor is a big part of my personal journey right now. So, when I sit down to blog, I’d rather talk about other things, such as the Westfjords. This is not to say that school doesn’t eat a lot of my time, oh it does. Indeed, it kind of annoys me with the amount of time that it requires for things that I really couldn’t care less about.

Now that I’ve got a semester behind me, I have to say that holistically I’m not a big fan of my program. A big, big part of that is that I just feel like it’s so disorganized towards international students. Though in fairness, Iceland as whole doesn’t seem to care much for people being anything other than a short-term tourist. I’m not getting into a discussion of that, but my point is that there is very, very little assistance to be found for people who are not Icelandic or who are not from the EEA (not to be confused with the EU, which Iceland wants no part of). As a result, I frequently find myself having to fight tooth and nail just to accomplish very basic administrative tasks. This of course is compounded by the very “Meh, meeeeeeeeeh, maybe at some point” culture that is pervasive here. That would be great if they weren’t also paradoxically obsessed with really early deadlines for ferners’.  The result is that you often have little time to do something and no avenue for help in doing it, either because they outright don’t know (the rules are so complex that even Icelanders don’t understand them), or they don’t care enough due to the aforementioned meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh. It’s really pretty awesome, in the smash your face into a concrete block sort of a way.

The catalyst of this disorganization is the fact that my program is not the length I thought it was. I’m not going to type the entire story here, but they REALLY need to work on how they describe the program in the English language (which should be a priority, since the program is one of their few ones in English), because as it stands, they are grossly misrepresenting the timeline (I’m talking upwards of 6 months misrepresentation). I really don’t think it’s intentional, and I’ve brought this to their attention, but I also legitimately think they just don’t care. Not out of malice, but just because, well, peeps are different here, lol. My high strung, gotta be on the move, obese Amerifat DNA doesn’t mesh well with it. Though in my defense it wouldn’t as much of an issue if they didn’t hold us to oddly strict standards in spite of themselves.

So, despite the fact that I was able to somewhat fix the timeline issue (though I’m still about 2-3 months out of whack), that got me off on the wrong foot. Then I found out that despite being an ultra-specialized post-doc program, the majority of my classes are just bull-crap I don’t care about. For instance, over the course of the program I will take 10 classes (it’s mostly a research program, but I still have to take classes). I came here for environmental law – in a life that now seems quiet distant to me I’m actually a barred lawyer person – and I like environmental law. Thus, post-doc. However, and this is so dumb it’s just sad, of those 10 classes only 4, yes 4 out of 10, are strictly environmental law. There is one that you could argue is in the realm of environmental law, but even if you are generous and add that one in, that’s only 5 out of 10 classes focused on environmental law. Yes, an environmental law post-doc that is only FIFTY PERCENT environmental law, and that’s being generous. W.T.F. I did not come here to retake some fluffy pants Human Rights course I had 3 years ago in 1L, I came here to take extremely-high-level environmental law courses, and on that front, I got one, one single course, that I’d call “high level” environmental law.

Then, to make matters even worse, the classes like “Public International Law” and “International Economic Law,” are just general law classes, meaning that there are people in them who don’t even have a Masters yet (I could write an entire post about why I don’t think the two legal education systems [U.S. v. European] mesh well and why that’s negatively impacting my experience, but those are unnecessary details for this post – just know that I’m objectively more educated than my classmates – NOTE: I said more educated, not more intelligent 🙂 ). And while I’m far from a pretentious academic, the result is that you get a course aimed a people who have far less legal education than I do – and while I’m definitely no legal guru, and always appreciate learning more, it also means that the classes get boring as heck. There’s also the fact that a lot of the students are extremely unengaged. Or, in the instance of the Icelandic students, they just don’t show up to class – ever (and the exam, some of them just skip that too). Now, I’m not one to talk about being unengaged, that’s sort of defined me in the classroom environment for a few years now (see one of my many posts about what I actually like doing in the lawls – hint: it’s not sitting in a classroom). But the fact of the matter is that the students in my program, which is very small, are mixed into the general body of students as opposed to having their own schtick. Indeed, on many levels the super small size of my program seems to be more of a hindrance than a benefit, but there isn’t much I can do about that. All I can really do is enjoy the sporadic things that are more focused on the students at my level, though the director of the program cancelled half of those things last semester. Yep, dat meh.

However, while I’ve made it pretty clear that I’m not overly enthused about my classes (or the majority of my professors), I did have one professor who I actually liked – and that professor is now going to be my primary thesis advisor. So that’s pretty cool. The additional good news on that front is that despite it taking 1.5 months to get a single page completed (yes one page), my thesis topic has also supposedly been approved. I say supposedly because nothing is ever certain here. So that’s a big relief. Really my thesis is the only thing about this entire affair that still really excites me. In a lot of ways I think this program should just be the thesis, with none of the fluff classes, but (fortunately as some would say) I have no say in the matter.


The director of my program has toys in their office, I like that much. 🙂

“Yes, that’s nice” you say, “but what about your grades!” I hear you. After all, our entire existence is defined by grades amirite? Dere is nufin but gradez! Yes, because establishing someone’s worth based on a small slice of time is such a good system. But it is what it is, and after all that bitching you might expect me to say I got bad gradez, and then you’ll laugh “ha ha, look out how bitter he is!” Nah my grades are fine. I scored all “First Class” which I still don’t fully understand, but I’ve been told it means I got all As. Basically the system at the University of Iceland is thus:


I have no idea how big that will be, but you get the idea. You don’t want to be red. You want to be as far away from red as possible. I also don’t think they use a forced curve, or if they do it is NO WHERE near as severe as HLS’s. I’m quite far from red, but not in the “With Distinction” (A+) tier, and I have no goal (or motivation) to get there. I’m safely within in the realm of “First Class” – much closer to A+ than to B – and that’s more than good enough for me. But, though I generally care very little for gradez, one aspect of how I got muh gradez is worth discussing. The oral exam.

Yes, like Murka’, IDIOTIC group projects, pointless papers, and time-wasting readings abound here in Icelandia. But one thing that I’ve found in the lawls realm is that the oral exam is favored over the written exam, and now that I’d taken several of these oral exams I feel like I can comfortably comment on them. Basically they are a good deal easier than the written exams I took at HLS (though keep in mean this doesn’t mean they are “easy,” just “easier”). I don’t know if that is a format thing, or a institutional thing (my guess is more on the latter, honestly). Now, in order to explain why I think they are easier, I need to explain the format – and since self depredation is always fun, I’ll just go ahead and say that I did not “ace” any of my exams (at least not in the traditional usage of the word “ace” meaning to “pwn” – though I did get As).

First, it’s important to note that the exams are scheduled early in the day (not early in the semester, you only learn your time less than a week in advance, meh), so in the fall semester at least you are dealing with the tired (thanks again neighbors for making noise until 3am), the dark, and the cold. This photo isn’t so dark, but it does capture the cold.


Yes that’s actually part of campus. I like it.

So, while you are tired and it’s dark and cold, you get to engage in a legal conversation where anywhere from 2 to 5 people are asking you questions. That’s the essential format of the oral exam. You talk, rather than write. Makes sense I suppose! It’s also worth noting, if it wasn’t obvious, but that you are alone. You don’t take the exam as a class, it’s one-by-one. Now, if the thought of being randomly asked questions from an entire semester’s worth of material and being expected to respond in real time makes you nervous, then perhaps being a lawyer isn’t the best field for you. I kid, but really instantaneous information recall is half the job in my experience. The good news for ye’ of timid presence, is that it’s not entirely random. Here’s why. When entering the judgment room, you pull a question out of a bowl (literally in some cases) and then you have anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes to prepare your answer to that question. During those 5 to 15 minutes, you can access ALL your notes (so long as they are printed, because f*ck trees amirite????). You can’t use your already-made notes in the exam, but you can use the notes you took from your notes during that 5 to 15 minute window (it makes sense just think about it for a second). This is why I don’t think the format is especially difficult. Unlike a written exam where you have between 3 and 12 hours and are expected to provide the most minuscule and precise of details (as well as discuss 8000 different applications of 12000 different rules), here you have somewhere around 10-15 minutes of discussion, and that’s it. As such, the expectations for microscopic detail aren’t as high.

So, here’s what I did, and it worked well. I just made an outline like I normally would. These outlines were generally quite large (I’m talking hundreds of pages in some cases) because a semester of law is a shit-ton of information. However, you then cabbage them down and use some lolzy formatting to get that outline down to less than 30 pages. You then make a table of contents for the outline, with large thematic areas divided into more specific sub-topics. Then you’re done. See, unlike the bulk of my classmates who seemed extremely stressed out, I didn’t even try to memorize any of that shit. Learning 350 pages of material, only to be asked about something which comprises 5 pages seemed like a massive waste of my time. Couple that with the fact that 60% of my classes are about crap I don’t care about, and yeah, you get the picture. In fact, outside of making the outline, I didn’t study for any of my exams. SB can vouch for this, people FUH-REAK out about studying for exams here (and by here I don’t just mean the Icelanders, I mean all the European students). Yet I didn’t study at all aside from the process of making/formatting the outline – and also for the record I never bought any of my textbooks and thus did none of the reading for the entire semester either.

If you’re getting tired of what might seem like gloating, bear with me. This isn’t leading up to an “I so smart” epiphany. I’m just a proponent of studying smart, not hard. So, here’s what I did. I used my categorized outline, and when I got the question, I used my 5 to 15 minutes to basically regurgitate that small section of the outline onto the page of notes I was allowed to bring into the exam – and, when the additional questions came, they were invariably also from that same section. So, if it was dealing with Directive 2000/60/EC, I’d know that the specific questions were going to be something like explaining the effects of a major Article of the directive, in that case probably Article 14, which effectively assimilated the public access requirements of the Aarhus Convention. That might sound obtuse without any topical knowledge, but once you’re familiar with the area and have your handy-dandy micro-outline, it’s not unexpected or particularly challenging. This is in contrast to the extremely long written exam, where even 12 hours isn’t enough time to go from “no studying” to “good grade” within the confines of the test.

The big caveat here is that you have to be very comfortable with the oral exam format, that is, real time legal conversations where you are outnumbered and where you truly have no idea what base question you’re going to get until you pull it out of the proverbial/literal hat. I’m fortunate in that such interactions don’t bother me, and that’s probably the only area of the entire process where I’d risk saying I’m above average. The fact that I was one of the top, or near the top grades in each of my classes had nothing to do with knowledge or devotion (of which I’d say I have less than most than my classmates), but instead to what I’d call a capitalizing “study” process and the fact that Ivory Tower Academics and fancy board-room tables don’t intimate me in the least. There’s also the fact that I could score 0.0000001 point above failing in all my classes and it would legitimately make no difference since my J.D. is my core degree anyway.

Thus, I’d say most of the difficulty in the format comes from the fact that you can’t prepare for a specific question, and that you need to be ok with verbal exchanges (that your grade depends on, and the exams are normally 50% of the grade – which is about 50% less than what I am used to, lol). The funny thing here, is that “cheating” is rampant. You might have already thought about the glaring issue, but if not, I’ll explain. As I mentioned, the exam takes place one-by-one, they can’t really drill a whole class at once, so there is a time-table, and you go in the judgement room one at a time, in set order. See the issue? While the questions are random to the individual, the questions are NOT infinite. In fact, some classes have as few as 4-5 questions – though others have as many as 20 (depending on the professor, obviously the more questions, the more complicated grading is for them). Now, you only get to see one question, but since that one question becomes the basis for your entire discussion, you don’t forget it, despite having to immediately return the question to the pile. So, naturally, as soon as you are done and leave the room, you either willing or unwillingly converse with your fellow students who have yet to take the exam, and tell them the question. I saw unwillingly because the culture is to wait right outside the exam room and relentlessly and somewhat aggressively pester the student who is leaving the room (regardless of how upset they might be) even if you never spoke to them outside of that moment. Yes, the culture is practically built around this kind of “cheating” – so much so that to not divulge your question is seen as being an asshole. I can safely say that I didn’t ask anyone about their question, because I didn’t care enough – and also didn’t want to you know, actually study, however I did tell people about my question, also because I didn’t care enough. However, if you were of the type that didn’t want to break the rules, or just didn’t want to help people get a better grade, then you’d have some serious peer pressure to deal with. The end result, is that as the day goes on, people who have yet to take the exam have built up a library of the questions, and if there are only 4-5 questions, this means that they’ve effectively seen the exam in advance.

But it doesn’t stop there. Ever industrious, the students will divide up the questions, and draft answers to the potential questions, and then copy them for themselves. Thus, a pool of 10 students might be able to generate 10 full answers, and then they just trade them. Of course this naturally means that the people early in the day have a much harder exam than the people latter in the day who may have “cheated” their way to a 50% chance at answering the question using materials they didn’t even make. Of course, I use scare quotes around “cheating” because even if you do use crowd-sourcing to obtain an answer to a question you end up getting, you’re left with an answer that isn’t your own and the hope that your attempts to memorize an entire textbook (or textbooks) are enough to answer the secondary questions, which are likely to be generated in real time. Still, the fact is that this behavior is extremely rampant, and I’d surmise causes a lot of people to pass where they would have otherwise probably failed. The cheating in and of itself doesn’t really bother me, it’s the fact that the first students are realistically being tested at a far different level than the later students, and that the professors – who are aware this goes on, or are stupid (not ignorant, stupid) – don’t seem to care. That is what bothers me. If everyone could, if they wished, cheat at the same level, then I really don’t care – but this cheating is objectively slanted towards groups later in the day.

But in the end I still did better than most, and I didn’t cheat, or read the books, or  really study, I just made a really organized table of contents and pasted that on the front of a 30 page, double-sided, 8 point font, .01 margins, legal monstrosity. Yay autismz. 😀

Anyways, that’s my thoughts on school. It’s weird, and while I’m not a big fan of my program as a whole, I am looking forward to the thesis, which will be entirely my own and on a topic I am very much interested in. Unfortunately I’m going to be quite pressed for time on it (due to the aforementioned timeline snafu), but I’m still excited to give the whole thesis thing a second go, though this one is going to be 2.5 times as long as my first one and is going to be published (and thus subjected to far more scrutiny). But I’m still excited in my good ole’ masochistic way – and, lest it seem otherwise, I have no regrets about where I’m at or what I’m doing, even if the road has been much rockier than expected.

If you thought this post featured a little bit too much complaining or bragging about school, have no fear, I’ll probably go right back to not talking very much about it for awhile. 🙂

With that, I should probably wrap this up. I had originally just wanted to just talk about school, but then I decided to add in some other things, and now look at that, this post is over 5700 words. I am nothing if not hopelessly verbose. I promise I can actually be concise when I need to be! Apparently that writing style just doesn’t crop up in my blogging, it, after all, it is mah’ hot blog, I do wut I wahnt!

If it wasn’t obvious, this will be the final post of 2017 for Dinosaur Bear. I hope you’ve enjoyed another year worth of my rambling – and boy what a year it has been. I already have another post conceptualized, though I’m not sure when I’ll get around to writing it. In the meantime, I hope you all had a Merry Christmas (or various holiday of your choosing) and that you have a Wonderful New Year.

Here’s Uglan (the mascot of Háskóli Íslands), with a Holiday (Christmas + New Year’s) send-off!

 
Until next time (and next year),
-Taco

Christmas Time in Iceland

by

Greetings!

This is likely my last or second-to-last post for 2017, so I’ve decided to have a bit of fun! One of the best things about traveling is getting to learn more about other cultures – or, as Mark Twain once put it:

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

The holidays are an especially good occasion for such exploration, and SB and I have definitely taken to trying to learn more about Iceland’s Christmas traditions. In this post I’ll share what I’ve learned, though the obvious caveat here is that I don’t know Icelandic, so I’m mostly relying on translations and interpretations of other people. That said, I’ve relied almost exclusively on materials written in English by Icelanders, so hopefully I don’t share any egregiously incorrect information! So let’s get started!


The first thing to know about Iceland’s Christmas (Jól) traditions is that they can trace their lineage well into the mythos of Icelandic folklore. These are, by and large, not modern tales woven to sell you Christmas cards. They’ve certainly been streamlined, modified, combined, and clarified over the years – but the basic foundation is extremely old. These customs are also much more… “old world,” than those  cuddly feel-good Christmas tales which have largely been adopted into mainstream U.S. culture. If you thought coal was cruel, how does being torn to shreds by a giant cat sound? Yep.

I, however, find these tales to be far more interesting – indeed, the older more “raw” versions of classical tales which lack their contemporary filters often appeal to me far more than their Hallmark Channel counterparts. The core messages are still roughly the same: be kind, love your family, and be festive. The difference here is that yo’ ass gets eaten alive if you’re naughty. Hard lands breed hard men.

So, with that framework in mind, let’s discuss how things work. Here I should probably note that a lot of the modern iterations of these characters stems from Jóhannes úr Kötlum’s 1932 poetry book, Jólin Koma (“Christmas Is Coming”). So while there are a lot of different very-very-old tales from which these characters are woven, that modern source is the primary basis for this post.

First off, clear your mind of Santa – he wouldn’t last a night in the harsh world of Iceland’s folktales. Instead, think of the 13 “Yule Lads” also known as the Yuletide-Lads or Yulemen – or in Icelandic, jólasveinarnir or jólasveinar. These 13 “lads” are trolls (or half trolls, not entirely sure as different sources referred to them as both) who come to visit the human population of Iceland around the holidays. The Yule Lads make up, what I would call, the crux of the Christmas festivities here in Iceland. But in order to fully understand the importance of the Yule Lads, we must first discuss their mother, Grýla.


Grýla is a troll/giantess who is said to currently live in a cave somewhere in the Dimmuborgir lava fields (which, as you will soon see, is somewhat fittingly where Satan came crashing down from Heaven in Icelandic Christian folklore).


Here Grýla lives with her somewhat lackadaisical third husband and father of the Yule Lads, the troll Leppalúði – but we’ll talk more about him in a second. Grýla is noteworthy for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that she is very, very old. She was first referenced in text during the 1200s, so it’s not unlikely that she’s even older than that. Grýla’s death has been noted more than once, but the old troll seems to know to cheat death itself, because she just keeps coming back to plague the Icelanders, specifically Icelandic children – and by plague I mean drag them screaming into the blackness and eating them alive.


The good news is that Grýla apparently only goes on her carnivorous quest around Christmas, meaning that your chances of meeting a terrible fate at her hands are restricted to at least a small slice of the year. Further good news, Grýla can be staved off simply by resisting the urge to be naughty. Due to some mythological rule-set, or perhaps just a very odd sense of morality, Grýla only eats bad children. If you found the prospect of coal to be a lukewarm deterrent to engaging in the oh-so-much-fun act of being naughty, perhaps a savage death is a bit more of a barrier to naughtiness.

Now, if you might be thinking that Grýla’s husband Leppalúði is likely to be just as malicious of a character. Turns out, not so much. I mean, he looks mean and probably isn’t the type of creature you’d want to run into in a dark cave, but in comparison to Grýla he’s quite tame – and apparently quiet lazy (or at the very least, aloof).


Now, with a wife like Grýla it’s not surprising that he definitely appears to be the submissive partner in the relationship. Add in the fact that Grýla just up and ate her first husband (and let’s be real, likely her second husband too) and you get an environment in which ole’ Leppalúði has probably learned to keep his trap shut and just tend to the cave and the children like a good husband. Indeed, Leppalúði – at least from what I’ve read – seems to be a bit of a (comparatively) mild-mannered homebody who mostly keeps the feck out of Grýla’s way (can you blame him?) and who probably spends most of his time dealing with the Yule Lad’s antics. In some ways the Yule Lads might be described as the balance between Grýla’s evil antics and Leppalúði’s buffoonery. The good news for us humans is that Leppalúði doesn’t seem to go hunting for people in the same fashion as his wife does.

That’s not to say that Grýla is the only bad news. While her husband might be tame, and while the Yule Lads are, as we will soon discuss, prone to mischief as opposed to murder, Grýla also owns a giant cat known as the Yule Cat (Jólakötturinn or Jólaköttur).


Now let’s be clear, this is not your average domestic cat. The Yule Cat might better be described as a “monster” in that it is huge and hungry for humans. Whereas its master (Grýla) preys on naughty children, the Yule Cat hunts down and ravages those who haven’t gotten any new clothes to wear prior to Christmas Eve. Oh, and lest you big-people think you are safe, the Yule Cat eats adults too – though naturally children are of course also on the menu!


So now you’ve got a nice picture of Mom ‘n Pop and their carnivorous cat, so let’s discuss the real stars of the show, the Yule Lads.


There are, in the modern iterations, 13 canonical Yule Lads (though this number has drastically varied over the lads’ long and storied history – see my comment about Jóhannes úr Kötlum above). Unlike their baby-eating mother, lazy father, and deadly pet, the Yule Lads care much more about being mischievous and having fun (mostly for them, less so the people they annoy) around Christmas time. A lot of this stems from the fact that their mother keeps them locked away for most of the year, unable to explore the great outdoors. It’s only around Christmas that she lets them out to play – or perhaps Leppalúði just doesn’t have the energy to corral the Yule Lads while Grýla and the Yule Cat are off eating people. Regardless of the exact manner in which they are able to get out and about, the 13 Yule Lads start to “come to town” one at a time on December 12th, and each Lad has a different set of characteristics which define the antics they get themselves into.

The 13 lads, with English translations, as well as their arrival and departure dates are listed below.

Icelandic nameEnglish translationDescriptionArrivalDeparture
StekkjarstaurSheep-Cote ClodHarasses sheep, but is impaired by his stiff peg-legs.12 December25 December
GiljagaurGully GawkHides in gullies, waiting for an opportunity to sneak into the cowshed and steal milk.13 December26 December
StúfurStubbyAbnormally short. Steals pans to eat the crust left on them.14 December27 December
ÞvörusleikirSpoon-LickerSteals Þvörur (a type of a wooden spoon with a long handle – I. þvara) to lick. Is extremely thin due to malnutrition.15 December28 December
PottaskefillPot-ScraperSteals leftovers from pots.16 December29 December
AskasleikirBowl-LickerHides under beds waiting for someone to put down their “askur” (a type of bowl with a lid used instead of dishes), which he then steals.17 December30 December
HurðaskellirDoor-SlammerLikes to slam doors, especially during the night.18 December31 December
SkyrgámurSkyr-GobblerA Yule Lad with an affinity for Skyr.19 December1 January
BjúgnakrækirSausage-SwiperWould hide in the rafters and snatch sausages that were being smoked.20 December2 January
GluggagægirWindow-PeeperA snoop who would look through windows in search of things to steal.21 December3 January
GáttaþefurDoorway-SnifferHas an abnormally large nose and an acute sense of smell which he uses to locate laufabrauð.22 December4 January
KetkrókurMeat-HookUses a hook to steal meat.23 December5 January
KertasníkirCandle-StealerFollows children in order to steal their candles (which in those days were made of tallow and thus edible).24 December6 January


As you can see from the table, each Lad arrives on a separate date, and they stay “in town” until all of them have arrived, upon which they start departing – again one at a time – back to their mountain home. In total, this means that the Yule Lads are causing chaos in some format or another from December 12th all the way until January 6th.

If this story has seemed a bit… unpleasant.. thus far, what with the deadly endeavors of Grýla and the Yule Cat, coupled with the Yule Lads’ seeds of chaos, and Leppalúði’s “meh whatever” attitude about all of it, then have no fear, things perk up from here. While the Yule Lads have changed a bit over the centuries, their current manifestations are also known for bringing presents to those who act properly! Of course at a basic level you need to be good (lest their mom find you), and you also need new clothes (lest their cat eat you), but also need to leave one of your shoes on the window sill of your room to let the most-recently arrived Yule Lad know you are there! If you really want their good graces, you will also leave them a treat – but make no mistake, this isn’t a one-size-fits all cookies-and-milk fallback. Each Yule Lad has their own preferred “treat” and you don’t want to mix them up! Some are easy to remember, for instance Skyrgámur (Skyr-Gobbler) likes Skyr most of all. Whereas others, like Þvörusleikir (Spoon-licker) have less obvious tastes, such as carrots . Still, others, like Stúfur (Stubby) are likely to eat whatever you leave them without much fuss. In addition to food, you can also leave certain Lads items such as spoons (wooden!) or candles.

If you follow the proper protocol, you’ll likely to wake up to a present/treat of your own in the shoe you left out (as well as some classical Yule Lad mischief). However, if you don’t follow the proper traditions and/or are naughty, you’ll just get an old potato! An old potato might not be much, but it’s better than being eaten alive, though the potato is probably a warning sign that you need to start cleaning up your act real quick-like, lest Mommy Dearest find you.

It’s also important to note that the Yule Lads, much like their foreign counterparts, only come at night. Being trolls (or half trolls) and living in a dark cave most of the year has made their eyes sensitive to the light, so be sure not to leave too many lights on when you leave out your shoes and treat – the Yule Lads see far better in the dark! If you do find yourself face to face with a Yule Lad, a surefire way to get their good graces is to wish them a Gleðileg Jól (Happy Christmas).

It’s also worth noting that if you follow the proper procedures and have a bit of faith, that the Yule Lads have been known to travel far beyond Iceland’s coasts to leave presents for those who tempt them with especially good treats. So if you aren’t in Iceland, but still want to participate in some Yule Lad fun, you know what to do – just watch out for Grýla and her monstrous cat.


So there you go, a nice primer on the Yule Lads and their crazy family.

But that’s not all that goes in Iceland during the holidays. While the Yule Lads provide the backdrop to the season, there are a few other events and traditions that are widespread.

The first is Aðventa (The Advent) which starts on the fourth Sunday before Christmas and is the “official” start of the season in Iceland. It’s also when most of the Christmas lights begin to appear. In addition to modern lights, traditional Aðventa came in two formats: an Advent Wreath with four candles (one for each Sunday of Advent), and a seven-candle candelabra which was, being quite bright, was believed to keep out the winter’s darkness.


If this talk of lighting has you wondering about Christmas trees, then have no fear, Iceland has those too – though they are a more recent phenomenon in the manner you probably imagine a Christmas tree. For most of Iceland’s settled history there really weren’t that many trees that could be cut down, so the Christmas trees were made of wood scrapped together from other things, and then mounted with juniper branches and candles. As Iceland “opened” to the world (and attempts at reforestation began), real live Christmas trees became more accessible, and today most Icelanders use Christmas trees which appear much like those you’d find elsewhere – and they predominantly use real trees as opposed to fake ones. One interesting note is that the Christmas trees themselves often weren’t (and aren’t) lit in the home until just a day or two before Christmas, but the lights are left up until January 6th (which just so happens to be the last day the Yule Lads are around).


Second, I’m sure you’re wondering about food. Well, there’s all sorts of it, just like anyplace else. A few notable examples are the vast array of cookies which get baked, as well as the staple of Laufabrauð – which, directly translated, means “leaf bread.” The baking of the Laufabrauð is a family event, and great care is put into making the Laufabrauð as fancy as possible – sometimes it ends up so fancy that it gets turned into decorations as opposed to being eaten! Laufabrauð is generally served during both Christmas and New Year’s, paired with delicious smjör (butter).


There is also a traditional drink which is a mixture of locally produced malt (Maltöl) and orange soda (Appelsín). The mixture, Malt og Appelsín, is so popular that it can be purchased pre-mixed as Jólabland (Christmas Mix), though many Icelanders still take the time to mix it themselves. The exact ratio of malt to soda is hotly debated, and that’s territory I shan’t risk entering. 🙂


While foodstuffs beyond the sweet include the scrumptious fare that you might imagine for Iceland, including: herring, smoked and cured salmon, reindeer pâté, smoked lamb, roast pork with rind, rack of ham, turkey, and more – December 23rd brings about something a bit more intriguing, Skötuveislur or fermented skate. Skate is a type fish, which as you might have guessed, has been fermented. Traditionally this one done by sealing the skate in a closed container for a month or more (sound familiar?). The resulting dish is known just as much for its extremely pungent smell as its taste. In fact, I’ve been told that the smell is so difficult to get out of your house that a lot of people opt just to go get Skötuveislur from a restaurant these days. I’ve yet to try this delicacy, and honestly after kæstur hákarl I can’t say I’ll be seeking it out. That said, it’s still a strong tradition, so if you find yourself in Iceland on December 23rd you’ll know what that pervasive smell in the air is!


Perhaps the smell of fermented skate brings about thoughts of the afterlife. As on December 24th (and on New Year’s Eve) Icelanders remember their departed loved ones. They do so by visiting cemeteries and leaving candles on the graves of the departed. One of the most aesthetic cemeteries during this time is Hólavallagarður, a cemetery from 1832 which overlooks Tjörnin – so not very far from us at all.


There’s also the “Christmas Book Flood” which you may have seen as the following image floating around social media.


In Icelandic this is refereed to as Jólabókaflóð (The book flood of Christmas), and it’s largely true to the tidbit being passed around the interwebs. The one big difference is that it’s not quite as confined as the image makes it seem (its more chronologically far-reaching), but it’s still a big deal (and yes chocolate is a part of it). A few weeks ago SB and I noticed that the stores were starting to accumulate a TON of books – we had no idea what was going on at first, but now we do! And for reference, I mean, literal tons of books.


Once you’ve got your new collection of books, you have to be careful, as the holiday season brings bonfires to Iceland – and I mean a lot of bonfires. Long before fireworks made it to the arctic north, bonfires served essentially the same purpose – the symbolic burning of the old year, old sins, and the celebration of bright futures to come. The many “brennur” (burns) are community events and occur mostly on New Year’s Eve and The Thirteenth Night. Also, these aren’t just piddly little campfires, these are legitimate bonfires.


While fireworks have since joined the ranks of Icelandic New Year’s traditions, the bonfires remain.


Finally, as the season winds down, we come to Þrettándinn, the “Thirteenth Night” (the equivalent of the Anglo-Saxon “Twelfth Night” you might be familiar with).


Like New Year’s Eve, bonfires are prevalent during Þrettándinn – but Þrettándinn is also a night of great, ancient, mystery. In Icelandic folklore, Þrettándinn caused strange and mythical beings to stir from their slumber. Many of these awakenings could be dangerous for humans (such as talking cows which would drive those who listened to them mad), and others, such as seals which shed their skins and walked among men, were just downright creepy. Þrettándinn, the official end of the season, also sees elves come out en masse (including the elf “king” and “queen”), as well as other mythical creatures and beasts. It’s also the final day the Yule Lads are in town, and if you make it through the night without falling victim to one of the various dangers of the dark, you’ll also know that Grýla and the Yule Cat have retreated back into the hinterlands for the year.

Like most other aspects of the season in Iceland, while evil and mischief lurk in the shadows, there is a great deal of symbolism to light, family, and the community. So stay close to the fire’s warm glow and those who you care about, and you’re likely to find yourself safe, full of delicious food, and spiritually satisfied even against the long dark night of Þrettándinn.


And that, dear friends, is Dinosaur Bear’s coverage of Jól. This is of course, not an even remotely exhaustive list, and as with any compilation of traditions, beliefs and practices will vary from one family to the next. It also leaves out a few important events, but this is a nice overview to the season, from an outsiders perspective with a focus on what seems especially “unique” to yours truly. I hope that if you’re new to all of this like me, you’ve found it especially interesting, and, conversely, if this is what you grew up with, that I didn’t get anything too out of whack. 🙂

In closing, here is a nice “cheat sheet” of the cast-of-characters (sans Yule Cat) referenced within this post. I’ve left the image uncompressed for easier viewing.


If you’d like an English translation of the poem upon which the modern iteration of the Yule Lads are based, click here.

Until next time,
Gleðileg jól og farsælt nýtt ár!

-Taco

Note: Unlike most Dinosaur Bear posts, the photos in this post are taken from the public websites of other photographers or organizations. All photographic/artistic works represented here remain the property of their respective owners – and as a reminder Dinosaur Bear is a non-monetized blog with no ads or other revenue sources. If you are the owner of one of the photos/works and would like it to be removed, please let me know.

Giving Thanks – Iceland Edition (2017)

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Greetings, and Happy (post) Thanksgiving!

I don’t have any big adventures to share, but I figured an Icelandic Thanksgiving was worth a post – plus I have a bit of a tradition in chronicling our “Turkey Day” festivities. 🙂

Thanksgiving in Iceland is interesting, because there is no Thanksgiving in Iceland. That’s not to say they don’t have something of an equivalent, but insofar as Thanksgiving as we Murkans know it, on the date we know it, there is no such thing. Of course this isn’t my first time celebrating a U.S. holiday while abroad, and the nice thing about Thanksgiving is that in order to celebrate you really only need two things: the ability to give thanks and food. Neither of which are in short supply in Iceland.

Plus, if you associate Thanksgiving with chilly November air, then there’s definitely no shortage of that here. In fact things have been downright cold lately. There was a morning last week where I was walking to the gym around 6:55am that might have been the coldest I’ve felt in years. At that time of day (and for a few hours afterward) it’s still pitch black, and when combined with the wind it was pretty terrible. Yet we’ve adjusted more easily to the cold (being used to it and all) than we have the darkness – for instance with the cold you can always have a nice hot cup of tea!

Though I guess the increased darkness has also generated more aurora borealis viewing opportunities. We’ve seen some awesome light displays over the past several weeks. While we still haven’t taken the time to learn how to photograph them with our good camera, they were so strong a couple of weeks ago that even our cell phone cameras could capture them.

Due to our lackluster camera skills (and the fact my phone is horrible in low light conditions) those photos only capture about 30% of the total lights that were present, but hey, at least we actually captured something this time! The lights are more frequent and stronger during the late fall and winter period, so hopefully we’ll get better at capturing them. Speaking of which, it might not be winter yet but we’ve had snow for awhile now.

In fact the first round of snow moved into our area around October 11th (though it didn’t move into the city itself until November 9th), and we’ve had snow in some capacity since then. It makes for some pretty mornings though!

There’s always something nice about a freshly fallen snow.

The downside is that we don’t always have sunlight – in fact it’s usually cloudy. So when coupled with the fact that the sun comes up less and less, the snowy landscapes can often get very, very grey.

But the animal priends’ don’t mind.

Nor do the snowmen. Icelandic Snowmen that is.

By and large we’ve adjusted to it. Some days are definitely worse than others.


It was like this pretty much the entire day – notice the complete lack of Perlan in the distance.

But other days kind of a have a winter-wonderland type of whimsy to them.


Chuck and Chica’s house.

That of course brings me to the holidays. Despite the lack of Thanksgiving, Christmas is beginning to pop up around Reykjavík – for example, Christmas Trees.

And also wreaths, lots of wreaths.

Oh and in case you were wondering, yes that is Tjörnin – frozen enough that people are using the lake as a walkway.

The holidays have also crept into other areas, such as our milk cartons.

Oh, and remember when I mentioned the holiday-themed energy drinks? Yeah, I wasn’t lying.

SB and I agreed that it tasted like those old-fashioned strawberry hard candies. You know the ones. Tristen also liked the manly Santa Claus on the can.

So, in order to prepare for the holidays we took care of a few things at the apartment. Namely cleaning some harder to clean areas. The plant buddies also got some new soil and new pots!

They’ve also since moved to the window sill in our bedroom to hopefully get a bit more of the limited sunlight we have. Another big event was bath time for the boys. Bath time is a huge ordeal. Valentino loves it, Tristen hates it, Pig just gets dirty again within 10 seconds, and Pigsten, well Pigsten is easy at least. Part of what makes it such an ordeal is that the boys take so long to try. Even with a fan it took us 10+ hours to dry them after I hand-washed them. So, lacking a fan, it took a whopping ~30 hours for them to fully dry.

Here they are shortly after getting cleaned in the sink – sitting on our bathroom stool/shelf/whatever (from the basement! 😀 ) in the early stages of drying. As you can tell Tristen was less than enthused. Here they are about 20 some hours later, much drier and enjoying a nice tea next to the radiator (with Pig doing yoga, of course).

The photo of the boys sitting next to the radiator in the bedroom reminded me – I had an interesting home improvement moment two weeks ago. It involved this:

That’s an array of networking and electrical outlets in our bedroom. The network ports don’t work, and haven’t since we moved in – so I’m not sure why they are there (the ones in the living room do work) but the electrical outlets work fine. The issue wasn’t anything to do with the ports/outlets themselves, but rather an extremely annoying noise that would occasionally come from the wall around/in the array. This noise had occurred shortly after we moved in and occurred on and off for a few days then stopped for awhile. However it started back up about two weeks ago and persisted, without fail, for nearly 48 hours (as in, it didn’t stop for a single moment).

The noise sounded like a muffled “knock” – so since the noise was coming from near a radiator I figured it might be pipes. However, after it kept me up half the night I decided the next day to investigate. I came to realize that the noise occurred exactly every 3 seconds (give or take -.002 seconds I suppose, if you want to be super accurate). I tested it 26 times using magical technology, and it was always 3 seconds. Having spent the past 3 years in a 90 year old Boston building I am used to pops, groans, and knocks – and they were never to precisely uniform on time. This knocked out the usual building-y stuff (and also our neighbors, who, while they bang around continuously, do so in an irregular manner).

Since I ‘sperg out over stuff like this and am super noise sensitive, the night of the second day I just got frustrated, grabbed the IKEA tool set and went about pulling the whole thing out of the wall. I was determined that the noise was coming from directly behind the array – and turns out I was right. After dismantling the whole shebang, I realized what was happening – and it was unlike anything I’ve experienced before.

Basically, within the array there are two holes on the network side that lead into the interior of the wall. These are used to run the Ethernet cables. However, cables are only ran on one side (and again they don’t work) so the other side is just an open little hard plastic tube/hole into the wall. This is where the noise was coming from. See, our apartment is very air tight (concrete + good window seals). If the windows are closed and you open the door, your ears pop (seriously). Similarly, if you open the windows in odd orders the pressure will sometimes close another window. And, best of all, if it’s really windy outside, sometimes it’s insanely difficult to open a window or door if it opens outwards (so all but out front door). I’m not kidding, one night I put my full 175lbs into our balcony door and it wouldn’t open (we also had severe winds, but the pressure also created suction). So, my theory as to what was happening is that this little hole in the networking side was acting as a pressure valve between the pressure in our apartment, and the pressure in the interior of the interior wall (which is drywall and studs, unlike the exterior walls, which are concrete).

This only occurred under certain atmospheric conditions (thus why it didn’t happen constantly) and the “knock” was in fact a little air/pressure bubble “bursting” in that tube as the pressure equalized and then was imbalanced again, over and over and over – thus the nearly perfect 3 second loop. How did I fix it? I shoved some puddy up in the whole and then slapped a piece of tape over it. 😀

No more noise, and it’s been silent ever since – and I need all the silence I can get in this place of parties and screaming until 4am.

ANYWAYS, got a bit off topic there. Back to Thanksgiving. Our Thanksgiving was actually the day after Thanksgiving, because that is what worked better for our schedule, plus when there is no formal holiday you can pick your own days. 😛

As if its needs saying, Thanksgiving = beer.


Props to SB and Tristen for carting this mother-load home!

Yes, after entirely running out of beer (even near-beer) we have since replenished the supply in the Taco household (complete with a bottle of wine too – from Argentina, we are cultured folks). Thanksgiving also = turkey, but we don’t have access to turkey, so we went with chicken, but we don’t need a big chicken, nor do we have space to even store one, so we went with a little chicken!

Yep, an official Icelandic chicken! For seasoning I had some of the usual stuff, garlic, pepper, onion, carrots, etc. But I also tried stuffing it with cheese and using a new (to us) sauce from the U.K. – HP Sauce. To me it kind of tasted like A1 sauced mixed with Worcestershire sauce, it was good.

We also had some MASSIVE Icelandic sweet taters.

The bird and the tatoes were coupled with snow peas (couldn’t find green beans), and rolls (which ended up having cheese inside – yay language surprises!) paired with some rhubarb jam!

Here’s a nice “before” photo of our Kjúklingur.

And then an “after” shot, complete with copious amounts of anxious Tristen.

In case you were wondering how snow peas worked out, they were really yummy.

Those are diced hotdogs (which are really good here), plus the usual seasonings. I was really pleased with how they came out. As for the massive sweet potatoes, we mashed those up and combined them with some Icelandic butter (amazing), Skyr (Icelandic yogurt – also amazing), and a small bit of honey. They were delicious – though I am biased as sweet potatoes are probably my favorite part of Thanksgiving these days.

Here’s a completed meal, shown with our rolls containing a magical cheese surprise.

Pigsten was a big fan of the warm gooey rolls.

Naturally no Thanksgiving is complete without desert! We don’t have a pie pan – and in fact pies don’t really seem to be a thing here (we seriously haven’t seen a single pie) so we opted for something a bit more unique, a chocolate-crunch layer cake!

It contained chocolate, almond cake, toffee, cream, and caramel. Tasty.

Then, after we’d all had some time to digest we busted out our wine.

All in all it was a wonderful little ole’ Thanksgiving in Iceland. Sure we have no chairs so we sat on budget kitchen chair cushions on the floor while eating off a coffee table we found in the basement, but the important thing is that we had good company, and the food was pretty dang good too. 🙂

What’s kind of funny is that the entire price of the meal – which we ate on for three days – was still less than it would be to eat out a single time here in Reykjavík, craziness! Heck, our bird was only ~664 ISK (~$6.46). We were smart shoppers and deal hunted, as usual!

But yes, despite the fact that our neighbors proceeded to keep me awake until 3:30 am that night with their stupidity, I am thankful for many things. Yes,  though I do indeed complain nearly constantly on this blog, I am generally quite thankful (and tend to complain less in person, though not much ; ) ).

Here’s a few things I am thankful for:

SB, the boys, our plants, that I’ve probably secured a supervisor for my thesis, my health, beer, being brave enough to take chances, my persistence (read: stubbornness), my computer still working, my pillow, coffee, polar bears, squirrels, my human family, a few planned adventures (more on those later!), that my income-based repayment application got approved so I won’t literally go bankrupt within 5 months, Steam sales, my 2 human friends (that might sound kinda sad, but I have impossibly high friend standards), Chuck and Chica, Iceland’s housing stipend, Meem letting me do work for her, Oatly oat milk, puffins, getting to watch airplanes take off, Charles XII of Sweden, Carmex, ear plugs, my ability to do Crow (yoga), indoor plumbing, my 7 year old backpack from Wal-Mart that has held up better than most designer backpacks would, my 7 year old Wal-mart folders which are rugged but still kicking, my passion for history, the person online who taught me how to open a beer using a quarter without bending the bottle cap, my S5 phone still working, my laptop still working, echinacea goldenseal, squeegees, sunglasses, Bónus, guerrilla tape, Iceland’s awesome tap water, Thomas IV, that my headset still works, my 11 year old slippers, soft-close cabinet hinges, my $3 mixing bowl, people who throw away things that I can take, and lastly, SB and I’s mutual desire to explore the world.

And those are just the things from the top of my head. 🙂

I hope you all had an enjoyable Thanksgiving, whether it was an “official holiday” or a “l337 underground T-Givn’ holiday” abroad.

Until next time,
Taco

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