Djaddasaga: puffins

So, we currently have about 6 hours of sunlight a day, and it's been often cloudy or rainy. And a bit cold. Therefore, I don't have much in the way of new pictures from the country to post here.

Thankfully, my procrastination can come to the rescue! I still have pictures from this summer that I have not posted yet. So I will post them now :). These pictures were taken in July/August, when Jó's aunt and her husband were visiting us.

We went to several places with Jó's relatives, and I also got Thai cooking lessons several nights in a row :). They also brought us many bottles of contact lens solution, as our guests often have to do when they visit. You'd understand if you lived here.

You can walk behind the Seljalandfoss waterfall

A comfy rock, somewhere around Seljalandfoss

Getting a bit too close to Skógafoss

Jó by Dyrhólaey (or for Lebanese people, Raouche-in-Iceland)

Interesting rocks around that area

And Puffins!

And of course, who can forget the sheep

In front of a (dirty) glacial tongue

Stained glass window at the national museum

View of the city from the top of Hallgrímskirkja

Boiling mud at Krísuvík

Nice colors

Don't dip your toes in there...

[PS: Note that I don't put pictures of people other than Jó and myself on the blog, as a matter of privacy. However if you are fine being on the blog, send me a message :)]

Last weekend Jó and I took a trip to Vestmannaeyjar, aka the Westmann Islands. These islands consist of one main island, Heimaey (13.4 square kms), surrounded by smaller islands. Only the main one is inhabited (about 4500 people), although some of the other islands are used for raising sheep.

The islands were mostly created 12,000 years ago as this is a highly volcanic spot. The latest addition was in 1963, when the island Surtsey emerged from the sea during a volcanic eruption. Notably, a volcano basically appeared on Heimaey in 1973 and destroyed one third of the houses in town.

Alright, enough with the trivia :).

Overall, Heimaey is a cute island, kind of a mini-Iceland. You can walk from the harbor through the town to the airport in 30 minutes. There are some very imposing cliffs and rocks on the north side (I would not try to climb those), and two volcanic cones you can climb (they're not very high, around 220 meters each). We climbed Helgafell, the older cone, but I'm sure we will go over Eldfell (the 1973 cone) if we return.

The people on the island are supposedly friendlier than mainland (main island?) Icelanders. In fact, a random person nodded to me as our eyes met at one point, which confirms that people are indeed friendlier. On the downside, the buildings in the island are slightly run-down, and the harbour area has a pretty bad fish smell (I assume it's from drying fish).

The town has a lot of puffin-inspired names, paintings and merchandise (even the street signs are shaped like puffins...). However walking around town you don't see any puffins, which is a bit annoying. But! Go to the cliffs, and there they will be... Plenty and plenty of puffins! They look quite cute and they are entertaining to watch as they fly from and return to their cliff spots. Moreover, as I can attest from my last meal in the island, they're quite tasty. Their meat is quite dense and dark, somewhat like whale meat, but much tastier. Puffins: cute and tasty, the perfect animal! (well, I guess lambs too fit into that mold).

And now for the onslaught of pictures:

Volcanoes and lava