Bless Bless

So this is the last post I shall write whilst here in Iceland. I leave tomorrow for Terra Britannia at 7.00am. My last day on site was last Thursday and we went for the now traditional Grillhusid lunch. It also coincided with a colouring in completion when we found a load of photo-copied pictures of Disney characters. It was decided that mine was best with five votes to two over Lilja's 'effort'.

The winner by far

On Friday Atli and Hrönn had their house warming party. Apparently I'd called his and Hrönn's new apartment cold and sterile. Well it was certainly warm on Friday, helped a little by a bottle of vokda... Then Jo and I took ourselves off to the Westmen Isles (Vestmannaeyjar) for the rest of the weekend. I don't know if you know, but these are a set of small islands just of the south of Iceland. Home to about five thousand people about a third of the main town on the biggest island of Heimaey was buried under a volcano in 1973. We went specifically to see this, we called it Tephra Tourism. We climbed the mound of tephra that was left over after the eruptions of 1973, nowadays called Eldfell. Fire Mountain. How fucking obvious is that? What dullard came up with that name? It's a mountain, it's got fire coming out of it. What shall we call it? Why not just call it 'Massive Fucking Destruction Mountain' and have done with it. That aside it was kind of weird being on a hot mountain that was only six months older than me.

The population of Heimaey are all like 'WTF! OMGZ!!! DUDE!!!'

It wasn't just Volcanoes that fucked Heimaey up, Algerian Pirates turned up one day in the seventeenth century and captured most of the population, shooting the rest like fish in a barrel in some caves that hey thought they'd escaped to. You would wonder why people even bothered going back to the island after all these catastrophes, but Icelandic folk are hard headed if nothing else and the population still clings onto this rock, eating Puffins, sea bird eggs and roots and berries by the look of things. Even the fresh water supply was fucked up by the Volcano. In a nice touch all these horrors were lovingly carved on the new Church door.

I assumed this church door was pre-1973 and they had left a blank panel on the middle right section in case 'anything else of interest happened in Heimaey'

Another massive highlight of the trip was seeing some Puffins. Having eaten one before Christ's Mass, it was churlish of me not to see them in their natural habitat. We stared at the stupid little fat fucks in the driving rain then decided to visit the folk museum. We had been lied to by the Lonely Planet again. It had told us in hushed tones about a cabinet of artifacts from the island's only Nazi party representative. We searched high and low but could locate no Nazis what so ever. The boat trip home was one of the choppiest ever. The ship was practically capsizing with every tsunami sized wave. It was certainly not helping Jo's tummy due to the Monkfish dish disaster from the night before...

The Vestmannaeyjar Ferry arrives safe and sound in Reykjavik...