But first, the weather.

It’s been raining heavily for the last few days (like, 16mm or 0.63inches per Day. For two and a half days), and also getting slightly colder. When I got out of the house this morning, I noticed that there was snow in the mountains again:

In the staggering amount of rain, we trundled down to the other maritime museum, this one about a block from the university. It used to be someone’s house, and had a lovely collection of model boats at various scales to illustrate what boats people used to use to fish:

I’m always irrationally grumpy when museums have a progression of ships but they don’t either a) at least list the scale of the model, please people or b) just have all the models to the same scale. It kind of undercuts the whole ‘and here the boats get Very Large’ theme most of these exhibits are built around. Anyway, there was also some celestial navigation tools (my old friends):

All the maritime/fish processing stuff was on the bottom floor, and then the top floor was all day-to-day tools and toys of, as near as I could to tell, just The Past. Like, there was very old Singer sewing machine and one of the very early dive suits, but also a cathode ray tube tv set. There was also an entire attic full of accordions. I’m not quite sure what was going on with that.

I always love going to museums, but I’m very amused that the two history museums we’ve been to in the last week are focused on a part of the past that is so recent. Most American history museums also primarily pull on the last 400years or so, but they tend to highlight wrenching cultural shifts or technological innovations. Stuff has changed, even if it happened recently. In contrast, Icelandic history museums tend to focus on either the Vikings and the Settlement Period (~1000 years ago) or the last ~70 years or so, and there’s just something very funny to me, in light of being inhabited by the same people and a similar culture since the 900s, to frame a museum around the Deep Past of, like, 1945. You had a bunch of intervening centuries in there! I’m sure stuff happened in them!

The rain continues, but the weekend approaches, and the class that starts next week involves going to the Arctic Circle Conference in Reykjavik, so that should be fun. Still amused, and staying dry (enough).