I had a relatively normal flight back from Boston, which I was not expecting, given how oddly the last several flights have gone. I hugged Mom and threw myself into the warm embrace of Logan’s TSA. I escaped fairly quickly, but when my backpack went into the scanner I had little carabiner keeping my water bottle attached to my backpack, and when it came out the carabiner was gone. So, for reasons inscrutable, the TSA stole a tiny carabiner but didn’t question me about either the chainmail or the tinfoil wrapped sandwich or the screwdriver that were also in that bag. These people keep making decisions and I don’t understand any of them. I managed to both purchase a bus ticket and get on the bus I meant to on the first try and got out of Keflavik pretty smoothly, and I’m beginning to wonder if buses sense intentions and that’s been my problem the whole time. Only small wrinkle this trip was that the domestic airport was closed when I arrived (8am) despite there being a flight (not mine) at 9am. So I sat in the sun for half an hour until they let me inside.

I got very enthusiastic taking pictures out the window, and only noticed later that my phone was doing something deeply odd with the propellers whenever they were in frame, so I have a lot of landscape shots with weird propeller smears in them.

I’m been settling back in pretty well; there is so much daylight now. It gets light around 5am and the sun doesn’t set until 10:30ish pm. It’s also been about 10C and sunny for the last week or so, and it’s just an wild amount of sunlight to have in a day. I keep forgetting I have to make or eat dinner because some dumb internal clock is like, No! It’s only 4pm! when it is fact 8pm and I need to stand up now. I’m so so grateful I made opaque curtains last semester, it means I can actually sleep despite all the sun.

This class is Community and the Built Environment, so we’ve been talking about how do people form attachments to places, what aspects of the built environment tends to effect how people feel about and use the space, and what are the mental/physical health effects of architecture. It’s been interesting, and has really highlighted how much of Iceland’s architecture and design is centered around daylight and attempting to make it bright even in the winter. Instead of being in a classroom, we’ve mostly been wandering around this or surrounding towns pointing at things; partially because the weather is so nice, and partially because he wants us to think about the buildings in the natural landscape.

We went on a field trip earlier this week to a town a fjord over, and once we got done wandering around and pointing at murals and fish drying huts we got scooped up and shown a a traditional turf house near a beach and were just let loose to wander and poke everything.

Turf houses are very short to keep the warmth in; I can just barely stand up straight without hitting my head on the beams. I did end up climbing on the rear wall to poke the grass roof, before getting distracted and spending most of my time on beach off camera left.

I love layers of compacted sand like this; it’s my favorite beach system to play with. The sand falls into the water almost exactly like a rock topple and it’s delightful to toss rocks in and see the river move in response. Similar processes at different scales! Also, streams this size make the most cheerful babbling splish-splash noises and I love it to bits.

There was some kind of outdoor gym/playground we stopped at in town, which I immediately climbed to the top of, and one of the other kids took this picture and sent it to me. I’m having a good time