Happy

Here's a happy Valentina and Marsibil at a fall meeting of the girls who went to the YWCA summer camp Vindáshlíð. I've always thought it unfortunate that the acronym for the Young Women's Christian Society here in Iceland is KFUK (if you can give me the full name I'll give you a gold star!) There used to be an office for the society downtown on Austurstræti when I was a kid visiting my amma, and I was always a little shocked because I wasn't sure if the people who worked there knew what the name looked like to an English speaker. To this day it doesn't sit right with me, though the society itself is a wonderful thing and my daughter certainly enjoyed her stay at their camp this summer.

Day After

I suppose I can't let Reykjavik's annual Iceland Airwaves music festival weekend pass by without posting something about it. I only saw one act this year, at the Mál og Menning bookstore on Laugavegur this afternoon, and I don't even know who it was. Some swell female crooner and a couple of jazzy backup guys (Babar maybe?). The fesitval was sold out this year again and my father said yesterday that the main shooping street, Laugavegur, was swarming with foreign accents and people hauling music equipment around. That's the cool thing about this festival: Reykjavik becomes, for one weekend, a very international place, just like a tiny San Francisco or like a small slice of London, or New York. And this year the organizers tackled the overcrowded venue issue by holding free concerts all over town, like the one I witnessed at the bookstore today. They get a big plus for that!

This still life is one I happened across this morning, the day after the last big concert night of the festival. A broken beer bottle, a lighter, an empty cig box, stubs, a half-full ashtray and a copy of yesterday's Grapevine festival guide all grace the scene, a fine memorial to last night's downtown action.

Tight

See if you can figure out what happened moments after this picture was taken...

If you answered, "the muscled-up SUV with the hyper-inflated tires can't make it past the two cars left jutting out at irresponsible angles by Icelanders who can't, or can't be bothered to, parallel park and it's a one way street, as are all of the side streets (going in the wrong direction) the SUV has already passed, and the driver wouldn't be able to back up anyway because there are at least seven cars in line behing him," you'd have answered correctly. By sheer luck of timing the owner of the silver car showed up before road rage made a mess of everyone's easy Sunday afternoon.

And the owner of the black car? I wouldn't be surprised to find out that his vehicle got a bit bumped that day as, even with the other car gone, the ferry of over-bloated highland adventure jeeps and vans that just had to drive that particular quaint street that day still had a hard time getting past the blockage.

Just another simple scene from the pretty little city of Reykjavik!

Trash

Something about this scene, even though it involves a trash can, seemed pretty to me. Probably the colors, and the idea that the owner of this double stroller has passed out of that phase of their life and is moving on. Out with the old and all that.

The city of Reykjavik has also been cleaning house recently, saying good riddance to our mayor of a year and a half due to a scandal involving a public utility and private profiteers. I'll let Iceland Review do the honors of explaining the situation in more detail. It's a complicated series of events involving power plays, money and alliances that, frankly, are beyond my desire to understand. Ahh, politics. Sometimes a simple scene like the one above and the story it seems to tell are very welcome in our often overly-convoluted civic lives.

Moths

There's a crazy number of moths flitting around town these days. I'm not sure if I've just not noticed them in previous years, or if we're having some kind of trend related to global warming and such. Kids here call them butterflies (fiðrildi), though they're technically mölfluga, or "grain flies," in Icelandic (see here for a proper description of the difference between moths and butterflies.) Since we don't have very many insects here, and really no true butterflies (except a type of small white one and Painted Ladies on occasion), kids often have little reference as to what a true temperate climate butterfly looks like, with big colorful wings and all that. The only butterfly our little one, Óðinn, has seen is the cute and smiley mascot for Baby TV, our very favorite channel to watch.

Sigur Rós

I went to the premier of the new Sigur Rós documentary, Heima, last night and it was a beautiful experience. I have my own few photos from their Reykjavik show (here and here), but I'll let the trailer to the film do all the talking. Do watch it!

I chose this photo from the Sigur Rós Iceland Tour page because my Valentína was in the audience when they played this show at Ásbyrgi. And also because the tour was for the people of Iceland, a colorful group of whom are shown here, enthralled.

Fusion

Fall's here, so I thought I'd post a photo from the last days of summer, just to remind us how wonderful we had it during the hot months this year.

Buskers and street musicians are not usually permitted to play for any amount of time on the sidewalks of Reykjavik (unfortunately) though this collaboration of young musicians was able to put in a good few hours' session of jazz. Maybe they'd gotten permission, because it wasn't the authorities that eventually drove them to pack up, but a well-tipsy local who couldn't seem to stop from getting overly involoved in what they were doing. You can see him boogying down in this shot, but in between dance moves he was trying wholehertedly to help the musicians play their instruments, much to their frustration. They had humor for it for a while, then called it a day. I'm sure the interloper has nothing but fond memories of his sunny sumer day jamming with the boys.