The latest from Reykjavik

Hi y'all

A short report form Iceland. It has been raining for the past couple of days and walking to school has made me rather upset at times. Fortunately it's almost weekend (no school on fridays) and I can just stay inside if I want to. Although I think that is quite unlikely to happen. ;)

Last weekend was a lot of fun: on friday me and the other Kaisa partcipated in a party organized by the local business students union, Mágus. The party was called "Bjórvissuferð" (translation is something like: driving around in the bus, drinking beer and not knowing where you are going..) It was great fun, had some beers, sang karaoke and met a bunch of new people. Mágus organizes also company visits and parties, so the poor Icelanders will be seeing us around in the future as well.

Otherwise things have definitely fallen to their daily patterns. I think this is the time when you start to get a bit bored with your every day life and need something to add an extra kick to it. So perhaps a little fieldtrip or a great party (have one coming up next week) will do. :D

Ok folks. That's all for now.

Hugs
Kaisa

These boots were made for walking

Last week we had very nice weather and enjoyed the day by going for a walk along the coast. Here are some pics from our little day trip.
Things are going well here. Had quite a weekend, partying from thursday til saturday. Last night we went to hear some great jazz in a local restaurant. A perfect sunday evening. :)
Oh, and happy valentine's day to everyone!!!

Party pictures

Icelandic images

Here are some pics.. Almost all are from our trip to the Blue Lagoon... The last one is from an event we went to taste some traditional Icelandic food: sheep´s head and shark were the most exotic ones!

Learning(?) Icelandic

Sæll!

One interesting thing about the country is definitively the Icelandic language. I like it a lot. (At this moment mainly the way it sounds!) We have started an ambitious project to learn at least a bit of this ancient Scandinavian language during these couple of months here.

Icelanders are very proud of their language, which is believed to have changed very little from the original tongue spoken by the Norse settlers. It has been said that the modern say people could read the the original sagas and Eddas that were written some eight hundred years ago. (Although haven't yet met anyone who would have these kind of books in their bookshelves, so go figure!)

People are also very reluctant to adopting new foreign words to their language. According to the puristic linguistic policy, there is an institute that comes up with new words (or review old words with new meanings) for new concepts. For example the word TV is "sjónvarpið" and telephone is "sími". Some words have some similarities to Swedish, which is a nice help in the beginning to make it a bit easier to understand the rather complicated grammar, for instance.

In the morning I tend to "read" the morning paper (read: look at the pictures and try to understand the articles with the couple of words i know). Hopefully by may I will understand a bit more than just how the weather will be like and what's on TV! :D

Here are some every-day phrases for those of you who got interested in learning this very useful language (some 300,00 people in the world speak it!):

Good Day / Good Morning - Góðan dag
Good Night - Góða nótt
My name is... - Ég heiti...
I am from... - Ég er frá...
Nice to meet you! - Gleður mig að kynnast þér!

(There are a couple of special letters in Icelandic: ð and þ and æ. All the vowels with ´ are also pronounced differently. ..Just to mention a couple of tricky pronounciation rules that have messed up my mind already!)

Well that´s all for now. Keep posting hellos, nice to read those!!!

Kaisa