Category: Travel

Nashville Trip

Welp I’m travelling in Nashville this week and yarr my comic is so delayed! But next Sunday I’ll have it up.

Nashville has been fun thus far, it has a pretty good live music scene and we got to hear some great performances at a Singer-Songwriter Night at a bar in midtown, along with a bunch of other stuff. That is something I’ve always really admired about places like New Orleans and Nashville, is how much they really value music, and it shows.

However, the bad side of Nashville is that the cars are absolutely out of control here. Like they don’t care if you’re crossing at a crosswalk, or if you have the walk sign on for pedestrians, they DO NOT SLOW DOWN AT ALL when approaching crosswalks or walk-signs. So cars turning left at an intersection, for example, will just accelerate straight into pedestrians crossing with the lights and with the pedestrian crossing sign on and everything. It is terrifying and the most horrible thing ever. I actually had to dive out of the way a couple of times because otherwise I would be dead. I have no idea how everybody in Nashville isn’t already dead from being run over by cars.

Because the weird thing is, lots of people seem to walk in Nashville! Like everybody, everywhere, is walking and there’s lots of sidewalks and certain neighborhoods would actually be very walkable if not for the fact that every single car-driver is apparently hell-bent on murder. It is such a sad example of how car culture just ruins things.

Oh, well. Have another screenshot.

KEEP MOVING!

West Fjords Road Trip

One of the segments of our Iceland trip was a road trip through the West Fjords.

Doc in a West Fjords Hotspring
Doc in a West Fjords Hotspring
Hot Springs in the West Fjords
Hot Springs in the West Fjords
Doc and the Necropants in the Sorcery Museum in Hólmavík
Doc and the Necropants in the Sorcery Museum in Hólmavík
Butterknot Charm in the Sorcery Museum in Hólmavík
Charm in the Sorcery Museum in Hólmavík
A Draug Coming out of the Floor in the Sorcery Museum in Hólmavík
A Draug Coming out of the Floor in the Sorcery Museum in Hólmavík
A Charm to Bring Storms in the Sorcery Museum in Hólmavík
A Charm to Bring Storms in the Sorcery Museum in Hólmavík
West Fjords Dolphins
West Fjords Dolphins
Ísafjörður Boats
Ísafjörður Boats
Úr álögum, in Ísafjörður
Úr álögum, in Ísafjörður

In Hólmavík there is a sorcery museum, which is about sorcery as practiced in Iceland during the Reformation Era. They have grimoires that describe staves for spells, etc.

They also have several exhibits where they recreate some of the spells that folklore says the sorcerers would do. Like they have a Draug coming out of the floor next to the spell for “Stave to wake up a Draug” and they have a model of the folkloric Necropants, etc.

They also talk about how Reformation Era Iceland was a very rough place. When the Vikings first colonized it, it was covered with trees, but since it is an island they eventually cut them all down. So by the 1600’s, you get stories like a guy being arrested for being accused of stealing another guy’s driftwood. Or a priest who got arrested for having a stave which was supposed to ward off sheep thieves. Tough times.

And also how the whole culture clash began, with the sheriffs going abroad to Denmark et al to go to college and study, and getting the ideas of sorcery being wicked and bad and suddenly they start persecuting what was previously just thought to be folk arts for luck and were now framed as evil sorcery.

In Ísafjörður, we got to visit Skóbúðin, the Museum of Everyday Life, which was spectacular!

We also got to visit some hot springs during this segment of the road trip.

Iceland!

I just got back from Iceland. I’ve been obsessed with Iceland for over 15 years now and have desperately wanted to visit, but I suppose I hadn’t had the same overlap of opportunity, means, time, etc until now.

One thing that I was not expecting: the food in Iceland is amazing. Absolutely amazing. Like, anywhere you go. It doesn’t matter if it is a fancy restaurant, a truck stop in the middle of nowhere, a tourist trap, a dive, etc. All food in Iceland is amazing. It is like all the cooks went, “Yea, I know I’m a cook in a truck stop in the middle of nowhere and people are going to have to stop here no matter what, but dangit I’m a cook so I’m going to do my darndest and cook the best I can!” Even the gas station hotdogs were pretty darn good. It is amazing! How can the food be so universally good? I wonder if it is because it is all so fresh and free of hormones and preservatives, or if everybody just really takes cooking seriously, or some combo. Either way I’m not complaining.

I also think that Iceland has the perfect weather. For me. I usually have a problem with feeling far too warm, and basically any time it gets over 75F I melt. Whenever I was outside, the temperature was perfect and I felt super comfortable. Now, I don’t like it miserably cold like way below freezing or anything. But it doesn’t really get miserably unbearably cold in Iceland. It doesn’t get as cold as New York or Minneapolis, for example, because it is warmed by the gulf stream. So I actually found the weather extremely pleasant. Especially after we’ve had what seem like endless heat waves in California >:(

I liked the wilderness explorations as well as hanging out in the city. We structured the trip such that the first half of the trip we would do wilderness stuff, and then the second half of the trip we would just wander around Reykjavík and look at the shops and bars, etc. There are several backpacking trips that I am really interested in, which would require going back in the summer.

Back in college, I actually started teaching myself to read and write Icelandic so I could read the sagas, but I only knew how to read and write it. I never learned to speak or hear it, and on this trip I have realized that the pronunciations are all completely different from how I had imagined they would be. There’s a lot for me to learn in order to speak it. So now I think my goal is to be able to learn enough of it to have very basic conversations by the time I go back again for my backpacking trips. I’ve already got most of the noun declension down from the reading/writing, so now it will be about ear training and pronunciations.