guinea pig racing

Funny video on youtube. Enjoy!

Icelandic stories

Take any guided tour here in Iceland, and your guide will regale you with old Icelandic stories. There is a long history of story-telling here, the most famous examples are the sagas. I like to think of these guys as modern day minstrels, keeping the old traditions alive. Here's one I was told that sticks in my head. Can't think why.

Once there was an old farmer with a beautiful daughter. One day he was visited by two foreign travellers who fell in love with his daughter. They told him they wanted to marry her (both of them apparently. Not quite sure how that would work!) He was unhappy because he didn't want to lose his daughter, so he visited the wise man for advice. I have an idea, said the wise man. Tell the visitors they can marry your daughter if they manage to ... (fill in impossible task of your choice here). So the farmer goes back and tells the young guys this. But they manage to complete the impossible task. Upset, the farmer goes back to the wise man. What should I do? He said. I've promised these guys my daughter's hand. I have another idea, says the wise man. Take a really big axe, creep into their room in the middle of the night, and chop their heads off. So he did. The end.

I think this is the Icelandic version of a happy ending.

sheep!

Last weekend I went on a trip with some friends to a summer-house near geysir. We visited a farm on the Saturday to watch the sheep-shearing there. Here's a (incredibly bad, sorry!) piccie

The ones on the right are waiting to be sheared, and the rather pathetic looking things on the left are the sheared sheep. I'm a city girl through and through (probably the only person in history ever to have been thrown off an Icelandic horse), so I kept my distance from the sheep (except the ones that came up sneakily from behind and started nibbling my jeans). But one of our party impressed us all by straddling a sheep, grabbing it's horns and wrestling it towards the shearers. We were greeted there by an incredibly friendly sheep dog who insisted on going up to each person in turn and placing his paws on their chest while wagging his tail furiously. This would have been a lot more enjoyable for us if he hadn't been covered in sheep muck. The whiff of sheep followed us round the rest of the weekend, but what the hell!

We had perfect weather the whole weekend. That is to say, it rained the whole time, which gave us the perfect excuse for just sitting around chatting, knitting, reading, drinking etc without having to feel guilty about it. Very relaxing!