Eurovision - oh wow it's here again.

This year, tragically, one of my very favourites is Iceland's entry and I won't be able to vote for it. It's not my favourite because I were developing some soft feelings for my new home - those are already well-developed and mixed well with the occasional "why does everyone drive like they're insane!!!?" -feel - but because I very sincerely like the song. It's a plus that I hear they're going to sing it in Icelandic at the competition.

The usual way things are done here is that the song is in Icelandic while in Iceland and gets translated in English for the competition abroad. Alas, because Icelandic is one of those languages that work on nuances it's almost impossible to accurately convey the original feel and meaning of the song in these translations. So what if the rest of the Europe does not understand Icelandic - that's what subtitles are for.

I have many more favourites for the year of course, but now I'm just going to talk about Iceland's songs that have been memorable to me.

Ahahahahaha aaaaah this woman. Everyone loved to hate Silvia Night, I remember that much from back home. What we and much of Europe did not know though was that Silvia Night is a famous comedian in Iceland and we really should have taken her behaviour with way more salt. That booing in the end is because she had put on her comedian routine which includes lots of bragging and putting others down, but if we take her performance out of that context it's actually quite awesome!

But face it, she really did not stand a chance. I will take this space to remind you of who won that year:

I'm still surprised they didn't set the stage on fire, literally I mean. :D

Anyway, on with Iceland: this is one of the cases where I really wished the song had stayed in Icelandic...

I was really rooting for this one too, it's so sweet. :3

Let's now bring out the big guns! You will NOT be prepared for the mullet! Or the shoulder pads! Or the pants! Or the dance moves and the sparkle - once you watch this one you'll not be prepared for anything you're about to see.

The Finnishness in my soul is rejoicing over how depressing this whole video is. Yes. More. Make me feel mildly suicidal by a Eurovision song and I'll remember you fondly for years to come.

Come oooooon you saw this coming - I'm a huge Páll Óskar fan and the combination of Eurovision and him is like ice cream with chocolate sauce and strawberries.

I'm going to end this post with a song that never made its way to the stages in Europe, and what an unfair thing that was. Oh my God this is the best Eurovision song ever written, everyone else can go home forever! Well ok, Hard Rock Hallelujah was the best. But this comes veeeeery very close!

About postcards and A Charming Mass Suicide.

Actually, it's not only my tea cup collection that has grown but my old cards collection as well. This one's grown more generally though, a card here and another one there, spread out over a longer period of time. I don't even remember when I've bought all these so I'll just start listing the new additions to the collection and make a couple of posts about them, as squeezing them all into one entry would really blow it out of proportion.

This first one is just a simple rose card, written on at the back, but it was so charming I had to have it!

And those of you who have known me for longer might immediately understand why this card stood out for me. I love personifications. All of them in fact, but the virtues are a soft spot for me and have been that ever since I waded through a whopload of research because of my final project, sat with several wise men and women and interviewed them on the matter.

This trio here are the theological virtues, and naturally the most well-liked and easiest to recognize.

Then moving onto a completely different type of subject, Iceland is an unsurprisingly good place for scouting volcano cards! This one's a photo from Katla erupting in 1918, and it serves as an explanation to why Icelanders don't take this particular volcano's eruptions lightly! Even Hekla gets less attention, my boyfriend's mum's attitude was that it just going boom every ten years or so, but Katla - she is a whole different story. The volcano is now so active it's being closely monitored and the people living nearby are following it too, in order to evacuate presto if need be.

Talking about Hekla, here's one of her. This is just an artist's view of it though. However, it is really interesting to me and I'd really love to try to go and find the place where the artist has stood looking at the mountain...

This is no card. It's added here as a curiousity and because I can. Snu found it at Kolaportið and bought it, and I sort of wrenched it off his hands and started reading it immediately. It's a translation of "Hurmaava joukkoitsemurha" (= A Charming Mass Suicide) by the Finnish author Arto Paasilinna and it totally surprised me to see it translated into Icelandic! :D It's a brilliant story and a pleasant way of studying Icelandic so for now, the book is all mine, mwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahaha...

9: 5 things I would never do in lolita.

Haha, this could include anything from mudwrestling to skydiving, but I guess the point is to list things that one would actually do, just not in lolita. K then, challenge accepted!

1. Clean up the house. Lolita tends to have many layers and I get sweaty enough in normal clothes, besides anything nicer would land in dire risk of getting stained. I do have dresses that can take more abuse than most, but why deliberately harm them?

2. Go to a work interview. There's time and place for everything and for lolita the time and place are not around when trying to woo a potential employer, unless seeking to be employed at a lolita related place. However, I've a feeling those aren't that common so the safe bet is always something else.

3. Move house. Poofy skirts and frills are not the outfit for lifting heavy boxes or even throwing things in them.

4. Uh... harvest potatoes. I almost wrote here "gardening" but in reality I have done that in lolita - the lighter kind I mean, weeding, watering etc. Oh, mow the lawn! Definitely wouldn't be pushing a lawn mower in ruffles!

5. Sing in a choir or any other task that requires uniform dressing up. Not even if just given the usual "everyone needs to wear black, no further rules".

It was difficult to think these up. There are so many styles and ways of wearing lolita that for almost anything there is a style, and the occasions where there really is NO suitable way of wearing lolita like going to the gym, putting off fires, arresting people and performing brain surgery, well, let's just say I don't need to concern myself with them...

Katla got there first.

Apparently while we were all looking at Hekla, Katla was secretly getting ready to go. There has been a small eruption underneath Mýrdalsjökull, the glacier Katla lies under, but it seems to be over now. The only results so far seem to be cracks in the glacier and a jökulhlaup that washed away a bridge and some parts of Ring Road 1. Some people have been evacuated, mostly from camping sites, and people near the rivers have been warned about the possibility of toxic gasses from the meltwater.

So no fear, Katla did not do the whole ash-thing - at least not this time.

EDIT: just as I posted this there were more news: Katla's calming down but there's still a lot of harmonic tremor around the area, so there's always a possibility we'll hear more about her. I'll try to keep this blog updated if something unusual happens, as always.

Hekla go boom?

Well, let's hope not, but she's been showing alarming signs lately. Now usually I wouldn't worry too much about volcanoes doing this and whatnots, but Hekla is a little bit special. Number one, she is very near to Reykjavík and deemed potentially dangerous. Number two, she doesn't usually give much of a warning - by the time you notice something the eruption can be half an hour away, as happened in the 70's.

Hekla last erupted in 2000 and a new eruption has been anticipated for some time already. Last evening's earthquakes have been confirmed as being caused by the movement of magma. My favourite volcano- and earthquake blog is keeping everyone updated as well as he's able to, and you can also follow Hekla's activity via his webcam or geophone.

If you've any questions I'll try to answer them as well as I can. And naturally, if something unusual happens I'll be writing about it presto!

When the circus is in town.

On Saturday I found out by a lucky accident that there was a circus show downtown and naturally I needed to go see it. I love circus, always have. I especially love the new type of artfaggy circus with deep and meaningful stunts done with a lady yodeling something about lost childhood in the background and two clowns randomly pottering about. This time - well, I didn't get the clowns. And it was just Carmen's Habanera, but at least it was suitably moody and the weather was fine and well, I do love a showy show, clowns or no clowns.

The name of the group is La Fura dels Baus.

They almost managed to sway away from my camera lens in this one.

The suit guy in front suicides!

The second part was even more grim and ended up with the whole group hanging from the ropes like so many, well, hanged men.

I loved the pearl curtain effect.

Wheeeeee...!

I love stuff like this. :3

About the volcanic eruption: at the moment it seems to be ending. However, there's been some unusual earthquakes in the Grímsvötn area so we're watching it for now. If a new crater opens up elsewhere there might be a jökulhlaup and those buggers have washed roads off of a 15 km wide area before...

PS: I've got my towel. It's purple, soft and loyal to me.

Reporting from the ash cloud.

Travel map of yesterday. We never got further than Vik, but you'll be able to see all the locations we passed and/or visited on the way.

Yesterday was a gloriously beautiful day so we packed ourselves + two friends in Snu's little Mitsubishi and started to drive towards Vatnajökull. We knew the Skaftafell area was closed off due to heavy ash fall but we decided to drive as far as we could and see if we could find anything interesting.

It's a cloud machine! A hot spot in the ground, likely a hot spring. The area is called Hveragerði (hver = hot spring) after the numerous hot springs there.

I took this photo for some reason, can't remember why. I guess I thought the air looked odd in the direction we were headed to. Somewhat yellowish and hazy.

A cloud machine close-up!

On the way we stopped at a huge greenhouse-thingy called Eden. It's a bit difficult to find but Hveragerði is such a small place that driving around will suffice in locating it. It's very much worth a visit!

EDIT: Alas, it's no longer possible to visit Eden. The place has now burned down to the ground. However, I've heard of plans of re-building it and I'm hopeful it will eventually be back, and I shall keep you all updated on the goings-on.

Flowers, birds. The parrot can say "hello". The black birdie can only look a bit silly.

HORSES! Horses are everywhere, like cows back home in Finland. They're cute and fluffy and aw, they're on every meadow and hill and even sides of some mountains!

The haze I spotted earlier on started growing thicker. This was somewhere after Hveragerði but a while before Hvolsvöllur.

Hvolsvöllur. There definitely was something unusual in the air, no doubt about it.

South Iceland has plenty of large waterfalls. One of the largest, Skogafoss (= Forest Falls), is on the way as well. Remember Ring Road 1 if you plan to go see it! Hopefully you'll get your sightseeing with a little less ash than we did, though.

By now we indeed knew this was definitely ash. However, what we hadn't known was that this was not necessarily Grímsfjall ash at all. We stopped in Hvolsvöllur at a Saga museum and the guide there explained that it was a year old stuff from Eyjafjallajökull: it hadn't rained for a long while and then the winds picked up the loose ash, as Eyjafjallajökull ash was very fine in texture (unlike Grímsfjall, which is heavier and will likely rain down faster).

Remember the Saga museum, it's a wonderful place for those that like the Icelandic sagas and offers an amazing amount of information about the daily life of people of the time the sagas were written.

It was certain that from this on the visibility would not be much. We also found out that the roads were now closed all the way to Vik because of the Grímsfjall ash that was so thick south of Vatnajökull that a man had a hard time trying to locate his own feet with a torchlight. No driving then, but I guess I can live without experiencing driving blind.

The ash cloud got rapidly thicker. This photo is taken halfway between Hvolsvöllur and Vik. There's a car up ahead but you can hardly see its lights.

The sickly yellowish grayness made everything look slightly out of this world and frightening. All houses looked abandoned, cars seemed to only go away from Vik. Snu commented he wished we weren't the only ones heading towards Vik because it did seem kind of ominous that everyone else wanted to get away from there.

Another car, and in front of it, a motorhome. Click the image larger and you just might be able to see it. We were now nearing the end of the trip and the radio was interviewing a farmer who was busily moving his livestock indoors. You could hardly make out his words among all that bleating, but one sentence that we did soon hear was "Look, I don't have time for this [interview]!" after which the reporter thanked him and moved on.

Vik had turned into a ghost town. Not a soul in sight aside of us and the tourist-looking types in that motorhome we had seen earlier driving ahead of us. We stopped by a grocery store and I hopped out of the car for a couple of quick photos.

Later we found out that this was actually not a very smart thing to do. The ash was rather bad for the lungs, made breathing difficult, stung my eyes and got so well mixed in my hair that after washing it twice I still feel grainy.

However, back there we only knew this ash wasn't as acidic and poisonous as Eyjafjallajökull's ash. Somehow I managed to think this meant the same as "harmless" but alas, that was not the case.

I didn't stay outside for long, though. 

The church of Vik at the worst cloud we were in. You can kind of understand why they decided to close the road.

Houses in Vik.

Visibility ~15m? It's unnerving to drive on mountains when the road seems to just suddenly disappear in front of your car!

Mountains in ash.

Skogafoss, the one I mentioned before. I want to visit it again sometime with less volcano in the air!

A troll rabbit and some sheep below.

(Trolls of Iceland are considered vulnerable to daylight, and only move around in the dark. If they, for some reason, stay out for too long the sunlight will turn them into rocks.)

Our darling Mitsubishi back in Hvolsvöllur. During the two hours it took to drive to Vik and back the cloud had moved west and was now sitting on Hvolsvöllur double as thick as when we left there.

Crossing Rangá(?). At least I think this is somewhere near Hella, a small town that didn't have any ash on our way the other direction.

Hveragerði was now about to be swallowed up by the cloud as well.

More cloud to the right side. By now we were at least out of it.

Horses at Rauðavatn (= Red Lake)!

However, just a few hours after we returned home in Breiðholt we were back in the ash cloud.

Nnnnnoooooooo!!!

Then for some photos I just snapped this morning after most of the ash had already rained down.

Ew.

Annnd a close-up of the table.

We're getting loads of info about the eruption here, so if there's anything in particular you'd like to know about it I'll do my best to answer!