Please no more lamb!

It has been a long couple of days! Yesterday we boarded the bus early to travel back to Reykjavik. We traveled north through a mountain pass (another bumpy, rocky road...I'm pretty sure my brain has dislodged by now!) and following the western coast, stopping at various historical and cultural sites along the way.
I'm exhausted right now and can barely remember half of the places so I really can't do them justice in this blog tonight!
We focused a lot on the Icelandic Sagas which you're best off looking here for an explanation of the stories and their significance. We visited several museums about the Sagas and the homestead of one of the famous authors, Snorri Sturluson. We also visited the site of the old parliament, which is not a building, but an outdoor location located in the rift valley. We heard stories from our instructor about the switchover from Viking to various religious rulings and they really do have a fascinating history here and I'm very glad to have gotten the chance to learn about it.
One of the instructors for the course is a glacialologist and he has been awesome and leading us on all these amazing trips for the past week. He led us through this area and even arranged a visit to a friend's home who he mentioned was an artist and recently became a musician. That was the understatement of the century. This guy is AMAZING! He paints, carves stones (he walks until he finds a rock that has a figure in it already and then accentuates it...I can't quite describe it..it was just beautiful), and recently built himself a xylophone out of rocks. He performed a concert for us and it was unreal. He finds the right tone in every rock and to switch to a flat or sharp, he splits the rock and breaks off a small piece of the corner to just change that tone slightly. It turns out it has performed with Bjork and recently the Dalai Lama was in Iceland and visited his home where he played for him!
We stopped a another hot spring and a few waterfalls as well and I never thought I'd say this, but I could stand to never see another waterfall again!
One of my favorite things over the past few days traveling has been this instructor telling us Icelandic stories, history, teaching us how to count in Icelandic, and pointing out all of the volcanoes and other geologic features over the microphone as we drove. It gave such an amazing extra little special thing to traveling.
We had dinner on a little island, Bogarnes, and had wonderful soup, freshly made veggie burgers and a huge bowl of skyrr for desert.
We didn't get back to the hotel until quite late...I think it was around 11 and we checked in (we've been upgraded and gained a chair and a bathroom that doesn't quite need to be declared a flood zone after every shower!) ad passed out.
We had to be in the labs by 8:30 this morning and started with geochemistry and doing basic acid-base titrations, moved to DNA extractions and PCR, and finally plated our innoculized samples. All stuff that I already know how to do so I was asked to help others, which at least made the day go by fast!
We ended a but early, around 4:30, and headed out for a disappointing whale watch. We saw several Minke whales but I was slightly disgusted by the practices here. I've always been on whale watched where the companies stay a certain distance away from the whales but here, we literally were chasing them down and coming way to close to make me comfortable. I'm sorry but if the whale is constantly swimming away, he doesn't want to be near the boat!! We did stop by Puffin Island so I got to see a bunch of puffins though they are nearly impossible to photograph they move so fast!
The boat dropped us off at a very small, very deserted (minus a restaurant and small guest house) island where we had dinner. We had lobster soup which was amazing, freaking lamb again (i never, ever, ever want to see another piece of lamb on my plate ever again!!!!!!), and some kind of weird cheesecake like desert which we had to eat incredibly fast because the boat had returned for us and only stops at the island for 15 minutes and we'd be spending the night if we missed them! Something interesting happened at dinner that I'm still sort of in shock over (in a very good way) that I'll tell you all about when I get back to the States.
We start early again tomorrow so I'm heading to bed. Night from a very noisy Friday night in downtown Reykjavik!

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Part of trip: Iceland

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