Husavik

Millybrown
Mark Hillmann
Sun 29 Jun 2008 23:13
A couple of days of rest, filing - yes, here I am in Iceland filing for God's sake, so I can find the instructions for some radio.  I found them too.  I turned on my palm thingy and it said I had missed my son's birthday, after all his good advice on making the blog more chatty, or is it too informal now Paul?  I tried to send this to him as a text (as I found the Vodafone instructions, so my mobile is now working) but it could not spell thingy and then crashed. 
 
Can you tell that I have just done a proper Sunday dinner with carrots, potatoes, onion, bacon, egg and frankfurter (check spelling) so I was allowed cider and crisps while preparing it and wine with it?  Playing Samuel Barber, Thelonius Monk and now the Doors through the radio (I can do mp3s), they are good too, but my selection is so small that boredom with the musac will soon come.  It is either that or Icelandic radio, which is sometimes good.  This morning I would swear that they had the omnibus version of the Icelandic Archers.  I was listening carefully for Brookfield or Schula to be mentioned.  It followed the Sunday service which could so easily have been a Scottish Presbyterian one drifting into Gallic that I could not follow.
 
I am in Husavik which has whale watching as its big thing.  There is a whaling museum that I went into after an early supper/late lunch yesterday.  I wandered round, diligently reading all the descriptions.  Then there was a room with most of it on telly, in English.  I sat down and after a while realised that there were bits I had seen before: Asleep in front of the telly, just like home; it had gone right round the loop. 
 
At five to seven a young lady came and said they were soon closing and did I want to look at the skeletons upstairs as they were the best bit.  I wonder how long I had been asleep and if the whole staff knew?  
 
There are two fleets of whale watching boats here, yellow flags and blue flags.  I will go with the yellow flags if their sailing schooner is going out.  It is an old wooden fishing boat with a convincing schooner rig added.  They say there are 2 sorts of whales on the other side of Skjalfandi. 
 
I asked them about the steam from the sea in Axarfjordur, the next fjord east and they said they did not know about it but it was certainly possible as the active fault that gave the recent earthquake comes north under that area.  Volcano watching - but not till the rain stops.