Iceland is Nice!

Forgive me for the cheesy title. I'm going to attempt to post up some pictures from my birthday trip to Iceland, which is the first real traveling that I've done since I've come here. The photos speak for themselves, but I've never raved about a place like this. My friend Colin and I flew to Reykjavik from London Heathrow (and Dublin before) for three nights via IcelandAir, which is one of the nicer airlines I've been on. We rented a car and drove to the southernmost point in the country the first morning we were there, and stopped and saw geysers, waterfalls, a glacier, lava fields and plenty of mountains. The second day we went to church at the national Lutheran church in Reykjavik (the service was in Icelandic), drove along the fjords of the western coast, and spent the evening walking around Reykjavik. The last day we went to the Blue Lagoon, a relatively famous hot springs area that the Icelanders turned into a spa.

All in all, the country is a life-sized version of Rohan from Lord of the Rings; treeless, wild, mountainous, sparse, full of horses and light-complected people. Gorgeous. It was also by far the most ridiculously expensive place I've ever been to, and it took me a week to develop the anatomy to check my back account online to see how much damage I did. Reykjavik is beautiful architecturally on its own, but the surrounding scenery just makes it beyond anything I could have imagined.

In other news, school is going well here. I'm enjoying my M.A. classes, although there's a lot more emphasis on music theory analysis and the conversion of four-hundred year-old scores into modern terms than what I anticipated. It's not exactly easy, but I'm not running around like a chicken with my head cut off like I did in college, partly because I don't have to worry about ROTC here. I have a better idea of what I want to do my thesis on (I'm not going to write the topic on the Internet, obviously), and I think if I can pull it off, it's a really good opportunity for publication; no one's ever worked on is before, and it's a bigger-picture version of what I worked on as an undergraduate, except this will concentrate on Ireland a few hundred years back. If I can pull it off. All in all, the Masters' program is everything I wanted it to be, and I even get to play my fiddle in the Irish Traditional Music Ensemble on Wednesdays.

I'm still trying to get used to the entire country shutting down between one and two in the afternoon, and I haven't exactly been thrilled (oh....the understatements we make) with the computer office at the university I'm at for the utterly, suicidally inefficient, mockingly student-unfriendly policies and Internet settings that enrage me on an almost hourly basis, but I'll let it rest. After all, the rest of the school here has bent over backwards to welcome me (particularly regarding the scholarship that sent me over here), and I've got loads of Christmas gifts to hand out to all the people who have helped me here in the last few weeks.

As for the next few weeks: as of these evening, I'm on my Fall break, which lasts until a week from Monday for me, since I don't have class on Mondays. I'm going to Portugal, the Algarve region specifically, on Thursday via a fairly good deal that I found. I'm also taking a bus to Cork, in the southwest of Ireland, tomorrow, for a couple of days. I'm coming back to the USA for Christmas for two weeks, since the next time after that I'll be back will be in the early part of August for law school, wherever that may be.

And to those of you're coming to visit me: come before it gets warm! You can easily find flights from East-coast cities for under $200 each way; Aer Lingus is your best bet right now. I'm largely waiting on family and friends to visit me so that I don't have to spend the money seeing things by myself and then more on seeing the same thing when visitors come. So book soon, if you're thinking about it.

That's all for this week. Enjoy the pictures, and I'll write again soon.