It began by somewhat of a surprise around seven o’clock in the evening of Monday, 21st May. As I stood at the bus stop waiting for my bus to come and take me downtown for a choir meeting I noticed something odd about the way the air looked like over the city.

Although fog is quite usual in the Reykjavík area the day was rather too sunny for it to be that. Besides that the colour of the mist was strange to say the least. It was sickly yellow and lay heavily near the ground, covering the mountain Esja so well it was almost out of view. It looked familiar, so familiar in fact that I made a very quick guess to what it was and it turned out I was correct. It was ash mist, öskumistur. I had been in it once before, last year when Grímsfjall erupted.

To explain a bit better, ash mist occurs often a year or even years after the original eruption took place. The ash, being very fine and light, often lies on top of the ground and a suitable wind can easily pick it up and carry it on. Last year’s ash mist was a large part Eyjafjallajökull eruption ash and part fresh Grímsfjall ash, this year’s was mostly Grímsfjall with a touch of Eyjafjallajökull. The difference is in the type: Eyjafjallajökull ash was black in colour, Grímsfjall yellow, and that’s an easy way of telling them apart. Besides this Eyjafjallajökull ash was light and took much longer to fall. This recent one was over with one rain and one night.

The ash isn’t outright dangerous to anyone except for people with asthma or other type of respiratory illnesses, at least not in the amounts that we received on Monday. Nevertheless it’s not healthy either, and people tend to avoid going outdoors during it. Other than that there’s very little that can be done while waiting for the ash to fall except for following the news on the television, radio or the internet and acting according to the recommendations. Windows can be taped shut to help keep the ash outside and if the mist gets too thick, masks can be worn outdoors.

It should be noted too that the ash is often acidic in quality, which means that letting it sit on your car for a long time will make it rust quickly. Therefore you’ll see people washing their cars a lot when this happens, and there’s the other damage that the ash can do. As it consists mostly of tiny glass particles it can only be washed out with a lot of water, scrubbing must be avoided at all costs or else the car, or any other object that needs a clean up, will be scratched beyond imagination.

All the photos in this entry have been taken during a couple of hours – approximately three, if I remember correctly – in that one night to give a better idea how fast the ash moves. The sunset that night was rather spectacular, I must say! Right now it’s thankfully over, the air is clear once more, Esja in full sight and lots of car- and yard washing is taking place along our street. Until the next one arrives we can once again forget about the volcanoes.

News in Icelandic about the ash mist:

Öskumistur í veðurblíðunni

Gríðarlegt öskumistur á Suðurlandi

Vilja rigningu til að skola Grímsvatnaöskunni burt (note that the photo accompanying this news piece is from the last year – it was not quite this bad this time)

Regnið dró úr öskuskýinu

The first part dealing with this is here, but again we’ll have a post about Icelandic food. Some of these things aren’t specifically Icelandic and they’re not all traditional food either, but I doubt they’re very widespread at least. Unless stated otherwise, these were all found at Bónus, a normal grocery store.

Skate, a more traditional food. You can’t always find it in buckets like this (I think this was taken around Christmastime).

100% minced/ground whale. It was surprisingly cheap.

On the top row is ground beef (mincemeat), the middle has different types of whale steak in those little boxes, and the bottom row also has pork and some sauces in little containers. Prices for meat nowadays are almost all listed per kilo (except for some things like the sausages at the very bottom-right, where the exact price is printed), so the prices you see there often have to be divided by the weight of the meat and aren’t usually the real ones.

Cornflaked (instead of breaded) haddock. Iceland’s normal type of breading is a really strange, orange-yellow mix of things (I don’t have a photo) but in the end it doesn’t taste so bad. This cornflake type was bad though, the breading came off the fish and tasted soggy after cooking.

To the left is a goose egg and to the right is flatfish. These were both bought at the Reykjavik flea market, where they had the same flatfish sold pre-marinated in curry mix, “Mexican-style” (meaning slightly spiced and orange-coloured), and garlic sauce. The prices for the pre-seasoned types were around 1,000kr (kr is short for “krónur – crowns”) but the unseasoned were around 600kr. They sell different types of eggs, fish, and bird meat seasonally, including puffin. The egg basically tasted like a regular chicken egg (although I heard this depends on what the goose was eating), and the flatfish didn’t have a strong taste but it was very soft and watery.

Hearts are one of the cheapest traditional foods in Iceland. These were lamb hearts bought at Bónus, but you can also buy at least pork hearts at the flea market. Depending on how many in the package and where you buy them, they typically range from 200kr to 600kr. Often people use these as stew meat or fry them and eat them that way, and some make meat soup with the leftovers.

At the top is Icelandic-style flatbread, which is a traditional food that’s still commonly eaten. You pretty much use it just like sandwich bread, although sandwiches in Iceland have less filling than in America. At the bottom is liver paste, which tends to be made of pork, lamb, or even fish liver. Mine looks pretty dark, but it’s actually just a thin layer of fat and seasoning on top while underneath is a normal shade of brown that almost matches the flatbread above. Most of the liver paste I’ve had didn’t have this fat layer on top.

There’s not many instant meals in Iceland and instead they have mostly other “instant” foods that don’t use a microwave, like frozen baguettes, frozen pizza, and instant soup. Here you can see some instant meals sold at Bónus. The round, yellow balls are peeled, mini potatoes. The potatoes are actually that small, although larger varieties also exist. Pictured you can see macaroni porridge, stroganoff, lasagne, and meatballs. Also common but not pictured is “plokkfiskur”, which is a traditional food that’s basically a mash of fish and mashed potatoes with some other things added in, and Icelandic meat soup.

Bilberry lamb. Iceland doesn’t have many berry types and few things grow in the wild compared to other countries, so you can imagine they sometimes put what they do have to strange use. Apparently berries are eaten with meat, baked goods, desserts, and even pasta in some other Nordic countries although I haven’t noticed anything that extreme here.

To the left are holiday-packaged Easter yogurt containers that both have toppings (sorry, I forgot the correct word – they’re typically cereal and/or chocolate pieces, never granola) that you can mix in with the yogurt. To the right is a type of red seaweed, the packaging is marketing it towards tourists (normally you can guess this is so if the packaging is in English, but this one was talking as if it didn’t even expect Icelanders to be eating it and only foreigners instead). Although the seaweed claims to be a traditional Icelandic food, and while that makes perfect sense, you don’t see this talked about much if you look for articles about traditional food online. It has a very different flavour compared to the green seaweed types I’ve tried, and it has an aftertaste. The package says it’s good in soup.

At the top-left is fish liver in a little tin packed in oil. At the very right is the same brand of liver paste as shown earlier. The bottom shelf is all sausages. Clearly illustrated is Icelandic caviar, genuinely in little black ball form although you can’t tell from the photo (they have a red version too, for the same price, but it’s not shown in this photo). You can also buy caviar paste that’s typically something like salmon eggs mixed in with some other things, that you’re supposed to spread on bread. There are different types of caviar and also different ways that they prepare them, so that’s why it doesn’t always cost an arm and a leg and may be different colours. You can see that it’s only 459kr ($3.66 USD) per 100g can and 4.590kr ($36.63) per kilo.

Some foods are Icelandified or just taste different. This includes pre-seasoned things, sushi, American food, pizza, cheese, and Chinese food. For example, there is no heat in any pre-seasoned food calling itself spicy (including sausages). These Buffalo chicken wings may look similar but the taste is pretty different in my opinion. Usually pre-spiced foods are a lot more expensive compared to the same things plain, sometimes being double the price even for a simple seasoning job, but there are some exceptions.

Who’s to say if this is really Icelandified or not, but something with the same name is also a Swedish sort of baked good. The Swedish version looks very different though. I’ve heard of a few so-called Danish and English recipes/foods that are actually Icelandified too, so I can imagine there’s many more things out there that I don’t know about.

Once you travel outside of Reykjavík you will sooner or later come across certain stone-built landmarks, cairns, also known in Icelandic as varða/vörður. Their use is varied to say the least. Traditionally they marked borders, routes, shorelines, notable places and areas where an important travelling woman had died. Nowadays they also mark the presence of a passing traveler, an anonymous notification left by someone who once walked by.

Varða are usually only made of a pile of stones but once upon a time they could also be made out of soil. However, there was a certain type of varða that was only made of stone, beinakerling, the “bone woman”. They were erected in memory of förukonur, traveling women who lived outside of society and brought news and gossip along whenever they came to a village. They often traveled in groups although solitary förukonur are also known. Beinakerlingar were different from vörður in that instead of rocks people used to leave them poems, beinakerlingavísur, wrapped up inside a hollow bone that was then stuck between the rocks. These poems were often very risky or even downright pornographic, and the oldest known such beinakerlingavísa dates from the 17th century. Some well-known beinakerlingar are in Kaldadalur, Stórasandur and Sprengisandur to this day.

The way these varða usually get built is that someone begins one by placing a couple of rocks together. People passing by later on will then each add more stones, rocks or even pebbles on the pile and the most visited sights tend to have huge varða or several, which just keep on growing. It’s been said that you can tell a lot about a person by the way they add to a varða and by the place they choose for their stone. I prefer to put mine somewhere near the bottom of the pile and wedge it well in its place. Someone might just throw a rock at them and another might balance theirs on top in an artful manner. The evidence is all around and on top of the varða for anyone to read.

Vörður are a very usual sight to people who like to go hiking. They often mark the most walked paths, best walkways and crossings at rivers. Following them one can often see a line of vörður climb down a side of a mountain, stretch across a whole valley and then go up another mountain’s side. They can be seen even at places where one wouldn’t think anyone would like to travel but as I once witnessed in Hólssandur, a barren wasteland near Mývatn in the north, hikers in Iceland will sometimes find no challenge too big. If there’s a marked route someone will walk it and if there isn’t one, a path may always be made. Eventually this path, too, will be marked with vörður built by unknown people on their way from one place to another.

The varða has evolved, much due to the way people like to find new paths and mark them. Nowadays their most important meaning is to mark that you have been to the place where it’s situated, or in case of the most famous ones, that you’ve been to the varða itself. Therefore even previously marked paths can have these stone piles if they f.ex. lead to a difficult route or a notable destination, for example the top of a mountain or an unusually beautiful waterfall. They are also in places where no sane person would ever venture to go to, in which case their meaning as a road sign is quite useless. This type of a varða is built for the sole reason of showing off to the world that a place that may once have been impossible to reach has been reached. By someone. It means very little who it actually was but what is very, extremely important is that they left a mark when they got there. Indeed, a varða can tell you a great deal about the people who built it.