yes it's true besides all the snow we saw being on the mountains, this weekend it was actually snowing and freezing! so zou can say: winter arrived in iceland!!

to read more about the thing sgoing on here in iceladn in the past weeks: click on "read more" !!!!

but I will start with the last weekend! as some of zou maz know it was the airwaves weekend in reykjavik, and I was one of the persons that did not have an airwaves ticket! since there were a few more like me among the volunteers we started an “anti-airwaves-program”. it began on Friday night in seltjanarnes. five o fus volunteeers met there and... cooked pancakes! we had a gresat evening with important discoveries as: denish eggs ruines the pancakes and kokomjölk with a best before date a month ago, is still alright to offer your guests ;-). besides all this we discovered that beer is not good for maud (but fun for everyone else) and milosz learned his first really important french sentence: “les crêpes sont brulées!”

after a short night on the lindargata kitchen floor we started our trip to hveragerði early Saturday morning! and here we discovered that hitchhiking is really easy!! once we arrived at the petrol station at the main road, and mickael spent some money in the shop, we prepared ourselves for some time waiting for a car to pick us up. but even before we lifted our thumbs to stop a car, we heard someone screaming at us from behind:” hey you guys! where are you going?” we turned around and answered: “to hveragerði” now the man told us that he was going there too and so we had a ride within just a few seconds!

and we were really lucky! once we sat in the car and got driving it started raining really hard... but once we arrived at hte clinic the rain stopped!

we were dropped off at the clinic in hveragerði, where anne and joan work., and now we woke up joan with a phone call to explain us the way to his house! (it was 12 o’clock by now) once in th ehouse we found out that anke and elsa from akureyri already arrived the night before and so did brook. after a breakfast (with fresh baked bread) we decided to go to the warm river near hveragerði! what we did not know about it: 3 of the 6 kilometres way there, were more muddy than anything else. so by the time we reached the river we were all covered with mud, and especially for mickael and me it made no more difference if we were standing in the river or not since our shoes were all filled up with water and mud by this time! but I have to admit that it is really amazing to be in a river that is just nice and warm and sometimes even hot (you can only gto into the part of the river where a cold river joined it!!), and to see boiling water coming up from the ground! the good thing about having all wet feet: on our way back we didn’t care about jumping over all the small rivers or trying to find a dry way to cross the biggert rivers.. but we just went through! and so my shoes were even cleaned. J on Sunday we decided not to do anything but just relax at the swimming pool! on our way back we weren’t as lucky hitvhhiking as before but we still only waited about 7 minutes (we had some kind of competition going with brook, who would get picked up first, since he was hitchhiking at the same round-about in the other direction!) and then got a direct ride to downtown reykjavik!

this week winter was finally coming to iceland! it is now as dark as I am used to from december in germany! the sun rises around 8:30 and at 6 pm it’s already dark again...

but besides that it finally started snowing in south iceland! (the north had snow before...)

and this weekend it was also freezing outside so that we were sliding to the bus after an evening in seltjarnarnes. there we met with about 15 people just to play werwolf (ja das is das gleiche wie unser altbekanntes mörderspiel!!! ) we had a lot of fun and met many new people from all over the world!!
yesterday we aslo discovered that even the lake was partly frozen!! so it was probably really cold the whole weekend!!

oh yes, there is something else I need to tell you! guess what, in the main streets of reykjavik you have no chance to slide on the ice or snow the whole winter! since the icelanders have way too much hot water they actually heat the streets so they can’t freeze! J what do you think of that??

well, this is it for today!!!
I hope the snow will stay a little while and not completely melt away in the next days...

greetings from the north!!!

freddy