Hello everyone! I seem to have survived the first week of teaching and exploring our first port. Only eight more teaching weeks to go! We had our first full day of teaching on Sunday. I’ve been living day to day, just trying to prepare one lecture after another. My classroom looks like a cocktail lounge; indeed, it was designed to be exactly that, with curvilinear benches along the mirrored back wall, little round glass tables, and swiveling chairs that sort of hug your body and make it difficult to write. I feel as if I ought to have on a gown and hold a martini and a cigarette in a long holder while I address my “guests.” It is unnerving to see yourself lecturing in a wall-to-wall mirror, even if it is across the room. Happily, the crossing from Halifax to Reykjavík was easy, calm, and beautiful. No problems at all!

After struggling with a reluctant CD/VCR player and sound system for a couple of days (it wouldn’t tell me what track I was trying to play, so I had to guess and backtrack several times for each cut), I gave up and borrowed a plain old boom box. Things have been fine ever since. Printing up my lectures has been very difficult. Generally it takes one minute to print a single page in the computer lab, so people are hovering, trying to grab their stuff out of the printer. In addition, e-mail access has been rare and untrustworthy partly because the device on top of the ship has to keep moving to track the satellite and beam the messages out, and partly because the link to the satellite has been jammed at all hours of the day and night with 400 students trying to do e-mail. I have been able to link up to e-mail about once in ten tries. None of this would matter in the least if I didn’t have to use these for my work. Otherwise, things are fun, funny, and completely unlike any other experience in our lives so far!

I’m teaching “Music of the North Atlantic,” a lower-division survey course of the areas we’re visiting, and “Music in Society,” more of a straight-ahead upper-division ethnomusicology theory course. I started out with 25 students in the first course and 17 in the second, then in two days went up to 29 in the first and 21 in the second. I did tell them that if they’re taking this because it’s an “easy” course, they’re just plain wrong. Anyway, my Music of the North Atlantic class went into Nova Scotia fiddling, sea shanties, ancient Icelandic music, and contemporary popular Icelandic music (the latter with the great help of Soffia Birgisdóttir – the “interport lecturer” – in one of my classes). Icelandic rap is wonderful! Icelandic reggae is even better! And my Music in Society class ended up in precise alignment, academically, with the Global Perspectives course (the one that every passenger must attend, including family members!) because both my course and Global Perspectives focused on urbanization and migration. In my case, music was the lens.

Did you know that 85% of Europe’s 750 million people live in cities? I didn’t. Or that Iceland is the size of Kentucky, but with the population of Cincinnati? Or that dancing was banned in Iceland in the 19th century? Wow. I’m learning so much, and this is only in the Global Perspectives class! I’ve continued to offer up one selection of music to start each one of the Global Perspectives classes. It’s easy to get the students’ attention, to entertain them with the music for a few minutes and spend a few more minutes explaining about the music from the countries we’re visiting, but it’s very hard to tell how much they are retaining of what I tell them. It’s clear that some students are thriving and others aren’t (either delighted and humored by the twists and turns of events that require flexibility on their part, or miserable and complaining about every last thing: “the geysers smell bad!”)

On Tuesday it was almost Midsummer Night! We went up to the faculty/staff lounge (a rather nice, airy room on the top deck) at 11:30 pm and watched the sun go down under the clouds. What a dazzling golden sight across the ocean! My colleagues were teasing us about how it would all happen again in another 24 hours, and one of them (Mark Srite) mentioned that we could stick around for a couple of hours and see the sun rise! We haven’t done that yet, because we have pulled the shade down in our room; otherwise we’d be up at 3 instead of 7. People are talking about seeing whales and porpoises, although the captain has asserted that they’re tuna, not porpoises. I didn’t see a single fin until the night before arriving in Reykjavík, when there were a couple of spouts very close to the starboard side (our cabin is on the starboard side). We could see the backs of the whales, but we couldn’t tell what kind they were. Cary was guessing that they were about 200 yards off. Considering that we can see about 30 miles in every direction when it’s clear, these whales seemed really close!

On Wednesday night, sunset was scheduled for 2400 hours (midnight!). And sunrise was scheduled for 3:03. We went upstairs at about 11:30 again (just after Iceland had been sighted) and began taking pictures from inside and outside the faculty/staff lounge, along with virtually the entire faculty and staff! Handfuls of students were careening around on the deck, all freezing and windblown, and various people among us (including us) ventured out in the wild wind to either take pictures our have pictures taken by others. It was all an incredibly high-energy scene (sunset at midnight!!!) and everyone was laughing, cheering, joking, and celebrating. And it was so very beautiful! Orange! Red! Gold! Blue! We have many photos to prove it. There were clouds, but they didn’t obscure the sun from our view. We were hard-pressed not to look directly at the sun.

The next morning we were in Reykjavík (“Smoky Bay” – so named because the one who named it thought that the beach was on fire instead of steaming from the geysers). We are berthed at the cargo loading/unloading place instead of the downtown harbor, much to our dismay. Evidently, the ship is too big to be in the downtown harbor (that would have made everything walking distance; instead, we are about 3 miles from downtown). After a speedy breakfast and hearing some of the Diplomatic Briefing with a man from the 12-person American Embassy in Reykjavík, we rushed onto the dock (and into the foul air of fish fertilizer or something; it hovers in our room as I type this) and onto a bus. The bus took us outside of town to the home of Haldor Laxness, Iceland’s Nobel Laureate in literature. Part of his property has Viking horses (literally – the Vikings brought horses with them, and they have not interbred in the ensuing 1000 years). There were about 70 of us, so they split us in half and the first group went riding while the second group learned to do country-western line dancing! I was hoping that my students would be flexible with the addition of line dancing to our adventure, and for the most part they were. The music used for it was Icelandic covers of country-western/rock tunes.

Viking horses are very sturdy, short, and they LOVE to move quickly in competition with each other. They have a special gait called “tölting” that is a combination trot/canter. It’s very smooth, and they’re famous all over the world for it. Our horses didn’t tölt so much as trot, fast and faster. There was no possibility of posting, as they were going too fast for that. We walked them along a river and several unpaved roads, with the horses jostling for position, brushing their drooling mouths on various people’s legs and occasionally pinning their ears and snapping or kicking if another horse, with whom there was no doubt some unresolved quarrel from colt-hood, got too close. It was funny, and exhilarating, and included very pretty scenery. I was jouncing along very quickly, thinking that if this was tölting, it was wildly overrated, when suddenly my horse sped up and the jouncing ceased altogether. It was like floating! And it was altogether different from cantering (which also occurred just as we headed into the “home stretch” and were close to the stable), because I was in constant contact with the saddle. It lasted only about ten seconds, but it was lovely nonetheless.

Morgan, who had gotten three hasty riding lessons (English-style, which is what all the Europeans do) before we left, did really well. Her horse just wanted to trot the entire time. Cary was pleased with his horse, which was responsive to his requests. Our group had a student fall off onto some thick grass, and the first group had two students’ saddles slip under their horses’ bellies, but no one was hurt. Cary and I agreed that if we’d ridden at that pace for 90 minutes, as planned, we would have been terribly jostled and miserable. 45 minutes was just fine, and you could practically feel your spine compress. I later took some pictures of the herd, and every time one of them saw me with a camera, he would get curious and head in my direction. So I have a handful of pictures with different horses looking curious and heading straight for me. Their manes and especially their 6” long forelocks are so thick and upright that they look moussed and blow-dried in a James Dean sort of way, and they’re quite good natured and friendly. And by the way, while we were having lunch (hamburgers and Icelandic hot dogs – a local favorite), the stable workers were taking off the saddles and bridles and sending the horses out into the pasture. A few minutes later the workers came out with big plastic garbage bags full of food for the horses: loaves of bread! They scattered dozens of loaves of bread on the ground, and the horses were picking up big baguettes and squarish loaves and chewing them right up. I asked the stable guy about it and he said that bread is their favorite treat! I brought my big coat on the ship even though I didn’t think I’d need it (my memories of summer in Europe were of solid, unending heat and humidity), and I’ve worn it every day since we arrived in Iceland. I would have frozen on my sturdy Viking horse! Cary wore gloves, and he was glad to have them. Icelandic dogs have also been around since the Vikings and you can definitely spot the “real thing.” They look like a combination of chow-chow and red-colored golden retriever (smiling, curling tail, very long thick fur).

After lunch, we jumped back on the bus and headed toward Pingvellir National Park, pronounced “THING-weh-kidh.” It is the site where Iceland’s parliament was created in 930 (the oldest parliament in the world), and is also the location where the North Atlantic plate meets the Eurasian plate. The Mid-Atlantic ridge divides the Atlantic ocean rather neatly, and Iceland is the above-sea-level tip of an enormous underwater volcano, spreading apart at the rate of 2 cm. per year. Wow. It was stunning – with a huge “shield” volcano on the left (like Mauna Loa – wide and spreading), another dramatically peaked volcano across from us, a meandering river down the middle of the valley, the Icelandic flag where the parliament once was, and fine weather, we were delighted. Also, the rock formations looked like trolls set in stone when the sun rose. We walked down into the valley, met the bus, and traveled on to Gulfoss waterfall. Oh my. Gulfoss is a large glacial river that pours into a relatively narrow canyon at a wide slant, so it is a powerful, impressive, drop-dead gorgeous full-scale waterfall with cascades, rainbows, mist, and plenty of roaring and rushing sound. It’s not that it’s steep, but that it’s so wide and varied! With the weather being so fine, some of us who shall remain nameless were practically jumping up and down with excitement! We were in Iceland at last!

We also stopped in at Geysir, the home of the original geysir, after which all other geysers in the world are named. The old one pretty much stopped spouting many years ago (although an earthquake briefly set it off a few years back), but there are others. The one we watched (Strókkur – “the churn”) went off every 5 to 7 minutes; you could see the water in the hole starting to boil up and up and up, and then KA-BLOOEY! Whee! It was grand! You’d get three or four big spurts of about 60 to 100 feet before the process would start over again. We rushed back to the bus (that’s the thing about going on a tour) and made it to a small caldera with a lake in the center. Cary and I have seen that sort of thing before, and I was more interested in what looked like a native orchid growing on the slopes. Lastly, we stopped at a famous greenhouse region that is able to grow tomatoes, cucumbers, and even BANANAS using the geothermal energy and hot water that is piped everywhere. Eventually we made it all the way back to the ship and had a much earlier bedtime than the night before.

The next day (Friday) we got up early again and jumped on a bus to visit the Reykjanes Peninsula, a site known for its extensive bird population. We were hoping to see puffins, but didn’t; instead, there were many, many arctic terns (‘thurns,’ as they’re called locally), northern gannets, a few seagulls, albatrosses, etc. We saw the island where the very last Great Auk was killed in the 19th century. The peninsula was an absolute moonscape of lava rock, with (paved and periodically unpaved) roads going through it. Most of Iceland’s interior is still unpaved. Much to my surprise, we learned that Iceland has had four winters with no snow in Reykjavík. Evidently they are experiencing global warming at a very rapid rate; their largest glacier has recently been receding at the rate of 60 to 100 feet per year.
That afternoon we went to the famous Blue Lagoon. How to describe it? It’s huge, milky blue, filled with hot sea water, surrounded by piles of black lava rocks on all sides, clean, lively, beautiful, and absolutely unlike any swimming pool you ever went to. There are bins of silica mud here and there to rub on your face and body (it’s a highly effective exfoliant; in fact, I was imagining minute scratches on my face from the tingling I experienced when I rubbed it on). There are little arching bridges here and there over narrow waterways, a very powerful hot waterfall that pounds every last bit of ache or stress out of your shoulders, steam and sauna rooms, and “hot” or “cold” spots in various locations, depending on your need to be warmer or cooler. There are all kinds of little inlets and caves; it’s a wonderful design. The bottom was sandy; in places it was muddy (but the kind of white mud that people were putting on their faces). In the center was a steam vent that was gushing boiling water and sulfuric steam. There was certainly no chlorine smell, there was no lap pool or children’s pool, there were no markers of depth (it went from one foot to about five feet, depending on where you were) and there was no way to tell whether you were abruptly going to wander into a very hot area or a cool area. It was pure joy! It was absolutely blissful!

I guess they have a restaurant there and other attractions, but I couldn’t have cared less; the water was so very hot and lovely. The air was icy when we first piled out of the changing/showering area to get in, and it was unbelievably wonderful to slide into the hot water after being so cold at first. After several hours we showered and got back on the bus; not only had I forgotten a comb, but I wasn’t able to get all the silica bits out of my hair (it felt like straw and I couldn’t even get a comb through it) and had to rewash it when we returned to the ship after a sleepy bus ride home. We went up to the faculty/staff lounge for a glass of wine and later hung out with a small crowd of faculty to talk over our adventures. Evidently the whale-watching adventure involved a five-hour bus ride followed by a five hour boat trip that was so rough that nearly every passenger was ill. There were whales, but it was expensive and difficult; we had ruled it out for ourselves because we really didn’t want to be on a boat when we could be on land, and we’re glad we had other adventures instead! Others were raving about visiting the huge glacier on the southern coast; “one of the best nature experiences of my life!” said Laura, the art historian. No wonder Iceland has such a thriving tourist industry! The natural features here are Iceland’s #1 tourist draw.

On Saturday we went walking around Reykjavík instead of going on a planned excursion. Iceland is one of the most expensive countries in the world because they have to import virtually everything, so we had to be very careful about what we did. You can expect to pay twice as much for anything here as you would at home, so we had breakfast and dinner on the ship to save money. As one of Europe’s hottest tourist destinations, Iceland has a newly-thriving, very hip art and music scene (journalists are calling it the “Icelandic Wave” and it includes the famous and successful singer/songwriter/activist Björk – pronounced “pyerkh” – whose name means “birch”). Iceland also heats all its homes with geothermal energy and is a pioneer in the world for hydrogen energy. There are major protests against the damming of a very large glacial valley to generate power for a new aluminum plant; the construction of the plant was supposed to employ local workers, but so far the workers have been foreigners. Unemployment in the rural areas is quite high, causing hundreds of people every month to move closer in to Reykjavík, and now that the fishing industry has fallen to just 50% of the economy (from 95% fifteen years ago), Icelanders are scrambling to find ways to keep their economy afloat. Fish, tourism, cheap geothermal and hydroelectric power, and aluminum are pretty much what they have. And Björk.

Anyway, we walked all over the downtown on Saturday, exploring Reykjavík’s odd assortment of new architecture. There were buildings designed to look like boats, Hansel-and-Gretel houses, an onion dome, and a stunning, soaring church with a clock tower that overlooks the entire city from the top of a hill. We went up the elevator to the tower, where a carillon of bells nearly flattened us simply chiming the quarter-hour! It was great! We also visited the Einar Jonsson sculpture garden, featuring powerful bronze sculptures based on various Norse myths. Try saying “Norse myths” several times!

For much of the day it was drizzling fairly constantly, which dampened some (but not all) of our enthusiasm. We found a lovely little pub-type place that was serving large bowls of seafood stew with fresh cream on top; just exactly what the three of us wanted. Between that, the warm bread, and the hot tea, we were very satisfied. It cost about $56 (remember, things in Iceland cost at least twice as much as they do at home). We also shopped for more skyr (the yogurt dessert that Morgan loves). I bought two CDs, my only real purchases in Iceland: one was a collection of Icelandic accordion music (seriously! I really wanted it!), and the other was Hjálmar, an Icelandic reggae group with a terrific male lead singer. And since I broke the bank with those two CDs I’m not buying anything else. Okay, I did buy Morgan a Tintin comic book in Icelandic from a lovely bookstore. My biggest impression of Reykjavík, now that I finally had the chance to explore it a bit, is that its downtown is entirely manageable on foot, reasonably laid out, and full of fun and interesting shops, art galleries, restaurants and coffee houses.

On our last day in Iceland, we visited the National Museum to see its exhibits on the Vikings and the early settlements of Iceland (first the Irish came, then the Norsemen, then the Danes). Icelanders are about 50% genetically Irish. The museum was beautifully laid out and I was delighted to see two ancient Icelandic musical instruments (the fidla and the langspil, two kinds of bowed dulcimers). We trudged around for awhile looking for an open lunch place (Reykjavík shuts down on Sunday), found a place where Morgan and I had panini sandwiches and Cary had a seafood soup, then went to the fabulous bakery for bread. Of course as long as we were there we felt that it was an Important Thing to Do to have a treat in Iceland. So Morgan had “the best ice cream” of her life (a strawberry/raspberry blend, as far as we could tell), I had good chocolate cake, and Cary had ástar pungur (a sort of spicy doughnut). And as long as we were having a treat, we ordered cappuccino as well. Delicious! Later we went swimming in a large outdoor pool with a long and meandering water slide; all three of us went down it multiple times. Unlike other pools we’ve been to, there were a couple of hot pools that had a shape and form other than a rectangle. It was very nice! Plus, I was finally able to wash most of the silica out of my hair after having visited the Blue Lagoon, so it doesn’t feel like straw.

As of two hours ago, we’re back at sea again, en route to Bergen, Norway! The captain said there would be a large pod of humpback whales about 45 minutes after leaving Reykjavík, and we did indeed see one little fellow (a porpoise? A baby humpback?) very close to the starboard bow. Considering all the cameras and excited students in pajamas shivering and jumping up and down in the bitter wind, though, it hardly counts as a whale sighting! I’m sure we’ll see more.

That’s it for now! More to come from Norway!