Beth Skwarecki

As Chris and I drove through Iceland, we saw at least as many horses as we saw sheep. That's a lot of horses.

We went riding twice, both times crossing lava fields near the mountains (the inland portion of Iceland is all mountain). Since they're different from most horses you'll see outside of Iceland, I thought I'd say a little bit about them.

They're short (around 13 hands) and fat, but nobody calls them ponies. They are horses, hestarnir. They just happen to be conveniently within reach of the ground, so you don't need a mounting block to get on them. And if you ride through tall grass, the grass may brush your boots.

As you'd expect from reading about them, the horses were strong, sure-footed, and after a while you start to think of them as the normal size for horses to be (we never saw any tall horses in Iceland, anyway). They scrambled over rocks, up hills, across streams, and over various other terrains that I felt sure we would fall onto. Other things you'll commonly hear about Icelandic horses are that they are good-natured and smooth-gaited. This is mostly true: the first horse I rode was good-natured, and the second was smooth-gaited. :)

In place of the trot, the faster sections of our trail rides were done at a tölt, a gait that one guide explained to me as a four-beat gait similar to a pace, but slower and smoother. It differs from the faster "flying pace" in that the tölt has no period of suspension.

Icelandic horses' saddles are placed further back than I'm used to. I was instructed to put one hand on the biggest lump of muscle on the shoulders, then my other hand next to that, and finally the saddle. Many of the horses wore cruppers to keep the saddle from slipping any more forward than that.

According to the Internet, in 982 the Icelandic parliament (the Alþing, which still exists) passed a law prohibiting horses from being imported into Iceland. This apparently had to do with controlling the spread of disease. Icelandic horses can still be exported, though, and you'll find farms selling and breeding Icelandic horses all over the world (a quick google turns up several in the US and Canada).

Once upon a time, a very poor farmer and his wife lived in Iceland. They were so poor, they had nothing of value - except for a small gold ball that the wife used to weight her spindle.

Their next-door neighbor was an elf named Kidhus, who was known to be something of a klepto. You can see where this is going.

One nice sunny day (Iceland gets these sometimes, in the summer), while the husband was out catching fish for them to eat, the wife took her spindle outside to work. She dropped the gold weight, but when she turned around to look for it, it was nowhere to be found. She told her husband about it when he got home, and he decided to go find Kidhus and demand the gold ball back, or at least some compensation for it.

Maybe I should stop and say something about Icelandic elves. Back in the garden of Eden, God came to visit Adam and Eve. He met their little children, and He asked Eve, are these all of your children? She lied and said yes, but actually she hadn't had gotten around to washing up all of the children, and so she told some of them to go and hide in the back room. God saw through this lie, of course, and stated that from then on the descendants of the hidden children would always hide from people. So Icelandic elves are invisible to humans except when they choose to show themselves. Otherwise, they live just like humans. Those that live in fishing towns are fishermen, for example. Icelandic elves are a little bit magic, a little bit vengeful, and they are at the center of a lot of really good stories.

Now, Icelandic elves live in knolls and try their best to avoid humans, but this farmer knew an old trick to force an elf to come and talk to him. It's simple: you just take something big, like your walking stick, and whack the elf's house over and over and over again. So the farmer went THWACK THWACK THWACK all over the knoll, and the elf appeared.

	Who gave my house such a thwack?

And the farmer said,

	Kidhus, it's your neighbor back.
	My old woman must be paid
	For that weight that she mislaid.

Kidhus wouldn't return the weight, so he asked the farmer what he'd like in return. The farmer asked for a cow that would fill a twenty-eight-pound vat at each milking, and Kidhus produced such a cow. The farmer took it home to his wife, who milked it all night and all through the next day, until the vat was full. "What will we do with all this milk?" they asked each other. The wife decided she'd like to make some porridge with it, but of course they didn't have enough oats to make that much porridge, so the husband went over to Kidhus's knoll again, thwacked it all over, and had another exchange as before. He returned with a giant barrel of oats, and they made more porridge than they knew what to do with. In fact, after they were stuffed with porridge, and their animals were stuffed with porridge, the pot was still mostly full, and they sat around digesting and thinking about what to do with so much porridge.

The wife got the idea that they should take it up to heaven to give it to the Virgin Mary. Surely Kidhus could give them a ladder long enough! The farmer went back to Kidhus, and thwacked all over his knoll, and the elf came up and said "Won't anything ever make up for that damn weight?!" It took a bit of negotiation, but finally Kidhus agreed to supply them with the desired ladder, and he set it up for them.

The farmer and his wife took their buckets of porridge and climbed up the ladder, higher and higher. They got dizzier the higher they climbed, until finally they fell off the ladder and cracked their heads on the rocks. Where bits of their brains hit the rocks, they turned into white lichen; and where lumps of porridge hit the rocks, they turned into yellow lichen. And that is why Iceland is covered in white and yellow lichen, even today.

We are in Iceland and having fun! We finally found an internet cafe. How the heck many days has powerblogs.com been gebroken?! (we fixed it, i.e. renewed the domain which shouldn´t have expired so soon, at least according to Registerfly´s list of domains expiring in 30 days :þ :_(______ -- I hope that not all of my customers have left. :_(_____)

Reykjavik, by contrast, has been great. We have been walking around Reykjavik (it´s a really beautiful city). We swam in a geothermally heated pool and ate some of the best fish ever (A very nice friend of Chris´s father took us out to dinner). We saw the sun set behind the ocean (and then it didn´t get dark afterwards). Today we head out to Snæfellsnes for horses and kajaks and puffins oh my!

Chris and I had a really great time at our wedding yesterday. (We may have been the least nervous people there!) We had a lot of fun, we were glad to spend time with our friends and family there, everybody was really great, etc.

We're in Baltimore now, waiting for our laundry to finish so we'll have clean clothes to wear in Iceland. So I thought I'd post a few pictures. (just the honeymoon, of course; I was too busy getting married to take any pictures at the church or reception! I'm really looking forward to seeing the pictures everybody took. If you'd like information about getting official pictures, let me know and I'll pass on whatever info I receive.)

Here is the view from our secure undiclosed location in Pittsburgh (I can disclose it now: it was the Renaissance Hotel).


Here is the view from our Park-Sleep-Fly in Baltimore:


We will be posting more pictures here as they become available.

I just had an awesome rehearsal dinner. Wedding tomorrow. I'm not nervous at all, yet. (The wedding coordinator at the church said I was the calmest bride she'd seen. Hey, I haven't found anything to worry about.) At the rehearsal dinner, we found a back door in the banquet room that led into an arcade! We played air hockey and marveled at the Tuxracer game.

So, now it's late at night and I'm working on making a program to pass out tomorrow. In searching for sappy quotes about love and family, I found this one. Enjoy. I might not be posting for a while.

There is many a tender old Tory imagination that vaguely feels that our streets would be hung with escutcheons and tapestries, if only the profane vulgar had not hung them with advertisements of Sapolio and Sunlight Soap. But advertisement does not come from the unlettered many. It comes from the refined few. Did you ever hear of a mob rising to placard the Town Hall with proclamations in favor of Sapolio? Did you ever see a poor, ragged man laboriously drawing and painting a picture on the wall in favour of Sunlight Soap - simply as a labour of love? It is nonsense; those who hang our public walls with ugly pictures are the same select few who hang their private walls with exquisite and expensive pictures. The vulgarization of life has come from the governing class; from the highly educated class.

—G.K. Chesterton

On Saturday, I had my bridal shower. Loot included towels, cutting boards, and a shiny red toaster, as well as a "get to know Beth and Chris" quiz that had trick questions (like "How did Chris propose?" He didn't. I asked him.) I was appropriately perky and gushy, as required. I received many lovely gifts and I will treasure them forever.


Saturday night, Eve and the gang threw me a bachelorette party, complete with little plastic naked men hanging off of our margarita glasses. We watched movies with titles like "Psycho Beach Party".

On Sunday, the out-of-towners had left, but after my dress fitting, Teri and I went and saw the Warhol, and then hung out with Eve some more. Teri really liked the Warhol museum (me, not so much; I'd been there before, and the Warhol always gives me a serious case of museum-head). Gift shop find: a "Pittsburgh: Pierogie Capital of the World" lapel pin.


People became very confused at the presence of two orange-haired individuals. Warhol people did double-takes when Teri walked by. She said at least one person called out to her, "Hey! Eve!"

Eve lives between two large, old cemeteries. We took a walk through them, to see the sculptures (including a big feathery angel and a sad sad sculpture of "the motherless child") and the crypts. Some of them were done like Greek temples; some had stained-glass windows that you could only see from the inside (or if you peeked through a hole in the door); and one was shaped like an egyptian pyramid, with a winged Isis over the door. On the way out, Eve pointed out a fig tree, and indeed the leaves looked just like what you'd tastefully cover genitalia with. I snapped off a leaf and pressed it in my moleskine; you never know when that'll come in handy.

Saw "Project Grizzly", about the guy who built a bear-proof suit, and "Return of the Living Dead". If I had to be a zombie, I would want to be the kind in this movie. The zombies were downright clever! One used a chain to lever open a barricaded door; another zombie, after eating a couple of paramedics, climbed into their ambulance and radioed for seconds.

(more details, or at least more pictures, will be available soon.)

Chris's father, being extremely cool and stuff, got us our tickets to Iceland for our honeymoon. I thought I would share some trivia about Iceland:

Right now, the biggest story on visitreykjavik.is is "Iron Maiden comes to Iceland!" Not only is an official website getting excited about a metal band (Teri: "Duh! Vikings are metal!"), but the announcement is that they're coming, not to some particular city but just "to Iceland".

Iceland is slightly smaller than Ohio, and has about half the population of Vermont. Iceland was settled by Vikings and Celts. It has fjords, geysers, and volcanoes.

The Irish actually discovered Iceland first. They left.

Iceland's biggest export is fish. The only "natural resource conversion" is the manufacture of cement. Buildings are apparently all made of concrete and use hydroelectric and geothermal power.

I found out some interesting things about its neighbor, Greenland. You see, Iceland is green and Greenland is icy. Greenland's name was a cruel trick by Erik the Red to try to get people to live there. (This worked until everybody starved to death a few hundred years later.) Greenland's population today is about equivalent to that of Ithaca when school is in session.