Outdoor Franzis (Week 9)

Good day!

After recovering from our cold, we started off quite sporty. It felt like we made up for everything we missed during our illness in 7 days. Since most of the snow has melted, we explored the Westfjords. Waterfalls, eagles, and changing weather were all part of it.

In addition, we gained an extra day off because April 22, 2021 is a public holiday in Iceland: The first day of summer (Icelandic: Sumardagurinn fyrsti). This day does not mark the meteorological beginning of summer, but refers to an old Nordic calendar. This calendar divided the year only into the seasons of summer and winter. Summer began on the first day of the month Harpa, the first of the six summer months. Today, the public holiday always falls on the first Thursday after April 18, between April 19 and 25. Since 1971, it has been a statutory holiday in Iceland. The weather on this day wasn't really 'summer', it was raining and we had 5 °C.

We also had the opportunity to participate in an excursion to a fish farm together with the other students. We gained insights into the work of the local fish farmers and were even allowed to visit one of the fish cages. Especially after watching 'Seapriacy' (a documentary on Netflix), it was even more exciting to see it all in real life and talk to the workers.

Then there was a special event, a dress rehearsal for a future adventure - driving somewhere and sleeping in the car.

For this, we had probably caught the best weather of the week: continuous rain. Well, but by now we are 'hardened' and so we stacked the wood we brought on the beach and made a fire to cook our dinner and warm ourselves up.

Shortly after we had eaten and the fire had finally reached the optimum size and warmth, we noticed a car watching us from the other side of the fjord - it was the police, because no more than 20 minutes later, the owners of the property, after a call from the police, arrived on site. (All of Iceland is private property and it is not uncommon for people to simply own a fjord and mountains, which are usually freely accessible to everyone). After a short talk with them, their surprisingly friendly request was simply to extinguish the fire because it is not allowed in this area. Since it was obviously not clear to us all, we immediately put out the fire and went to bed early = in the car/tent. We both slept quite well and will definitely spend another night in the car again.

The next day we made another discovery - when we packed up the tent, we spotted a spider. YES - the first spider we have seen in full three months of living here. We know what we didn't miss! In our eyes, it was already big - the Australian who was also with us laughed at us for that statement... :)

By the way, the days are already very long. The sun rises at 5:00 am and sets at 10:00 pm. It's totally crazy when you compare it to the hours of sunlight in February. It's still totally unfamiliar... let's see how it develops over the next few weeks.

Remember when we wrote about how Iceland has more sheep (460,000) and puffins (4 million) than people (360,000)? So far, we haven't encountered any sheep in nature or puffins...

Best regards,

your Franzis (no new nicknames this week)

P.S.W.: Breakfast for 2 people - 39.67 euros (without coffee)