Today was a great day for guerrilla tourism and snapshots of the strange and occult. What ever could I mean? Buckle up, friends. It starts with an earlier-than-acceptable visit to the Glaumbær old turf farm . It was a great collection of turf buildings, which are Icelandic houses with some wood structure and some parts built up of turf with grass growing on top. The thing you naturally do when you walk up to the front doors of these things is you assume the size of the inside of the thing you’re about to enter. Ever see Dr. Who? If you have, you get where I am headed, here. (If not, here’s a quick bit of info- he has a time travel machine about the size of a phone booth, but when you enter, it’s absolutely cavernous, and he always says the same thing, which is:) It’s bigger on the inside.
Well, it is. Much bigger on the inside. There is a central hallway and a series of rooms. It’s interesting. I walked through a parlor of sorts, then to a kitchen, a few pantries, an attic and a long sleep room with many bunks. There were lots and lots of rooms. More than I can remember and certainly more than I photographed. The turf houses were interesting, but also, we arrived at the site of these homes about 45 minutes before they opened. Here comes the guerrilla tourism- Kitti wasn’t having it. He was present, so he would go in. No waiting 45 minutes for the place to open. He’s an Icelander, and he says it’s time now. So he hopped over the stone wall and went to the gate. He opened that gate. We all walked in. Then the teenaged employee shuffled out of the information hut and spoke with him. He showed the passes or explained something or another, but whatever objections the teenager had, it was far too late. We were already walking around in the turf farm. Joke’s on you, kid.
We had lots of time to explore that turf farm, then we were back in the van for a bouncy ride. The roads in this part of Iceland are nothing to get excited about. Our bouncy ride took us to a few little stops on the way. We visited the site of the last capital punishment in Iceland. It was a very brutal beheading by axe. There were two people put to death, both of whom conspired to kill the wealthy person to whom they were indentured. It was a pretty hairy story, and the punishment was probably fair for the time, but they didn’t exactly arrive at the idea for this crime hastily. They had some pretty rough times leading up to their choice to kill that dude with a hammer and a pocket knife (and arson). It was really quite the roadside attraction. Move over, world’s largest non-stick frying pan and biggest ball of twine in Minnesota. This is a really interesting axe.
Our next stop was the very strange Museum of Sorcery and Witchcraft. I joked on the way in: But you’re a wizard, Caswell! But it was a whole lot weirder than that. Iceland generally operates in a bilingual way. Everything you see is in Icelandic and English- except this museum. It’s entirely in Icelandic. You have to walk around with a guide book, which they have in many languages. I read the whole thing (not carefully or thoughtfully, but I read it…) and still don’t entirely understand the things I saw. There were pages and pages of text that attempted to explain all sorts of weird things, but I couldn’t make sense of many. Nor could anyone else in our group. Weird things of note:
- There was a skeleton figure clawing out of the flooring to illustrate some point about resurrecting the dead.
- There was a pair of Necro-pants that were effectively the whole bottom half of an adult man- at least all of the skin- that imbued the wearer with some powers. (I tired to capture a tasteful image, but you need to check out the album for it- it’s pretty anatomically correct)
- There was a timeline on the wall of everyone who was put to death for witchcraft- fun fact- Icelanders almost exclusively killed off male practitioners of witchcraft. I guess that’s balance for Salem.
But we didn’t linger too long, there. We needed to get across a large swath of Iceland today, and so, we did. We are now safely in the Westfjords. Tomorrow is supposed to be a free day, and we get a little more sleep-in time in the morning. We also have managed to book an e-bike tour and a fancy dinner here in Isafjörðor.
See you on the other side of the fjord!
No comments:
Post a Comment