Black – Energy and Time

Croatia days 30-31: Zagreb

September 18th: Mostly a rest day. For lunch, we headed for a Curry Bowl restaurant only to find that it had apparently been abandoned years ago and its patio overgrown. (Online photos of the place showed tables where those bushes are now.)

So we went to a nearby sushi restaurant instead. The fish was very fresh.

Carol chose 3 rolls. Probably a better deal.

September 19th: Breakfast at the bakery by the bus station. I went (uncharacteristically) for pizza while Carol grabbed a slice of cheese pie.

Then we took an Uber up to the Gornji Grad (“Upper Town”) section of old Zagreb. And I do mean “up”.

It’s higher than the rooftops of most of the rest of the city, and has great views.

It’s such a steep drop that there’s a cog railway spanning it.

We wanted to see the Museum Of Naive Art, but it was closed. So we spent quite a while in the Museum Of Broken Relationships.

Then we just cruised around the neighborhood for a bit.

I thought I saw a tiny hummingbird in a flower bed, and spent several minutes trying to catch a photo of it. This blurry image is about the best I could do. But I now think that it was probably a hummingbird hawk-moth (Macroglossum stellatarum).

For lunch, we found where the Curry Bowl restaurant had moved to.

Carol had Hot Butter Calamari and I had the Black Pork Curry.

Iceland day 11: Svartifoss to Heimaey

We had camped just outside Svartifoss, and Carol woke up early and wanted to hike there. But I was feeling a bit beat up and decided to skip it in favor of a leisurely breakfast.

Me eating breakfast next to our black Dacia Dokker camper

Svartifoss (“Black Waterfall”, probably from the same root as the English “swarthy”) is known for it’s black hexagonal basalt columns, which tend to break away before they can be worn smooth, leaving fairly jagged rock. This is the same kind of rock as seen in Devil’s Tower in Wyoming.

another (unnamed?) waterfall on the hike

Then it was off for a long driving day.

There are tall thin waterfalls all over Iceland, in some areas one every kilometer or two.

Our next stop was Fjaðrárgljúfur, a canyon which is (sadly) most famous for Justin Bieber filming parts of a music video there, which increased the tourist load so much that it had to be temporarily closed in 2019.

I found two kinds of mushrooms on the way out.

This looked somewhat similar to a Liberty Cap (*Psilocybe semilanceata*), but I wasn’t about to ingest a foreign LBM to find out whether it was hallucinogenic or not. Also, the stipes seemed too thick and short, and there was no sign of blue or purple discoloration in the older specimens.

We stopped in Vík for lunch at Wok On Vík, an Asian fast food place.

Looking southwest. The 3 rocks in the distance are a famous landmark.

I had something in peanut sauce over brown rice, while Carol went for green tea noodles.

A delicate rock arch. Same 3 rocks in the distance, only this time east (behind us).

Onward to Skógafoss, a 60-meter falls (slightly taller than Niagara Falls).

Lots of spray. You get close, you get wet.

Seljalandsfoss, often described as the only Iceland waterfall you can walk behind, even though Kvernufoss also has that property.

Since we were a little ahead of schedule, Carol proposed that we visit Vestmannaeyjar (the Westman Islands). So we took the short ferry ride to Heimaey (“Home Island”), found a nice campsite (more on that tomorrow), and had dinner at Tanginn.

Carol had the Reindeer Steak, which came with a mushroom sauce. Yes, there’s meat somewhere under those greens.

Iceland day 10: Ice Blue Glaciers Come And Go

Has it been a million years
since our memories embraced?
Stars are falling down like tears
Will I ever see your face?
Ice blue glaciers come and go
I ask them all but they don’t know
How much longer, baby, till you rescue me?
from Rescue Me, an imitation-Hendrix song I wrote for a proposed fictionalized biopic of Jimi Hendrix which could not get rights to any actual Hendrix songs and so put out a call for fake Hendrix-like songs. I responded with two (the second one written with Todd Wayne). Fortunately, the movie never got made. Jimi’s lyrics often had extreme exaggeration of scale (“I stand up next to a mountain, chop it down with the edge of my hand.”); here I was going for extreme exaggeration of timescale, with the protagonist seemingly stuck in one place for thousands of years.

The south of Iceland is sparsely populated. When people first arrived 1200 years ago, the glaciers stretched all the way to the ocean and there was no place to raise crops or even hunt. They’ve retreated quite a bit since then, but still dominate the landscape. The giant Vatnajökull (“Lake Glacier”) covers 8% of Iceland’s surface area and is up to a kilometer thick in places. Its tongues are so big and so numerous that they have their own names. All eleven of the glaciers in this post are parts of Vatna.

There was no way we could hike to each tongue, or even park at them all, so I became a drive-by shooter. 🙂

We stopped by a huge dairy, but their ice cream shop was closed for COVID. The building on the right (behind the tanks) was the cow milking room.

Finally we hit our first glacial lagoon.

I had time to grab a “lobster sandwich” (langoustine on a hot dog bun) before our lagoon tour on an amphibious truck/boat.

Our guide shows off a chunk fished from the water.

I took about 20 pictures like this, but if you’ve seen one iceberg you’ve seen ’em all. 😛

the famous Diamond Beach, which is glacial ice drifts on black sand and gravel

When you need ice for your cooler and there’s a glacier handy

Quest item: Find Dr Pepper in Iceland (took 4 days!). Quest item: glacial ice. Combo quest: Drink Dr Pepper with glacial ice (location bonus: at Diamond Beach).

Seals were hunting in the channel to the sea.

For dinner, I finally cooked. Rotini with choice of sun-dried tomato pesto or basil pesto.

Iceland day 9: East Fjords

At 08:00 the Viking Jupiter cruise ship arrived. It was on an “Iceland’s Natural Beauty” tour that circumnavigates the island.

I thought about taking that tour sometime in the future just to eat sushi here again, but $2800 for a sushi meal seems excessive. 🙂 Cheaper to fly in and stay for a few days.

At the summit on the way back in to Egilsstaðir we passed the old (now unused) bridge from when it was a one-lane road. Well, actually we passed it on the way out too, but I missed taking a picture then.

In some of the Eastfjords there is fish farming.

For lunch, we stopped at the Hotel Framtíð restaurant in Djúpivogur. I had the Fish Soup, which came with bread and an extra pitcher of soup.

Carol had the catch of the day (salmon in Bearnaise sauce) with onion soup.

After lunch we headed to the famous “black sand reflecting beach”.

Except it wasn’t sand at all (Icelanders do not seem to know what “sand” means), as I found out when I tried to walk on it. It was a mud flat. I sank in up to my ankles.

For dinner, we headed to Kaffi Hornið in Höfn. Carol splurged on the Grilled Lobster (langoustine) platter, while I settled for “just” Lobster Pasta.

Sonnets To Orpheus II, 25

Schon, horch, hörst du der ersten Harken
Arbeit; wieder den menschlichen Takt
in der verhaltenen Stille der starken
Vorfrühlingserde. Unabgeschmackt

scheint dir das Kommende. Jenes so oft
dir schon Gekommene scheint dir zu kommen
wieder wie Neues. Immer erhofft,
nahmst du es niemals. Es hat dich genommen.

Selbst die Blätter durchwinterter Eichen
scheinen im Abend ein künftiges Braun.
Manchmal geben sich Lüfte ein Zeichen.

Schwarz sind die Sträucher. Doch Haufen von Dünger
lagern als satteres Schwarz in den Au'n.
Jede Stunde, die hingeht, wird jünger.

Already, the first rakes at work, do you hear?
Listen; again humans are beating
on the stiff stillness of hard early spring
earth. No longer does the coming appear

flavorless. That which so often seemed
like what had come before, comes back as new.
Always hoped for, maybe even dreamed,
still you never took it. It took you.

Even the leaves of a frozen oak in
the evening, brown, portend the future.
Sometimes the winds leave themselves a token.

Black are the bushes. Yet piles of dung
lie deeper black in the meadows, richer.
Each hour that passes grows more young.

Sonnets To Orpheus II, 15

O Brunnen-Mund, du gebender, du Mund,
der unerschöpflich Eines, Reines, spricht, -
du, vor des Wassers fließendem Gesicht,
marmorne Maske. Und im Hintergrund

der Aquädukte Herkunft. Weither an
Gräbern vorbei, vom Hang des Apennins
tragen sie dir dein Sagen zu, das dann
am schwarzen Altern deines Kinns

vorüberfällt in das Gefäß davor.
Dies ist das schlafend hingelegte Ohr,
das Marmor-Ohr, in das du immer sprichst.

Ein Ohr der Erde. Nur mit sich allein
redet sie also. Schiebt ein Krug sich ein,
so scheint es ihr, daß du sie unterbrichst.

Oh wellspring-mouth, you giving orifice,
who inexhaustibly Oneness, Pureness, speaks -
you, before the water's flowing face,
marble mask. And in the distant peaks

the aquaducts' origin. From far away
hillsides of the Apennines, past graves,
they carry legends to you, tales that then
over the age-blackening of your chin

spill into the basin before
you. This is the ear laid down to sleep,
the marble ear, in which you always speak.

An ear of Earth. Just with herself, therefore,
alone she talks. And if you slip a cup in,
it seems to her, that you are interrupting.

Hum Tum (2004)

I was feeling a bit homesick for India last night, so I watched Hum Tum (“Me and You”) (2004). It was better than I expected. Rani Mukerji was awesome as always (though perhaps not as much so as she was in Black), the rest of the cast was pretty good, and the plot got deep into a lot of stereotypical male-female relationship problems with more than a little wisdom and a lot of humor. Plus the title song by Veronica Mehta & Juggy D is one of my favorite Indian dance club tracks. (Note for non-Hindi speakers: there’s a surprising amount of English, plus (not always correct) subtitles.) Anyway if you’re looking for some romantic comedy with a little singing and dancing, give this a try.

the music video, with subtitles