dragonlady7 | Entries tagged with travel

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well so i’m in new york city and it poured for the whole time but the sun has risen this morning so that’s nice.

i’ve had a covid exposure so i gotta isolate when i go home but i’m not terribly worried about it, we’ll see if that bites me in the ass. i gotta take the train so i gotta mask but like. it’s okay. i can isolate pretty easily so it’ll be annoying at mealtimes for a couple of days but it’s not like. the end of the world.

yesterday we went on the ferry to ellis island etc, which i had done before for school trips but didn’t remember and they’ve absolutely redone the whole place since then anyway. But when we got back it was absolutely bucketing rain, and i’ve discovered that the shoes i brought are like anti-waterproof somehow. they’re Børn boots and they absolutely fucking suck, the insoles have disintegrated and the sole supports are starting to go after wearing them a handful of times, and they just sponge up water from the ground through the soles as best i can tell, absolutely the worst shoes i could have brought. I’ve spent a bunch of time on this trip wearing flip-flops in fifty-degree weather because those were the only other shoes I brought and it’s better to just get your bare feet wet.

Anyway we went for lunch at the Fraunces Tavern which is a general-washington-ate-here kind of deal, and then when the rain had not let up we sprinted around the corner to the Dead Rabbit which is a bar on that same block, and I wikipedia-spiraled about the dead rabbit riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Rabbits_riotand the bowery bhoys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowery_Boys_(gang).

Our first night in town we discovered that there’s an Uzbek restaurant https://www.farida.us/ in the financial district and it’s set to open more locations around town so like. Double thumbs up. We had a shashlik sampler platter and an order of the manty dumplings and it was so good but it meant we were too full to try the lagman or beshbarmek and so i want to go back but idk when i’ll be in the area again. but if you are, you need to try that out.

Anyway it’s been a fun visit but I gotta get the train back now and isolate for a while. (Your picture was not posted)

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I hadn’t actually researched anything about it but as I was doing my final round of packing I looked at my personal item carry-on purse, and looked at the pile of reusable grocery bags on the table, and said I got a feeling, hm, and sure enough. I took one of the lightweight nylon ones that can roll up into itself, and threw it into my purse.

Every time I made a purchase, the clerk would sort of brace herself and say “do you want to buy a bag we’re not allowed to give them away,” and I would haul this ratty-ass ACLU-fundraiser ten-year-old nylon bag that I literally found in a box at the farm probably out of my purse and smile and say “Oh, no thanks, I’m good!”

So I did feel like I was on the ball, there.

I thought NYS outlawed plastic bags as of now but we might still have a couple of months.

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No flights went out of Ísafjörður yesterday either. The woman from Heydalur, whose name the Internet tells me is Stella, was absolutely correct when she told us to start driving.

I don’t know if any flights went out today either. We’d’ve been stuck. Driving was absolutely the right thing to do, and she was also correct in predicting that the conditions were worsening in the north even as they began to ease in the south.

She didn’t have to do that; she just came around to the various tables of the parties who were staying at her resort the night before, and asked each of us what our plans were for the following day and advised us of what she thought would happen, and then checked in with us again in the morning and made sure we had the correct directions.

She’s from Reykjavik originally, not a native of the Westfjords, and she and her husband have been running that hotel since 2000, so very obviously, she’s seen pretty much all that can go wrong. I don’t know if we can possibly appreciate her enough.

She also asked us when we left if we could send her a message once we’d made it over the mountains, because she’d worry. It was one of the first things Dude did when we made it to the guesthouse in Bú∂ardalur– as we sat in the lobby, he got on the wifi and emailed her. She wrote back immediately to thank him.

Anyway. Dude said that the trip insurance ought to cover the extra cost of the rental car, but then I wondered if the cancelled flights’ refund wouldn’t be more anyway? So he’ll have to look at that. I don’t actually know how much any of the trip cost.

It was kind of funny, he did literally all of the researching, and then I did all of the doing, and that was how it worked. It’s fine, I hate researching and logistics, and he winds up acting kind of a martyr when he has to drive a lot. Next time, I think, we should have him research how much it costs to put two people onto the rental agreement. We wouldn’t have thought to this time, though, because we were only expecting to drive an hour and a half to Heydalur, and then the same distance back.

I think I’m glad I was doing the driving. Z’s a fine driver, and competent, and more cautious than me, but I’m probably a more obnoxious passenger and backseat driver, and probably would have had far too much advice to give him. He only made horrified noises on three occasions (only one of which was unhelpful; I’d struck a curb and couldn’t tell if the car had made a bad noise, or him). And it was good to not be a passive just-along-for-the-ride sort all the time.

He did say at one point that there weren’t a lot of people who would have enjoyed this vacation, and he was glad I was, and I said it was more the company I was enjoying and could have enjoyed myself most anywhere, and that’s about as sappy as the two of us get. It was objectively a cool place to be, though.

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I woke at like 4am local time here and I’m not sure why. I do think I got enough sleep. I’m worrying now about the weather, of course. We have travel insurance so it doesn’t matter, but. We have to fly from Reykjavik Airport to Isafjörður today, which is in the Westfjords and has a tiny airstrip you have to kind of fly straight into a fjord to get to. So if the weather’s bad, they don’t fly. And it snowed last night– only an inch or so here, I think– I took a photo out the hotel window when i woke up– and it’s gusting wind so forcefully that shortly after I woke up, I thought the first gust I heard was a woman shrieking.

[image description: view out the hotel window down into city streets, with a backyard at the bottom with a dusting of snow and some steps illuminated by a porch light, and farther up more distant streets including a roof studded with tiny lights and a courtyard with a fancy mural of a graffiti word, and a white building with various oddly-shaped windows including a convex circular portal and a rectangular window showing the reflection of another roof made up of tiny lights.]

We went out for a Super Fancy dinner last night that was fantastic. Yesterday, we just spent lounging around the hotel, and I needed that– by the time we came home on New Year’s Eve I was in so much pain, mostly in my hip but my back too, and it was terrible, and I thought oh I’ll be so useless today– but I was fine, because we didn’t do anything. So! Good to know. I sort of feel guilty for lounging around a hotel room all day in a foreign country but I also know everything was closed yesterday. I also worked a bunch on the various sewing projects I’d brought with me, so that was cool.

I’ve been liveblogging the trip on Instagram Stories, but if you’re not into the ‘gram I also have been uploading uncaptioned photos to Flickr {https://www.flickr.com/photos/dragonlady7/}. I’ll probably organize those into an album at least, at some point.

I did take a few new year’s photos on my camera, my real camera, and have downloaded those to look at them but haven’t really examined them in detail. it was raining, and so i didn’t have the camera out that much. we’ll see, this may not be much of a trip for photography.

I’m hoping we can make our flight today, and once we get there, that the roads are clear enough to drive. We’ve got a two or three-hour drive to get to where we’re staying, and sometime after we arrived in Iceland Dude noticed that his driver’s license isn’t in his wallet, so I’m going to have to rent the car and do all the driving, so that’s fantastic and not at all alarming. I mean– I don’t mind, except that I know that if I were the passenger, I would be obsessively documenting the trip and taking photos and composing captions and so on, and if he’s the passenger he is going to just sit there and look at things and not take a single photo unless I directly ask him to and possibly explain how he should frame it. So like, that’s fine, but I really do look back at the photos and the stupid snapshots and Instagram story videos and the like that I take on these trips really often, and having nothing is going to be a huge bummer.

But I’m a perfectly competent driver, and am not particularly worried about that, I just know it’s exhausting. And if it’s snowing, we won’t be able to see any of the amazing view.

But, we’re staying in a place with hot springs and Icelandic ponies, and so regardless of the weather, I will experience those things, even if it is dark and we can’t see the view at all. Not that I’m going to ride any ponies, I just want to look at them. (I mean, if the weather’s nice, we’ll see, but I’m not here to struggle through a fucking blizzard, man, I could do that at home.)

And if it all goes wrong, well, we have travel insurance, and we can enjoy ourselves perfectly well in a hotel room somewhere, like we did yesterday. :)

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I just wrote a bunch of postcards home and made the joke in every single one about how nice it is that everyone here is making such a big deal about Dude’s birthday. There’s fireworks everywhere, there’s going to be a bonfire later, it’s just a lot of fuss and it’s terribly kind of them all.

Ha I slay me. My jokes are great.

I have made zero fuss over Dude but I tried, in my defense, and he didn’t want anything, so. But you only turn 40 once. So.

Iceland is lovely, I’m posting near-constant updates on Instagram Stories, and i’m not sure if that’s a good way to do vacation or not, but. It’s been misting fairly steadily and I haven’t wanted to take my good camera out just to get droplets all over the lens, and yesterday I was actually too sore and jacked-up from flying to even want to lug the camera around so I didn’t. So… but we’re going to scenic places later this week, I’ll make up for it then probably.

Except that it turns out Dude forgot his driver’s license somewhere– it’s not in his wallet?– so I’ll have to be doing the driving in the Westfjords, and I’m going to tell him he’s got to take constant photos but I don’t know how much he’ll really do. If it were me, I’d take short video clips near-constantly, but I think he’ll probably just take one and then not do any more, and I’ll have to make do. Oh well. No point worrying.

Oh I explained a lot of this in Stories but we went to a museum today that was built around an excavation two meters below a busy street, and it’s basically in the basement of a hotel, but what it is, is a big room surrounding the surviving foundations of a Viking-era longhouse, and it’s just a big explanation of what the area was like around the time of settlement, and how people lived, what they ate, what the longhouse was likely used for and for how long, who maybe lived there and what they did with their lives, what we know and what we can guess and what we don’t know. There was also a surviving little bit of wall– possibly a pasture enclosure, something like that– in the corner of the room, that they know for one hundred percent certain was built before 871 (+- 2 years margin of error), because an eruption happened then that deposited something everywhere, and it’s under the wall but built into the turf of the longhouse, so the wall existed already and the longhouse was built not super long afterward, but definitely afterward. So that was neat to find out.

It’s got me ruminating a lot on what life was like in the Viking era, though I’ve researched that before– I think it was 2004 or 5 when I wrote an entire romance novel set in about 1000 for NaNoWriMo, and it’s notable as the most definitely complete novel I ever wrote but also it’s not very good and I don’t think I’d publish any of it. It did have some good sex in it but I don’t think it would survive being extracted. So. Actually, bits of it are surely preserved in my Dreamwidth archives too because I was hellbent on polishing and publishing it, and just never did, so I could pin down the date if I really wanted to. I don’t though.

Anyhow. Off to dress for dinner. We’re going out for tapas because we could get a reservation there; everybody else was full up tonight, lol. Tomorrow we’re going someplace Expensive And Exquisite because apparently nobody goes out on New Year’s Day here.

Which is good, because my idea of Dressing for Dinner tonight is to wear the only pair of jeans I brought, with two pairs of leggings under, and two sweaters over two shirts, because most of tonight will consist of wandering around in cold drizzle because that’s how one New Years’es in Iceland. Tomorrow I can wear my nice velvet dress and new lovely amber jewelry and not be quite so cold, methinks.

Happy New Year, everybody!

Ah, I’ll leave you with an uncaptioned version of The Photo Everyone Takes Of Reykjavik From The Top Of That Crazy Church Tower:

[image description: a photo from high up straight down a street of a downtown full of two- and three-storey buildings, mostly with peaked roofs, looking toward a seashore and a lead-gray sea. everything is a blue-grayish color because it is sunset on a cloudy day, and about half of the streetlights are on. for the record it was like 2pm.]

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aegean-okra:

The Basilica Cistern, is the largest of several hundred ancient cisterns that lie beneath the city of Istanbul/Constantinople. It was built in the 6th century during the reign of Byzantine Emperor Justinian I. The bases of two columns reuse blocks carved with the visage of Medusa. The origin of the two heads is unknown, though it is thought that the heads were brought to the cistern after being removed from a building of the late Roman period. There is no written evidence that suggests they were used as column pedestals previously. Tradition has it that the blocks are oriented sideways and inverted in order to negate the power of the Gorgons’ gaze, however it is widely thought that one was placed sideways only to be the proper size to support the column. The upside down Medusa was placed that way specifically because she would be the same height right side up.

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oh, i’ve been here, when I went to Istanbul in uhhh 2018? was it 2018? i think so. It’s… simultaneously boring and overwhelming. You can’t see anything from the surface, but like… the cistern was built literally 1400 years ago??!! it is SO OLD, you have to see it. It’s really close to the Hagia Sofia (and was built approximately concurrently) so if you just went there and were blown away (seriously it’s… huge) then you figure you’d better check out this cistern. So you give them money and go down some stairs and you’re… in the dark? and it’s… it’s dark. that’s it.

So you wander a little, and ok this is a big space. There’s a walkway, you’re on this walkway, there are columns. Gradually (maybe you cheat with a camera flash, or you see someone else’s) you realize that there are a shitload of columns. What the fuck.

There’s not really anything to see, you just realize that you’re underground in this literal forest of columns that extend off into the distance and then are sort of blocked off, there are painted canvas wrappings blocking off where they’re doing work so the whole thing doesn’t collapse, and there are paintings of columns on the wrappers, and you’re kind of led around these areas by the walkway. The floor is dark and maybe covered in water, you’re not sure. It’s full of people but it’s still weirdly hushed, and it’s just really really really dark in here. (The photos I took are here, [https://www.flickr.com/photos/dragonlady7/45685183574/in/album-72157698963172630/] and if you just keep clicking the “next” button there are a handful of them, including the Medusa heads, and oh yeah the whole album is Istanbul if you’re interested.)

The walkway takes you to a column that’s all carved fancy, and explains that this column was clearly taken from some bit of earlier construction, salvaged from Roman stuff– a lot of the columns have bits on them that were clearly taken from older construction, apparently the Romans had left a lot of monumental architecture sort of lying around so this made sense. Then there’s a completely uncited legend of what the carvings mean, which is implausible but charming.

So you get to these Medusa heads basically last of all, and they mention them in the summaries of the site so the whole time you’re like “so what’s the deal with these” and to get to them you have to go down some stairs, which is unnerving because there’s water down there, but the walkway stays dry, and then around a corner it’s like oh there they– holy shit those are huge. What the hell were these heads on to begin with that they are so massive???

But maybe the weirdest thing about the Basilica Cistern is that it was lost for hundreds of years.

I know right???!!! It was there the whole time, it’s just the Ottomans didn’t like water from cisterns, they weren’t into the idea, so they stopped using it and then everyone forgot, and in the TWENTIETH CENTURY, people were like “hey downtown you can get fish out of the wells, isn’t that weird” and a random German submariner was like “I must explore this” and TOOK A BOAT DOWN INTO THE CISTERN (because apparently there was… a staircase… that the locals were like “idk! weird cellar staircase! nobody goes down there!”) and that was how the people of Istanbul rediscovered this incredibly massive ancient work of engineering. When they say there’s no written record of the Medusa heads, that’s because there’s almost no record of the entire construction, even though it is incredibly enormous, it’s basically an entire city block of water collection facilities, and holds thousands of tons of water, and would still work today with minimal maintenance, but was entirely forgotten for literal centuries.

It’s really something.