But yea it's going well so far and I'm looking forward to my first full week of class. I am taking three Icelandic courses all taught in English: Vocabulary I, Pronunciation and Speech I, and Icelandic Medieval Literature. Unlike learning Spanish in middle and high school, I have a much higher drive to learn Icelandic since I can use everything I learn as soon as I step outside the classroom.
I figured I should put up some pictures of our community kitchen. It's a good way to see people you don't have class with or usually see any other way that live in the dorm since we all have to eat! I am most impressed with the Asian students and their cooking habits. I asked one student from China how many students were here from China that he knew and he said 14. Many of the Chinese students knew each other before coming here and many were in the same high school class from what I understand. It's a little intimidating when I walk into the kitchen and there are 3 or 4 of them all cooking together and speaking their native language to each other, but it is nonetheless impressive the dishes they can make. They are always cooking rice, slicing vegetables, and boiling meats and they have quite the collection of sauces to top it all off. So whenever I walk in to make eggs and bacon or just boil some ramen I feel quite inferior to them.
I also did my first load of laundry today. It took a while to figure out how the washers worked but I eventually got it. Apparently for some non-American washers you have to select what degrees in Celsius you want to wash your clothes which baffles me. These washers look like robots though and sound like them too.
Another thing I ran into a lot from casual conversation to sign for gasoline prices was that every place besides the U.S. uses the metric system. So anytime I talk about how heavy something is in pounds, or how much something is in inches like snow or rain, the person I am talking to mentions that they use centimeters and kilograms. The speak of the temperature in Celsius. They speak in kilometers instead of miles. They measure gasoline in liters and it's hard for non-Americans to think of how much a gallon is. Gas is very expensive here by the way. I saw a sign for gas that said 210 Kronurs (about $2 USD) per liter of gas. 1 liter = .26 gallons, so its the equivalent of around $7.50 USD per gallon back home. It's ridiculous! It makes sense that more stuff is expensive in Iceland because it's an import country because it's an island an has to import everything they can't produce themselves but still that's a lot for gas. Nevertheless, my icelandic 'buddy' that I was assigned through the University of Iceland exchange student program still offers to drive me around and pick me up anytime I need to go anywhere.
As far as things I've been doing leisurely, I've watched two Icelandic handball games at a bar/pub place called Hresso. Apparently handball is the one sport Iceland is nationally recognized in and they are actually very good. They won a silver medal at the last Olympics in handball thus having the most medals per capita because of their small country population of around 300,000. It is quite the atmosphere when Iceland does well during the matches because the place is completely packed with people standing in the aisles between tables just to see the game on the TV and every time Iceland scores everyone yells and claps loudly. Handball is basically Iceland's substitute for English Premier League soccer in the UK. Also, Binni's mother had a graduation celebration because she just finished her master's degree in public health education so she had a bunch of family and friends come over to the house and I got invited. I met Binni's brother, sister, mom, dad, uncle, and talked to a couple of other people too. The food was great and everyone was nice. After that me and a couple of Binni's friends went downtown in Reykjavik and I got to see the vast amount of people that roam the streets late at night. Before that night I had not seen too many pretty Icelandic girls during the day, but now I understand where and how to find them all. Binni tells me all I need to do is tell them I'm from Texas and then they will fall into my arms. Sounds good to me.
Until next time, Takk and Bless!
