With strong winds and low visibility impeding our travel onward, we've now spent an extra four days in Akureyri. Folks wander to the breakfast room each morning before dawn, to wake up, eat pickled herring and skyr yoghurt, and assess the weather. Around 8 am, conversation usually hits a lull, as thoughts turn to Tracy's phone and the expected word from the Norlandair pilots. When her phone rings, Tracy picks it up, leaves the room for a few minutes, and, for the last four days, she returns with a shake of her head. Reassess tomorrow. These are small aircraft in a big landscape, and I am happy for the pilots to be conservative.
Akureyri has been a fine place to spend a few days. We've continued training each morning, trying to prepare for what will be a shortened turnover at Summit, but we've also had free time to explore. Town lies at the end of a north-facing fjord, and we've found some nice views of the surrounding glacial valley. In the photo below, Matt is perched on a lump of bedrock, with the thin fjord visible beyond town. We rode the bus as it made its neighborhood loop, surveying the colorful, blocky, multi-family apartments. The houses have a lot of windows for 65.7°N. There are nice geothermally heated town pools up the road, and a few times we've climbed the hill, paid our 550 krona, and spent an hour or two soaking. In addition to the usual range of hot and cool pools, there are some warm fire-hydrant-like spigots to sit under, and two waterslides, which were a hoot.
At the grocery store down the road, we picked up a container of 'hákarl' or shark. This is a traditional Icelandic food, and is pretty well-known for its unusual preparation and its reportedly repulsive aroma. The shark meat, when fresh, contains a poisonous level of urea, and is rendered edible by burying the whole shark in gravel for several months, digging up the putrified flesh, slicing it into strips, and hanging to dry in the wind. The flesh is then chopped into little cubes which are eaten raw. Kelly and I saw one of these hákarl-drying operations when we were collecting samples at the glacial outwash plains. It was an open-air wooden structure, 100 feet on a side, with arm-sized slices of light-brown flesh hanging from the rafters. We are going to bring this questionable treat up to Summit Camp to share with the current crew already on station.
