Iceland

Wow! It has been a while since i took the time to post something. Why is that? I don't know for sure.

Didn't I go anywhere all that time, no of course i did : that would have been strange! :-)

Really worth mentioning was my New Years Eve in the Netherlands (hardly abroad, i agree, but still), which is spent with some good friends in a little house at the coast. At midnight we went to the beach and celebrated the coming of 2009 (see picture below). Personally i was curious what the year would bring.

I was hoping a little bit less travelling. Not that i started to dislike it, but i felt i was really hard to built up some kind of a life if you are never at home. In the mean time i had settled into my new house (i moved end of november), a small house that i bought by myself. And one of my plans for 2009 is to make it from a house into a home.

Up until now i went twice to Greece for my job. Both were nice trips and i enjoyed seeing my friend Mary again, who showed me parts of Athens.

The second time was an internal training, which was a very nice group.On the 7th of June, the day we had elections in Belgium (both regional and european), i was flying of to Iceland. A country that i was longing to see for a long time. I did vote and then rushed back to my house where a taxi brought me to the train station of Ghent where i boarded the train towards Schiphol Airport, near Amsterdam. In Antwerp i changed trains and then i was ona direct connection or so i guessed. Between Antwerp and Roosendaal, it was announced the train would go any further. I alerted a few japanese travellers who didn't understand the announcements and went on a search for the correct train. This one went to Den Bosh and i met there a very nice guy, originally from Morroco and living and working in the States, called Adil. We had some very nice conversations on varied topics and before we knew (and after ch anging trains yet another time) i was in the airport where i was on time for my plane.

The first week i was teaching for Siminn, the local incumbent telecom operator, in Reykjavic. The group was nice, they were the more social icelandic people i was going to meet. I don't complain, but icelandic people are not the warmest i have ever met. They are polite that is true, but that's about it. Reykjavic is a very nice town. It is rather small for a capital (around 100.000 inhabitants out of 300.000 in total in Iceland). And i enjoyed strolling around in the evening (it didn't get dark the whole time i was there, so i did have to worry about getting back to my hotel on time).

The picture above shows the darkest it got, seen from my hotel room.

When walking from my hotel to the city center i came across this lovely lake, with some wildlife. :-)

After my course, i spent the saturday in cristal clear water of 4 degrees celcius. Why, because of the amazing visibility but also because it is in Thingvellir, where you have the tectonic plates of Europe and North-America joining (Iceland pretty much evolved from the magma coming from underneath the plates while the continents are being pushed further apart each year (by a few centimeters). And to be honest, I just had to do it:
More pictures of the dive on my facebook account.

A colleague of mine, Tony, came along for the next part of the trip (he had even more trouble getting there and arrived somewhere around midnight).
The idea was to circle the country in 6 days, following the N1 (National 1), a round that goes around the whole of the island.

Day 1: Starting of the day by picking up the car (we were lucky to get a free upgrade) and drive towards Thingvellir, which i had seen the day before, this time to really visit the place itself. Apart from a geological important place, it is also the setting of the first 'parliament' of Iceland, called the Althingi, from around 930 where the law speakers receited the law to all the representatives and issues of justice were discussed. Important historical decisions where taken here, like the adaptation of chirstianity in the year 1000.
And it is also a very beautiful place to see:
With some bad tempered geese:
As I already knew from my dives there, the water is cristal clear, people also have the tendency to throw money into it:
Iceland had in those time a clan like structure (reminded me a bit of Schotlands history). And i bought a book on the Iceland sagas to learn more about it (to be honest i still have to read it).

After that we drove to the Great Geysir area. These are the first geysers that i ever saw. They have their own 'Old Faithfull', called Strokkur, which blows every few minutes.
Even in this hotpot (with boiling water) people where throwing money:
From there we went to Gullfoss, one of Icelands most beautiful and certainly the most impressive waterfall (the word 'foss' by the way is icelandic for 'waterfall'). Through the beautiful landscape it was a nice drive back to the N1 which we continued up until Hella, where we stayed the night. It was a very small place with absolutely nothing to do even finding something to eat passed 9pm was impossible.

Day 2: We continued to the east heading for the Eyjafjöll district and stopped at the waterfalls Seljalandsfoss and Skogafoss.

At Seljalandsfoss we walked behind the waterfall, which was a nice experience.
At Skogafoss i want to see how close i could get. The waterfall is pretty big and an enormous amount of water sprays from it.
I was nicely tucked into my raincoat but still got soaked to the bone (and the water was pretty cold). Then i wanted to see the waterfall from above. There is a little trail going all the way up, but if you continue just a bit further you go back down towards the actual ridge of the waterfall. The view there was stunning, impressive and a little bit frighting, since i was standing on a patch of dirt and grass of which I wasn't sure i was going to hold me, luckely it did: you have to spice up your life from time to time ;-) And that gives you a picture of the waterfall from a perspective that few people take:
And since i was in an adventurous mood, i went a bit offroad with the car towards the Solheimajökull ('jökull' stands for 'glacier'), my very first glacier ever (but not my last, see some of my next entries ;-) ). I went up the glacier for only a few hunderd meters, since it is too dangerous without a guide to do so, there can be cracks in the ice that aren't always easy to spot.

The driving was nice and we went all the way to Dyrholaey, which is a natural reserve famous for the great number of seabirds nesting there. Unfortunately the road to the actual colonies was closed due to the breeding season so we enjoy a short walk around the curious formation just next to it.
Closeby there is the little village of Vik, where we had a little rest (ate some soup) and get some gass (and bumped to back of the car into a little wall; honestly i didn't see it!).

The next part was magnificient, driving across a the Myrdalssandur floodplains and the seamingly endless lavafield or Eldhraun, apparently the biggist lavafield to have flown on Earth in historical time.


We stopped at Klaustur to see the Church Floor, which consists of small basalt colums that together form a kind of naturally created floor, very curious.
But to be completely honest i was more taken in by the cute sheep that where running aruond there :-)
Again the road was spectacular: vast tracks of black sandy desert washed down by numerous glacial rivers.
We stopped shortly at the Skaftafell National Park but unfortunately there was no time for a descent walk so we had coffee and some cake instead.

And there was more to be seen: Jökulsarlon, the glacial lagoon where icebergs, sculpted by the elements are broken of the Breiðamerkurjökull glacier.


After that we drove all the way to Höfn, where we had a lovely diner and enjoyed a good night sleep after a very long day.

India

It has been a hectic year, 2008, with some 5 months abroad out of 12 and an impressive list of countries visited this year: Australia, New Zealand, Dubai, France, UK, Greece (i don't count the Netherlands and Luxembourg).
And to top it all of, there was a bit of a last minute request to go to India, New Delhi to be exact. I have never been to India and it is considered as one of the more special countries in the world.
So i was fairly exicted to go there, even though the timing wasn't really ideal (too close to xmas holidays for comfort, bit of a mellow mood, ...). My enthousiasm was tempered a bit by the problems i had with my flight: instead of a direct flight from Brussels to Delhi (which was cancelled due to techical problems), i flew to Chennay (with some delay), waited there 5 hours and then flew to Delhi. So i arrived almost 12 hours later and instead of walking in the city on sunday, i recuperated in my bed instead.
Now all things have a positive side: i did get the opportunity to watch plenty of movies:
Wall-E (finally saw it)
The Dark Knight (not bad, if you like to genre of course, and pretty grim movie)
Mummy 3 (wanted some no brain entertainment and that is what i got)
Hellboy II (also no brain, but the costumes and effects are very nicely done)
even the beginning of Wanted (not a specifically great movie so far, but hell, it features Angelina Jolie :-) )
These days it's the only way i get to see some movies.
And i met a few nice people along the way who were in the same predicament as i was.

I did walk around a bit in the neighbourhood of the hotel and just like the people from the hotel told me, it is very safe. The only thing people warned me about is the fact that you can get approached a lot by beggars (a colleague told me that she only left her hotel one time and made it to the middle of the road, where she was so sick of all the beggars and people trying to sell her useless stuff that she turned around and went back in). I walked around for i guess a bit more than half an hour (towards the Lotus temple to be exact, but couldn't get really to it since it was closed already, but at least saw it from afar, very beautifull building, the shape of a closed lotus flower), without a soul asking me anything. I felt right at home, aparently i must look like someone that hasn't got a lot of money either ;-)


The first thing, apart from the omnipresent dust, that got to me was how visible the poverty is. I have been around, saw quite a few third world countries, and still it seems a lot more in the face than other places. On the side of the road, you will find dwellings, made out of a few bricks, branches and some stuff they have found, where whole families (including some adorable children, always hard to see them in such deploring situation) run around in the dust, burning wood or whatever they could get their hands on (i was praying they knew not to burn anything made out of plastic since the fumes would be very bad for their health) to keep warm (it's winter here, even though the temperatures are nice for people from western euorpe, were there are freezing temperatures at the moment), wearing lumps for clothes, although sometimes i am suprised to discover lovely colours that are used, but difficult to see now, with the layers of filth that are clinging to it.

The next thing i would discover the next day on my way to work. I had underestimated the distances and had taken a room in a hotel in Delhi proper, instead of the satelite-city of Gurgaon where the site of Alcatel-Lucent is. So i spend one and a half hour in the taxi just to get there. Traffic is something to behold in India. The chaos is unbelievable. There are people everywhere! Okay that shouldn't surprise me since there are 1 billion people in India! Even though the amount of cars is not so spectecular, the traffic is a complete disaster. Mostly for two reasons: nobody seems to be obeying the rules (my taxi driver assured me there are plenty of traffic rules defined by law, but nobody seems to be following them and in the end nobody cares to ). Second, the roads are filled with: anything. There are of course cars, trucks and busses. But also motorised riksjas, three wheelers that are carrying anything from people (loads of them sometimes, so it seems a miracle that the small wheels do not collapse) to lumps, to pottery. In between you have bicycles that try to get through the traffic in one piece and a tremendous amount of motorbikes.


The food is definetly divers and nice. And what i personally like a lot is that vegetarian is really normal here. During the lunch break we go eating at the canteen, and there is simple no meat there. This is also not really a surprise, since the strict hindu believe normally prohibits the eating of meat. A lot of hindus are apparently strict vegetarians, some even veganists. In my class there were, apart from the customers, also two people from Alcatel-Lucent. Had good conversations with them and on friday evening we went walking around in Delhi city. One of them apparently belongs to the Brahman caste (as you know, India still has a very strict hiearachy of castes, of social layers, even though official the caste-system has be abolished several years ago). By the way, i heard that the familyname is an indication to which of the castes you belong, in other words, you are born into them. The Brahman caste is as far as i know the highest of all castes and sometimes called the 'priest-caste' so i had this mental image of all people belonging to it to priests. But religion is very important for that guy, even though he apparently had some doubts on the strict rules of the religion he was brought up into. And we had a very interesting conversation on religion and spirituality which inspired us both.

On saturday i went to Agra. The city best know for the world famous Taj Mahal (see picture at beginning). I visited three sites in total:
First of all the ghost city of Fatehpur Sikri, built by the Mugal Emperor Akbar, that combines both Hindu and Islam influences. The Mugal emperor himself also combined cultures, since he had 3 wives: one moslim, one hindu and one christian :-) The complex is completely built out of sand stone.
In the picture below you see a platform on a pond, where musicians came to play to entertain the wives of the emperor.

The detailed carvings that adorn the complex are beautiful.


Don't be alarmed by these carvings by the way, the swastika, is an ancient hindu symbol. It appears in to forms: counter-clockwise, which is the symbol of life and happiness and clockwise (just like the symbol adapted by the nazi's, although they rotated it over 45 degrees), which is the symbol of death and destruction (a fitting symbol for the nazi reich if you ask me).


After using it for a few years, they noted that their was not a steady watersupply so the whole site was abandoned. But still very impressive. Next to it a enormous mosque was built, which is still in use today. It had two gates, one for the emperor and one for the people. Remarkably the gate for the common poeple is huge (see picture below), the one for the emperor a lot more modest.
The mosque also houses the tomb of the great sufi saint Sheik Salim Chisti (see picutre below), who apparently made it possible for the mugal emporer to have an heir.


Inside the tomb, people still come to the sufi saint to pray and ask for blessings. One a request has been given (usually some money is involved), they place a little cotton thread inside the tomb. When they have received their blessing, they come back to remove their thread.


Second i went to the Taj Mahal. I suppose everyone knows the story, of how another Mugal emperor, was so grieve strucken by the death of his favorite wife, that he built an enormous tomb for her to show the world his love to her. The whole building is made out of white marble, set on a red sandstone platform. It stands next to the river and apparently on the other side, the emperor was to built his own tomb, out of black stone. But before the Taj Mahal was finished his own son overthrew him and emprisoned him. But he did allow the monument to be finished. But not the one for the emporer himself. They put an extra coffin in the Taj Mahal for him, which is the only non-symmetrical part of the whole complex.


In the white marble they created beautifull carvings, but by laying in other stone, with different colours in the marble. A very precise work that is still used today.


In the picture below you see both the carvings on the monument, but also pay attention to the top of the central dome. There you see a nice example of the mix of hindu and muslim symbols: the top of the dome is a reversed lotus flower (hindu symbol) and on top of that you see the crescent moon (muslim symbol).


The whole complex is very nicely made, with gardens around the Taj Mahal.The last place i visited that day was Agra Fort. A enormous fortress that is still used by the military today, so only a part could be visited.


It's also here that the emperor who built the Taj Mahal was imprisoned by his son and the fort was used by emperors (and the english occupiers later) as palace.
The first picture below is where the emperor addresses the people.


If you zoom in a bot just above the inner gate you see 2 stars of david, the jewish symbol. Symbols of all religions are seen throughout India and it proves that they are by default extremely tollerant to all religions.