Day 3-shopping in Borgarnes

January 7-The family slept in until 10 am this morning. I think we all needed the sleep, but the sun does not provide the cue to wake up here like we are used to in Colorado. In fact, I only got up when I did, because I started to see some light outside the window, and that only happens around 10 am! We decided we needed an alarm clock that lights up, so we added that to our shopping list, which we intended to deal with in Borgarnes today. I mentioned in the last post that we had done some shopping at the store on-campus. However, the store is not very big, since Bifröst only has 400 residential students and associated staff and faculty, and its prices are expensive, even by Icelandic standards. In fact, Sally's new colleagues had advised us not to shop there unless we needed them right away and could not put them off until our next shopping trip to Borgarnes.


In order to understand all of this, I should probably explain our geographic situation here. Bifröst was not built in a town, but out in the country on the Hringvegur, or route 1, which is the main highway on Iceland and encircles the country. The map of the southwestern portion of Iceland, shown at the left, shows Bifröst in relation to the other places I have mentioned in previous posts. Starting at the beginning, Keflavík, into which we flew two days ago, is on the western end of the peninsula at the bottom of the map. If you follow the coast around the north side of the peninsula and onto the mainland, you come across Reykjavík, Akranes, and finally Borgarnes. Route 1 heads northeast out of Borgarnes and the yellow dot on the left side of the road is Bifröst, which is about 20 miles away from Borgarnes. While Borgarnes is the "big" town for shopping, it only has a population of 2000 people. Our next option for items we cannot find in Borgarnes is Akranes (pop. 6600) and if that does not work we will have to go to Reykjavík or see if we can order it online, I suppose.


We ate breakfast and headed to Borgarnes to get everything that is necessary for a functioning household; it was quite a list! We visited the five stores in the "mall" in Borgarnes and another grocery store and pretty well filled up the trunk of the car before heading back to Bifröst as the sun set around 4pm. It was nice driving the road at dusk, because people had turned on their Christmas lights, which we had not seen when we came in the day before. The picture of Borgarnes on the left was taken across some mud flats to the east of town.




As you can see by this picture, there was one obvious problem with our apartment when we moved in. The skeleton maintenance crew that stayed on over the Christmas break was unable to keep up with the snowfall, and the places they skipped included the stairs going from the second floor to the third floor of our apartment complex and the third floor landing, leaving about ten inches of snow and ice for us to crawl through to get to our apartment. Numerous natives have said December was much wetter than it has been for the past couple of decades, so I doubt that they had the personnel in place to deal with the extra snow. Furthermore, as far as I can tell, there are only two occupied apartments on the third floor, so I suppose it made sense to concentrate on other locations first. Nonetheless, after hauling our travel bags and shopping bags up a toboggan run, I decided that stairs would be better. So, I borrowed a nice metal spade from one of Sally's colleagues and cleared the landing and the stairs after we got home. It has made the whole process of getting to the apartment much less adventurous!

Inside the apartment we quickly took adavantage of the bounty of our shopping trip. Sally was able to cook us a wonderful (cheap, relative to eating out) soup. She and Alex both started knitting woolen scarves. The other two kids played with some new PlayMobile figurines. Finally, Sally and I enjoyed a beer from our new Belgian beer glass and a 125th anniversary Erdinger Weizenglas. That should be the end of the story, but sleeping-in has finally gotten the better of the kids and they did not go to bed until nearly midnight! Once we finally got them settled, Sally and I headed to bed ourselves. Now that we have an alarm clock, we can get up before the sun and Sally can be better prepared to be up and able to teach at 8:45 on Monday morning!