Day 30-exploring Skorradalur

   February 3-The Varmaland school had an in-service day today, so the girls had the day

Skorradalur and Skorradalsvatn behind the kids, as seen
from the pass on Geldingadragi road.

off.  That means that Alex has not had a full week of school at Varmaland yet!  Since there was neither rain nor snow and the sky was mostly cloudless, we kept Spencer out of kindergarten and the whole family went exploring.  First, we drove to Borgarnes to do some shopping, eat dinner, and give the bank photos for our debit cards.  Then, we headed southeast across the fjord (Borgarförður) and took some of the back roads to the valley Skorradalur, which has a big finger lake (Skorradalsvatn) in

Nautafoss on the Dragá.

it.  We drove to the top of the pass that leads over to Hvalförður and took a short hike to see Nautafoss, or Bull Falls.    
   To get back to Bifröst we had to cross either Borgarförður back at Borgarnes or the Hvítá (White River) that feeds into it the fjord.  These aquatic travel barriers abound in Iceland and overland travel was extremely difficult and time-consuming until the 20th century.  This makes more sense when you realize that for the most part only the Icelandic

Hvítá bridge.

coast is populated, so most travel around Iceland occurred by ship.  It was not until 1928 that overland travel through the Borgarensi region became possible, when the Hvítá bridge was built.  It is only a single-lane wide, but it was important enough at the time for the Prime Minister to attend the ribbon-cutting ceremony at its opening.  In 1979 the bridge across the Borgarförður at Borgarnes was built.  These remain the only two ways to cross the major

waterways in this region.
   There were horses in almost every pasture as we drove around the valleys, so we stopped a number of times for everyone to get a good look and for Sally to take plenty of pictures.  If you look closely, you can see the double coat of hair that helps them survive the Icelandic winters.  Joslyn's classmates in Colorado are doing research reports about native vertebrate animals, so she is going to do something similar over here about the Icelandic horse.  Soon, she will be the resident expert, so we can pepper her with questions as we drive around.

                        The kids may have gotten out of school today, but the adults did not.  A six-week class on Icelandic culture and language started last week, but we did not find out about it until this week.  It is being taught by Ian Watson, an American ex-pat from Rochester, NY.  He was trained as a linguist but is somewhat of a Renaissance man and seems to have become involved in a plethora of activities since he moved here in 2001.  The class is meant to teach exchange students about Iceland and to give them a chance to learn a little about the language.  This class was devoted to learning about the pronunciation of consonants and consonant combinations.  It was fascinating.  We had never heard about voiced versus non-voiced consonants.  That simple lesson really helped us better understand some of the sounds in Icelandic that we do not have in English.  For instance, a double-l is pronounced "tl", like in "bottle."  Ian also discussed Icelandic grammar a bit and we learned that Icelandic does not have an indefinite article ("a" and "an") and the definite article is indicated by modification of the noun, not by adding a word like our "the."  I don't know how many of these sorts of details we are actually going to learn over the next few months, but it will be fun trying!