ICELAND!!!

Reykjavik at 2am

American and Eurpoean tectonic plates

Gullfoss Waterfall

Langjokull Glacier

Geysir

Solheimajokull Glacier

Glacier cone

Skogafoss Waterfall

View from Skogafoss Waterfall

Upriver from Skogafoss Waterfall

Behind Seljalandsfoss Waterfall

The Blue Lagoon

Leifur Eiriksson and Halldrimskirkja Church

Reykjavik

Perlan

Iceland – I never imagined that I would have such a great time there. I flew from Kuwait and met up with two friends from Chicago, Charlie and Dom. Easily the best vacation I’ve taken in a long time. And every great vacation must start with being arrested, right? Technically, Charlie and I settled out of court for smuggling but that’s just details. I guess I got a little excited that I would be able to drink for the first time since arriving in Kuwait. So both Charlie and I picked up two bottles of booze and a case of beer at duty free and walked towards the exit. Neither one of us knew but the Icelandic government only allows an individual to bring in one bottle and a 12 pack of beer. We couldn’t carry our suitcases, bottles, and beer together so the bottles went in the suitcases. I guess we were the poster children for smuggling walking by security so they stopped us and asked to scan our bags. Well, they found the bottles of booze that we were “smuggling” and said we would be fined. $80 later and a chat with an Icelandic police officer, we were a bottle short and on our way. (They just let us pay the tax on the beer and be on our way.) I didn’t feel so bad after they stopped a Norwegian couple behind us for having too many bottles of wine.

After that, the trip was fantastic. The first night, July 4th, we went out of a few beers. The bars close at 1:30am on weekdays and as we left the bar, the sun was down but it looked like sunset. I knew this was going to be fun.

Our first tour was the Golden Circle Super Jeep Tour. Our tour group couldn’t have been better. Three girls from DC, the UK, and Australia, respectively, two guys from the UK, and the three Chicagoans. We all ended hanging out the entire weekend and they really made the trip. Our first stop was Þingvellir. It is the location where the Icelandic parliament, Alþingi was founded in 930, which makes it the oldest known functioning parliament in the world. It is also the place where the American and European tectonic plates meet. These plates are moving apart at about 1 inch per year. You can see where the plates are moving apart.

The next stop was the Gullfoss waterfall. We stopped at a rest area type place with a little gift shop/restaurant for what the guide said was a 15 minute stop. There was a trail so we followed it and to our surprise found the waterfall. The guide didn’t tell us about it because we were planning on stopping at it later in the tour. The waterfall was amazing and I could have easily spent a day hiking around exploring different parts of the falls and river but we had to move on to the next stop, snowmobiling on Langjokull Glacier, the second largest glacier in Iceland.

Snowmobiling was the reason to sign up for this tour. I mean snowmobiling in July, how cool. I emailed the tour organizer to check if they provided cold weather gear for this part of the tour. Luckily for the guy from Kuwait, they did. But it wasn’t too cold except when we were snowmobiling. You could see little creeks forming on the glacier from the melting ice. It was awesome. We probably spent about 30 minutes on the glacier. The water was clear blue in some parts. Simply beautiful. The snowmobiling was fun too. I almost dumped the sled a couple times (and Dom) but luckily kept it upright. 30 minutes wasn’t enough.

After the glacier, we stopped by the Gullfoss waterfall again but didn’t spend much time. The last stop of the day was Geysir, the most of the famous geyser in Iceland. It erupts regularly every 5-10 minutes and there was a crowd of people, including me, just standing around the geyser with cameras waiting for it to erupt. The whole area had a pleasant eggy odor and the people that got sprayed by the geyser smelled even better. I didn’t touch the water of Geysir but did feel the water of one of the pools near it. It easily passed the hot test. Here is a video of the eruption (sorry but you’ll have to tilt your head or the monitor).

The next day, part of group went on other tours, but half of us went on walking tour the Solheimajokull Glacier. (On the way to the glacier, we drove past Mt. Hekla. It was once believed to be the entrance to Hell until two hikers went to the top and safely returned.) They call the Solheimajokull a glacier tongue which comes off of the mother glacier, the Myrdalsjokull ice cap, the fourth largest glacier in Iceland. (Follow the Myrdalsjokull ice cap link and you’ve just went on our tour, minus the glacier.) The tour provided crampons for your books and an ice ax and we were on our way up the glacier. The first part of the glacier was steep and we lost a couple members of the tour but the rest of us went on. I thought that this glacier would be similar to the Langjokull Glacier but it was very different. The glacier was dirty. Parts of it looked like ice and snow but parts of it looked like someone had dumped piles of dirt all over the ice. The piles were called glacier cones and we were told they get there because a glacier does not slide over the ground. Instead it is constantly cycling the ice from the bottom of the glacier to the top and vice versa and that is how it brings up the dirt. The cones looked like you could just wipe them away but they were really a dirt blanket over a solid ice peak. There were still little rivers on the glacier and you could fill up your water bottle in the standing pools of water. However, if you were stranded on a glacier, the guide said you couldn’t survive on the water from these pools because the water had no minerals. So whether you’re stranded on a glacier or the middle of the ocean, you still need an alternate water source.

We spent most of the day just hiking around the glacier, trying to avoid falling in a crevice, looking at the rivers and pools on the glacier. But my favorite part of the day was the little bit of ice climbing we did. The guide found a 30 foot hole in the glacier and let us all have a chance to climb down and back up. I’ll definitely do that again!

On the way back from the glacier, we stopped at two more waterfalls, Skogafoss and Seljalandsfoss waterfalls. The hike to the top of the Skogafoss waterfall was rough but the view from the top was worth it. And if you climbed a fence and hiked just a little more, there was another waterfall. Not as high but just as impressive. At the Seljalandsfoss waterfall, there was a trail that made a loop behind the falls. What an amazing country!

The city of Reykjavik reminding me a lot of a college town. The main street is Laugarvegur and was very similar to State St. at UW-Madison. We had read that people stayed home and partied until at least midnight because it’s very expensive to drink at the bars ($15 beers). We went out at 11pm on Saturday and it was almost a ghost town. But two hours later, the bars were packed and everyone was having a good time. By the time we walked home after 5am, the sun was well up in the sky. A lot different from a 5am night in Chicago.

Sunday, we hung out with two Icelandic friends we made, Bergþóra (aka Begga) and Thelma. Besides teaching us the right way to pronounce Reykjavik, they took us to the Blue Lagoon. The water is really an eerie shade of blue. It gets even more blue in the winter because the algae changes color with the temperature. The whole lagoon is created by the run off from the Svartsengi power plant nearby. It pumps geothermally heated water from a mile below the Earth’s surface. It is like a big hot tub, without the bubbles. If you get too close to where the water is dumped into the lagoon you could get burned. You can be sitting there content and all of a sudden a hot jolt of water hits and you have to move to cooler waters. There are other spa amenities at the Blue Lagoon like a sauna, massages, natural mud masks. A good place to spend a lazy Sunday.

Charlie and Dom had early flights on Monday which left me to explore Reykjavik alone before my flight. I checked out the Hallgrimskirkja Church and Perlan. The Halldrimskirkja Church is one of the most famous landmarks in Reykjavik. In front of the church is a statue of Leifur Eiriksson, donated by the US government. We should give out more gifts like this. Entrance to the church is free but you have to pay to go up in the tower. Well worth it as you could see over the entire city from there.

Perlan is a building constructed on top of hot water tanks for the city. Inside is an award winning restaurant and a Viking museum. Outside of Perlan is a manmade geyser that is modeled after the famous Geysir.

Just a short note about the place we stayed. It is called Room with a View which is an apartment building on the main street in Reykjavik. If you’re going to Iceland, I highly recommend staying there. Anyway, when I called to book a room, the guy who owned the place told me I should pay in $US and not a credit card. The reason? The rates on the website were posted in 2005. Since the dollar has gone down so much in the last 2 years, it would be cheaper to pay in dollars than a credit card which would give the current exchange rate. It saved me $100. Pretty much an example of the people I met there.

So you can probably tell by the amount I wrote and the pictures that I had a good time. It was depressing to come back to Kuwait but New Year’s 2008 in Reykjavik is on the table. Anyone up for it?

I had heard about the Kuwaiti souk (market) and I finally made the trip into the city to take a look. The souk that we went to was not the open air market I envisioned but rather a big cluster of stores selling everything you can imagine. Rugs, blankets, toiletries, electronics, food, currency exchange (I saw Iraqi money for the first time), gold, jewelry, and fake watches. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to the souk until about 10am on Friday (the Muslim Sabbath) and a lot of the stores close down around 10:30 or 11 for Friday prayers. About half of the stores were closed by the time we made it around to them. I was told the better time to go is in the afternoon after the prayers are over, but it’s so hot in the afternoon it doesn’t make me want to spend a lot of time shopping. I’m sure I’ll go back.

The bottom picture is of people during Friday prayers (the Muslim Sabbath). I haven’t seen the people lining up on the street like this before and thought it was interesting.

I have left Kuwait to go on another adventure. I am meeting some friends from Chicago in Reykjavik, Iceland for a few days of vacation. We have a tour planned tomorrow that will take us snowmobiling on a glacier and we plan to stop at the Blue Lagoon for some relaxation. Besides that, I just plan to enjoy some place that is vastly different from the desert. I will have some good pictures in my next blog.

Hope you had a great 4th!

I saw my first Kuwaiti sunrise since I arrived in April and was so jetlagged I would wake up at 3am, unable to fall back asleep. The sun comes up around 4:45am so it’s high in the sky before I usually get outside to go to work. A friend had a birthday party last weekend and after a long night of Charades and Truth or Consequences (I wish I was kidding) the sun was almost up when I got home. So I grabbed my camera and the top photo is the one that turned out the best. When I first looked at the photos on my computer, I thought it looked more like a tropical sunset than a Middle East sunrise.

Last week on Monday, I got done eating dinner, stepped outside, looked up at the moon and saw what I thought was a bright star right by the moon and the second picture was what I saw. (In August, the Earth will be closer to Mars than it has been in about 60,000 years.) It looked like the mirror image of the Turkish flag with the star on the wrong side. Speaking of Turkey, did you know that in 1928, a law was passed there to make it illegal to use the letters Q, W, and X?

I can say that I’ve been waterskiing in the Persian Gulf. I was in Abu Dhabi on Saturday and Sunday (I would say the weekend but everyone works here on those days) and the hotel I stayed at offered waterskiing for about $20. The boat looked decent and it had a 135HP outboard motor so I didn’t think it would be a problem. It was pretty windy and there were whitecaps on the water. The driver thought I was crazy for going skiing when it was that choppy but I figured it would be my only chance to waterski this year so I had to take advantage. Unfortunately, 30 seconds into the ride, the motor died. This happened 3 times and finally we gave up. Hopefully I’ll get back to Abu Dhabi when they have their boat fixed. Besides waterskiing, I didn’t have any free time. We did drive by the biggest mosque I’ve ever seen, the Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan Mosque. I haven’t been to the Taj Mahal, but I was with someone who has and they were more impressed with the mosque, even though the Taj was built over 350 years ago.

From the local newspaper…”Pakistani Sorcerer in Police Custody (June 19, 2007) Kuwait: Hawally police arrested a Pakistani expatriate in connection with sorcery in which the man would cast spells for a fee of KD 3000 (US $10,800). Police raided the man’s flat and the ‘sorcerer’ threatened to harm the police by using his magical powers but police still arrested the man (how brave) and he was referred to the authorities. During interrogations, he confessed that he executed over 70 magical spells and mostly Kuwaiti and expatriate women were his customers.” Along those same lines, I heard that an astrologer predicted the cyclone that hit Oman a couple of weeks ago. It’s very rare for cyclones to hit in this area so the police arrested the astrologer but later let him go. The reason…the cyclone didn’t do too much damage. Strange place, the Middle East.

I am looking into places in the area to go on vacation. I am planning a trip to Jordan to see Petra, the setting for the last scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Dubai, and Egypt. If you know of any other good places to visit, shoot me an email.

I am friends with this Italian guy who last week started telling me about a machine he invented to wash dogs. It’s similar to a car wash but on a smaller scale. He sold the drawings and specs to a business man who has since franchised the idea and I guess they are all over Italy and Spain, though I have never seen them. He had a bunch of pictures and it looked like a pretty simple machine. I’ve looked on the internet but couldn’t find anything. This guy was pretty passionate about his invention though. If anybody is looking for an investment opportunity, I can put you in touch with Guillermo.

Fardin, Navid, Adam, Yosef

Well, a full week in Kuwait is hardly as exciting as a single day in Korea. At least that’s what it seems like. My excitement for the week would have been meeting up with my friend, Captain Eric Raasch, a Marine helicopter pilot who was in Kuwait but has since left. I mentioned him in last week’s entry. He was stationed at an airfield about 2 hours northwest of me, living in an air conditioned tent, if the AC was working that day. He couldn’t leave the airfield and I could not get a hold of the right personnel quickly enough to get an access badge. It would have been great to meet up with a friend from home, 5000 miles from home.

Two of my Iranian friends are going back to Iran Thursday. Their one year work contract is up and they have decided not to renew it. So I tried to throw a going away party for them at my apartment. Unfortunately, the female guests showed up after 11pm, which I learned is the cutoff for women to enter the hotel property who are not wives, sisters, or mothers of the registered guests. I had a very heated discussion with a short man in a long white robe about this rule but finally gave in. We moved the party to another apartment but learned similar rules apply there. Every apartment building in Kuwait has a security guard. Besides keeping the building free from criminals, he holds the role of the religious police. He makes sure the residents aren’t bringing in women they aren’t married to, aren’t drinking alcohol, no parties, etc. Kind of like the high school atmosphere I have written about before. Luckily, Fardin, the guy that lives there, pays his security guard the equivalent of $20 a week to “wash his car.” Fardin didn’t go into detail about what would happen if we were caught, he just said it wouldn’t be good for him. But for me, because I’m American, it would be ok. Which is nice but I don’t think I’ll try to find out.

Hope you have a great week.

Korea turned out to be a lot more fun than I expected. Most of that had to do with how nice the Korean people are. They went out of their way to make sure I enjoyed myself in their country. A couple people took me out to dinner one night where we cooked pork and vegetables on a skillet at our table. All during the meal, we drank Soju, which is the traditional Korean liquor. They taught me the custom of drinking Soju, which is usually consumed out of a shot glass. You hardly ever pour your own drink because it is custom for someone else to pour it for you. The younger of the pourer/drinker has two hands on either the bottle or the glass. The elder only holds the bottle or glass with one hand. And you don’t drink Soju without having some sort of food with it.

Thursday, May 24 was Buddha Day in Korea, a national holiday. Buddha Day celebrates the birth of Buddha. The shop was 90% closed for the day which meant I didn’t work. Two of the office people I worked with took me to two temples that are on the UNESCO World Heritage list to experience part of the tradition of the day. The first temple we went to was the Seokguram Grotto. It was packed with people, some for sightseeing and some for praying. It was about a quarter mile walk through a wooded, uphill trail to the temple. Along both sides of the trail, colorful lanterns had been strung up. The main Buddha is made of stone about 15 feet tall and is in a stone shelter. The 24th was the one day of the year you could walk up to and around the Buddha. Many people had placed food and other offerings all around the statue and people were praying in front of him. I was told the temperature in the room the Buddha sits is the same all year round, one of the Buddha’s mysteries. Unfortunately, I couldn’t take photos but this site shows a good model of what the Buddha looks like.

The second temple was the Bulguksa Temple. I didn’t spend as much time at this one but they allow you to take pictures of the Buddha’s at these temples. They were really beautiful and it was interesting to see all the different ways people were praying to Buddha. The best part about this temple was getting a picture with a monk. He didn’t look happy to take a picture with me but I was told that’s how they always look.

For lunch and dinner on Buddha Day, we ate sitting on the ground in the traditional style. I struggled with chopsticks all week but by the end of my trip I was getting pretty good. At restaurants, they usually give metal chopsticks with flat ends. They give metal because it doesn’t absorb the bacterial and is easy to clean. They use the one with flat ends because they like to laugh at foreigners trying to eat noodles, at least that’s my theory.

Friday I said good bye to Ulsan and headed to Seoul to catch my flight back to Kuwait. I didn’t fly out until midnight so I had some time to kill. Instead of flying back to Seoul, I took a bus to East Daegu and then caught a bullet train to Seoul. The train cost about $40 for a 200 mile trip. The trains were really nice and quiet. Similar to some planes, they had TV’s on the ceiling above the aisles. These TV’s showed Korean shows and the speed of the train. The fastest I saw was 298 km/hour or 185 mph.

When I got to Seoul, I hoped on a tour of the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, between North and South Korea. It is a strip of land 4 kilometers wide dividing Korea at the 38th parallel created in 1953. It was a pretty sad and interesting place as it is the most heavily protected border in the world. It was created as a buffer zone between the two countries and has been largely uninhabited for more than 50 years, but there are a few small towns within the borders. It’s not a safe place to go walking around. On the drive in, there are fences up on either side of the road with signs posted for land mines. Our guide said only 30% of the land in the DMZ has been cleared of land mines. That’s enough deterrent for me to not go exploring.

The first stop on the tour was the Dorasan Train Station. You may have heard about this station in the news last week. A train crossed from the south into the north from the Dorasan station. This was the first time in 56 years trains had crossed the border between the two Koreas. We walked around the station for a while and all took pictures with the guards inside as this is the only place you can photograph them inside the DMZ.

My favorite stop on the tour was the 3rd infiltration tunnel. This was one of several tunnels dug by North Korea under the DMZ to mount an attack on the south. It is called the third tunnel because it was the third tunnel discovered. This was is the closest to Seoul and we were told that 10,000 soldiers an hour would have been capable of going through. The tunnel wasn’t very big so vehicles or machinery couldn’t have fit through. Plus, the ceiling was at about 5’6” so you have to walk hunched over the whole way.

Of course, North Korea denied building these when they were discovered. They first claimed the south built them. When that was proved false, the north claimed they were mining coal (the whole area is granite) and painted the walls black. All pretty funny now. We did get to see North Korea through binoculars. You could see a North Korean flag which sits on top of tallest flagpole in the world.

If any of you out there know Eric Raasch, a friend of mine from U of I, I got an email from him that he is with Marines that are in the Persian Gulf and will soon be in Kuwait. Hopefully I’ll get to meet up with him. Here is an article that shows the ship he is on. It’s the in the center of the picture.

This week was the type I hoped I would have when I took this job. A lot of work but opportunities to do some unique things. This week, those were going to Ski Dubai and a Lotte Giants baseball game, a Korean team.

I had to leave Kuwait to renew my visa (it expires every 30 days) so I was asked to go to Korea to help on a project UOP has under construction there. Before going to Korea, I stopped in Dubai for a day to purchase some structural steel for my project in Kuwait. After spending the day climbing around steel yards in 105 degree heat, I stopped at the Mall of the Emirates. There is no sales tax in the United Arab Emirates and a lot of money there, so the malls are in constant competition. The Mall of the Emirates built Ski Dubai to bring in more shoppers. It is similar to the casinos in Las Vegas; each one is continuously improving itself to bring in more gamblers.

For about $50, Ski Dubai will rent you snow pants and a coat, skis, and boot plus a lift ticket for two hours. An all day pass is about $30 more but two hours was all I needed. Hat and gloves are not included but the cheapest set is about $15. I made the purchase and it was worth it.

The hill is not very big. It only takes 5 minutes to get to the top and less than 30 seconds to get to the bottom. Their website advertises 5 runs but there are really only 2. On the right is the more difficult run and the left is the beginner. At the bottom of the hill there is also a jump for snow boarders and a bunny hill for lessons. I’m not a very good skier and haven’t been in about 5 years so I was happy to not fall on the difficult run. It was a great time. It wasn’t crowded and the snow didn’t turn icy like it does at the end of the day in Wisconsin. Click here to see a video of a slow ride on the easy run. At the bottom of the hill there are turn styles where you swipe your card and it will tell you how much skiing time you have remaining.

So after skiing, I went to the airport for my 3am flight to Seoul. Not a great time for a flight but the airport was packed. There was hardly a seat because everyone had already claimed their bed for the night.

One of the inspectors at my new job site was a baseball fan and I asked him about baseball in Korea. He said there was no team in the town I was in, Ulsan, but in Busan, an hour away, there was the Lotte Giants. (I would post a link but it’s all in Korean) I got on the internet and found out they had a game Saturday at 5pm. The Koreans also work weekends (it feels like Americans are the only ones with 2 day weekends), so after work, me and a girl from work hopped on a bus to Busan. Everything was really cheap. It cost less than $5 to get there, $3 for the seat, and $1.50 for a beer. But I felt stupid for buying food or beer there because everyone else in the stands just brings there own.

We got there two hours early which was good because all the seats except for the ones directly behind home plate are first come first serve. And I don’t think they stop selling tickets until people stop buying them because all of the aisles and stairways were full of people watching the game. Luckily, we got great seats right on the first baseline, equivalent to the 200 level seats in Wrigley.

I don’t know if the game was played against a big rival but the fans there go berserk. I can only imagine the crowd noise is similar to a World Series game. The fans chant the batters name while he is at bat and cheer at the top of their lungs if he gets a hit. The home team didn’t hit a home run but I can only imagine what happens if there is one. And when the opposing pitcher makes a pick off move to first, the fans chat, “bah” at him for 20 seconds after it happens. Apparently bah is the same in English and Korean, it doesn’t mean anything but is just an easy word to yell at someone. Also, when there is a foul ball, everyone chants, “Give me the ball!” over and over at the person that catches the ball. No one actually turns the ball over though.

Between innings, there are cheerleaders and an MC on top of the home team’s dugout. They put on a show of singing and dancing. While the game is in progress, the cheerleaders are sitting but the MC is leading the fans in different cheers. At a MLB game, I’m sure they wouldn’t be allowed to be playing their music, beating on drums, and just making so much noise, but it really adds to the fun of the game. Call me a Lotte Giants fan.