Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme

So I've finally had a chance to experience the eponymous ice of Iceland.  The weather here is like an excitable little child in a sweet shop who can't make up his mind: "Snow! No, rain! Wait, no, hail! Yeah, hail. No just wind. Snow and wind? Hail and rain? No...everything at once!"  And so everything at once is what we got today, a snow-wind-rain-hail-pocalypse.  Ok, maybe no pocalypse, but it was still pretty serious.  When we get just snow though, as we did this weekend, things begin to look very pretty indeed.  Exhibit A, B, and C (and my new snazzy header, oooh):

Susseljuhús - the sustainability centre in Sóhelimar where I work

Things turned not so pretty when the rain melted the snow and froze to ice, turning all the dirt roads in the village into ice roads.  Not so much fun in the darkness of morning.  But after today's efforts everything is now covered in a layer of sludge, which makes everything a bit safer, albeit not as pretty.

I've begun work in Ölur, the forestry initiative in Sólheimar.  At the moment it's still too early to plant, so I've been sorting poplar saplings into five categories (tall, tallish, short, really short, scutty) and making cuttings of herbs in the greenhouse.  The past two days I've spent my time enveloped in a perfume of rosemary and spearmint; it's a tough life.  Most of the trees are grown to be bought by the government for a reforestation scheme - Iceland is one of the most deforested countries in the EU; although from what I understand, the forests were neither all that plentiful nor impressive to begin with.  There's an Icelandic joke that goes something along the lines of "What should you do if you're lost in an Icelandic forest? ..... Stand up."  (Readers should note that Icelanders are generally a good bit funnier than this.)

Paulo and Matt struggle through an Icelandic forest

The rest of the plants, mostly herbs and a few types of flowers, are grown to sell to the general public.  It's an organic nursery, so everything has to be grown to fairly strict standards.  No pesticides, hormones, non-natural fertilisers, etc.  There are ways and means, though, of making the garden grow without creating mutants.  For example, when I was making cuttings of rosemary, mint, and pineapple salvia this week to make new plants, I dipped the ends in lemon water.  Most hearty plants will re-root on their own without the aid of dangerous hormones, but lemon juice gives it an extra boost.  Oh, and all the vegetarians out there may want to skip this: organic fertiliser?  Ground up fish bones and blood.  You may be vegetarian, but your vegetables aren't... As the logic of Hazel (who is also a vegetarian) goes, we're more vegetarian eating cows that eat grass, than vegetables that eat fish.

The head gardener of the forestry programme is a quiet woman full of interesting surprises.  She lives in Sólheimar with her boyfriend, a big jovial man who likes to talk loudly about politics over tea breaks, and Popeye the sheepdog.  I found out she's an installation artist who has taken a sabbatical from her craft for an indeterminate amount of time.  Yesterday as she trimmed an unruly cloud of lemon balm she asked me, "Do you play Facebook games?"  I told her I didn't, and she went on, "I play Fairyland.  The object is to have a garden and grow plants."  She fell silent after that and moved on to watering the oregano.

As all of the interns get more involved with their projects, I'm able to really see the connectivity of the community shine through.  The clippings of rosemary I made the other day in the herb greenhouse were used by Will and Pami in the bakery today in their herb-infused oils experiments.  When fully grown, the tomatoes and cucumbers Flor is cultivating in the greenhouse will be used for lunches.  The herbs left over at the end of the season will be dried and used in the candle workshop where Hazel's working, and the natural cleaning products Paulo, Claire, and I were creating in the soap workshop will be used to clean the guesthouses.  Ideally, it would be cool to take it a few steps further: use the natural hot springs to plant more fickle fruits and veg all year round (nine bean rows shall I have there...), keep bees to provide the beeswax for the candles (a hive for the honey bee...), and most importantly, set up a microbrewery and open a little sustainable pub - really missing the aul pint or two here...

At the risk of sounding more like a hippie than people already think I am, "It's all, like, connected, man..."  There's only so much intrinsic worth an object can possess; after that, it's up to personal and social influences to put a value on something.  If you have a bag of dried herbs that comes from southeast Asia that cost you a fiver in the local supermarket, it's not going to be as valuable to you as the herbs your friend picked and dried for you.  It reminds me of The Story of Stuff (which if you have 20 minutes, I would highly recommend watching), which traces the true cost of a radio and explains how we never pay, or often consider, the true cost of products.  Aside from the cost element of an item, though, is the value, and this is something that we can consider and influence on an individual level.  I know it's not as easy as walking down to the village greenhouse to say howdy, nor would completely localised economies solve all the world's problems.  The poorly planned, grossly unequal globalised production line as it stands today is a massive issue to tackle; but being more mindful of where our stuff comes from, and the real people who were involved in getting it to us - conscious consumption - is something we can all do.  It's a good place to start, don't you think?

The Lake-isle of Sólheimar?

In other news, all is well on the set of Iceland's Next Top Intern.  After a surprise birthday dinner on Monday for Claire's birthday, we all sat around listening to Sigur Rós, waiting for more snow to come.  Though we still can't understand most of what they're saying (Takk - "Thanks" - and goðan daginn - "good day" are all the meaning I can salvage at this stage), all the same there are few things more fitting to do in Iceland than blast post-rock Icelandic bands by candlelight.  

Tonight, we Þorrablot!  This will involve fermented shark, sheeps' heads, and the interns performing their rendition of an old Icelandic folk song.  Stay tuned for the aftermath.

More photos here. 

A Stitch In Time Saves...A Lot More than 9 Quid

Informed that there was the chance of a party in the village this weekend, the other interns and I managed to procure a lift to the nearest town, which is about half an hour's drive away, to buy supplies.  Given that this was our first time out of the 100-person village in a week, we were duly excited.  However, a trip to the off-licence served to dampen spirits a bit; they weren't kidding when they said alcohol is expensive up here.  And I mean really expensive: a 70 cl bottle of Captain Morgan, which would retail in Ireland for about €25 or in the US for about $20, was the guts of €50 or $60.  Yes, feck's sake indeed.  You'd think as a country that has named grapes vínber - literally "wine berry", they'd have their alcohol price priorities straight, but apparently not.

But no fear.  Since drinking will be financially non-viable most of the time, I've taken up the next best thing: knitting.  Drinking and knitting actually have quite a few similarities: they're great hobbies for rainy days, they both encourage thoughtful conversation, and in large quantities both will keep you warm in the cold Icelandic wind.  Sorted.

Last weekend we decided to explore our surroundings a bit, and so trekked down to the Ölfúsa River to see the sights.  It was about a 45-minute walk through tufty fields covered in frozen horse crap and dissected by channels of ice here and there.  

The area was so flat that the river began to seem like a mirage; it stayed about a 10 minute walk away for at least half an hour.  Apparently this optical illusion has to do with the clarity of the air here - objects seem much closer than they are.  We eventually did get to the river, and much revelry ensued.  Large quantities of ice are great fun.  

Aside from off-licence trips and ice rivers, I've finished my first week here at Sólheimar.  The supervisor of the forestry programme was on holiday this week, so I'll be properly starting into my main internship next week, but for the past few days I've been concentrating on using my online marketing experience to do what I can to help.  The Facebook page has been created, the YouTube channel is up (though no content yet, I have to ask around the village for videos to upload so stay tuned on that one), and there's even a LinkedIn profile if anyone is so inclined to search for Sólheimar there, although LinkedIn's connectivity policies are very restrictive if you don't want to pay them for the honour of being in their network.  While I'm eager to learn a new set of skills, something that I can hopefully expand upon as I venture into a new field of work, it's also good to know that what I've been doing for the past two and a half years can actually be valuable to organisations such as Sólheimar.  

So that's the work side of things for the moment, but this place is a lot more than just the day to day work.  Everyone who works in the village lives in the village, and the work that is being done directly effects the village.  You can see the fruits of your labour pretty much immediately, which can be something of a luxury in our global society, where so much business lies in the online or theoretical realms.  If you help cook lunch for the village, or plant five trees in the nursery, that's a measurable, tangible action.  I'm so used to talking in terms of advertising return on investment and search engine marketing, where "customers" or "$500K" are just terms that are tossed around every day, without any real thought as to what they actually signify.  It's a bit funny, I suppose, that I find myself more in touch with reality working in a tiny eco-village in the middle of nowhere in Iceland than working for one of the largest companies in the world in a major metropolitan area.  

There's a lot to a sustainable community, especially one that focuses on caring for people with disabilities.  There are some interesting things going on beneath the surface: the politics and ethical questions for instance, some of which I may broach later here.  But the people here really do have a very good life; they're encouraged to be as independent as their capabilities allow, and everyone has an individual role to play in the community.  Sometimes the lines blur between the "home people" and the carers, and really that's the way the founder, Sesselja, would have wanted it.  I've caught myself wanting to know who's who, and then questioning why it should matter.  The answer, I guess, is that it shouldn't.  And sometimes it's just as simple as that.

There's a lot to learn here, from the internship itself, from the community, and from the other interns.  The house we live in is suspiciously like something out of a reality TV show: 10 twenty-somethings, travelling to Iceland in the dead of winter, live together and battle the wind, elements, and mystical trolls in the hopes of being crowned Iceland's Next Top Intern... the house could easily be bugged with hidden cameras.  But the experience, the mutual respect, and the unusually high level of insanity we all have blend together very well.  A really great bunch of lads, all around.

Oh, one more thing before you go.  We saw more Northern Lights!

More photos here.

Why, Hello There!

Family, friends, random Brazilian man who stumbled here through a misspelled Google search…welcome!  For the next indeterminate amount of time, I hope to document my thoughts and adventures as I navigate the ambiguous realm of the twenty-something.  I recently left my job to gain experience in the field of environmental sustainability in the hope of pursuing it as a career.  Over the next few months I’ll be travelling around to various – and mostly undecided or unconfirmed – locations to develop my individual views on the matter, on what’s working, and what role I might possibly be able to play in the whole thing.

First stop, a three-month internship in a sustainable eco-village in Iceland called Sólheimar, where my time will be split between the sustainability center and forestry internships.  Why, you may ask, would I move to Iceland in the middle of the winter, with only four hours of daylight, and lots of cold things and not so many warm things?  Well, sure why not?  Iceland is a bit of a dark horse, a country you wouldn’t often catch yourself thinking about of a rainy afternoon, but which nonetheless seems to be unexpectedly popular.  The most common reaction I’ve received since I found out in early November I was accepted to the internship has been something along the lines of, “Oh wow, I’ve always wanted to go there!”  (Actually, to be fair, the most common reaction was an uncomfortable silence followed by a forced, “Oh, good for you; that’s interesting…”, but that was before I adjusted my explanation of the internship so that it didn’t sound like I was running away to a puffin-ruled communist enclave on an isolated fjord.)  It’s a bit of a mysterious fire and ice wilderness type of a place, and so the fascination is understandable, really.  Who wouldn’t want to sit in a hot spring in the middle of the snow, or frolic with puffins partake in completely non-communist activities that are in no way dictated by avian overlords?  Exactly.

Puffins and breathtaking scenery aside, Iceland has a unique and rich culture due to its physical isolation, and from an environmental standpoint is strides beyond most nations because, among other things, of its use of geothermal energy.  According to the Iceland Energy Authority, 87% of Icelandic buildings get their heating and hot water from geothermal energy (and additionally 75.4% of the nation’s electricity comes from hydro power, bringing their usage of fossil fuels to just 0.1% of their overall energy consumption).  I can’t do much more than regurgitate statistics at the moment, but I’ll hopefully get to learn a lot more about a culture that is sustained this way in the coming months.

So I have two days of gratuitous frantic packing left, and then I depart for the wintery, constant night of Iceland.  Until then I’ll leave you with some of the natives to set the mood.