ten, Martha's Vineyard, nine Martha's Vineyard

So, I'm here in Iceland now, and the daily reminders that I'm in another place are piling up. Yesterday I was at the pool and there were three girls playing some kind of Marco Polo type game that involved slow counting. Instead of counting, "One, one thousand, two, one thousand" they were counting, "tíu Vestmannaeyjar, níu Vestmannaeyjar." This is like kids in Mass counting, "Ten, Martha's Vineyard, nine, Martha's Vineyard" since Vestmannaeyjar (Westman Islands) are a group of Islands off the south coast.

One of the other things that has been hard to get used to is the light here. We're down to one hour of real darkness, between 1 and 2 am, so when I go to bed, it's in this summery dusk that is usually still bright enough to read by. The evening and the sunset stretch so long that it's hard to know when bedtime is, since 10:30 looks like I used to think 8 would look. On the other end of the day, it's also very odd, like when the party to celebrate that I am "nýkomin til landsins" happened on Friday. Like all good Iceparties, we all ended up downtown in various bars and clubs, leaving the house at 1:30 am or so.

At our second stop that evening, I noticed that the sky outside was starting to brighten, and by the time we left, it was 3 am and fully daylight outside. The streets were crowded with people, and the lines were still long outside the clubs and bars.