One more thing: the Icelandic sweater.  From the first time I read about it in Mallory's blog (yup, that's right Mallory, I'm still creeping on you even when I'm IN Iceland) I wanted to make one.  I found out in the National Museum that they are not that traditional as I had thought, but people started wearing them in the 1940s.  Whatever, new traditions.  So yeah, everyone actually wears them!  All the time.  After being all over europe and hearing little kids speaking all kinds of foreign languages you would think it would get old but this is actually the cutest thing ever: little kids running around talking to each other in Icelandic and wearing Icelandic sweaters. In Iceland.  So much cuteness and Icelandicness. 

Icelandic hipster in an Icelandic sweater in a hipster bar

Midnight Sun

So, the summer solstice is a month away, so there are technically only 19 hours of daylight (with sunset at 10:56pm and sunrise at 3:52am), but that does not mean it is actually dark during the "dark" hours.  It is never dark here!!  Even when the sun sets, it's so close to the horizon that it is still light.  It's crazy!!

Example: last night, I went into a concert around 11:30pm.  It was light out.  I came out around 3am.  It was light out!  The only time it gets reasonably dark at night is when it's cloudy.  It's kind of cool to see for a week but I could not imagine living with that, it really messes with your head.

Land of Fire and Ice

Current location: Reykjavik, Iceland


Though I haven't yet seen any fire or ice, I did learn in the National Museum yesterday that they are represented on Iceland's flag : when they were designing the national flag, it was originally going to be just a blue background with a white cross, to represent the glaciers, but they decided to add a red cross to represent the fire from the volcanoes! Cool!

Note: I will no longer be uploading photos to to my blog because blogger decided to install some new, "better" system that doesn't work! Thanks a lot!!

foooooooood.

Since I can't put my pictures on my computer to upload them to my blog, I'll just give you a little taste of Nice.  Today I went to Fenocchio, a famous ice cream place in Nice which is known for its weird ice cream flavors, like beer, tomato-basil, and various flowers.  I picked avocado and rosemary.  The rosemary didn't have too much flavor--it definitely tasted like rosemary but in a pretty mild way, and it was a little bit sweet.  The avocado, on the other hand, was heavenly.  It was also a bit sweet, but so creamy and delicious, with a really mild avocado flavor but a great texture.  I will try to make avocado ice cream this summer but there is no way it will be as good as this.  My sister and I tried an avocado chocolate in Bruges, just because it seemed weird, and it was also great.  I never would have guessed avocado would lend itself so well to sweet things, but I want to experiment with all kinds of avocado desserts now!

I also tried another niçois specialty the other day, socca.  It's basically a chickpea pancake--they use chick pea flour to make a great big flatbread that they fold up and cut into pieces and you eat it as a snack.  They don't put anything on it, and chick peas don't really have that much flavor, so it really only tastes like salt but it was a great snack.

It's my last night in Nice and for dinner I will be enjoying a delicacy of pasta with pesto and tomatoes--back on the poor diet since my parents left!  And tomorrow I'll be heading north to spend a few days with Ginger in Paris, which will be lovely and relaxing, before I head really really north to Reykjavik.

Whoops!

So I realized I haven't posted anything in a while.  I can't really post about Basque Country with my parents until I put my pictures on my hard drive, which could take a while since there isn't enough room in my hard drive for my photos... Also blogger changed its photo uploader so I probably wouldn't figure out how to do it anyway.

BUT, Basque country was really really lovely and I had the best time with my parents.  We stayed in Bayonne, the capital of French basque country and did day trips to Biarritz, St-Jean-de-Luz, some inland Basque villages, and San Sebastian, in spanish basque country.  The villages were beautiful and San Sebastian is an awesome beach town.  I found Biarritz to be kind of boring, it wasn't beach season but it still seemed like there was absolutely nothing to do there besides the beach.  San Sebastian, on the other hand, was beautiful and really fun and lively.  It was packed with people,  and there was an important soccer match that day so there were tons of people drinking and shouting in the streets.  Even though it's just across the border, it definitely felt not French.  I would love to spend a few days there in the summer, but it was still cool to see just for a few hours. We went to the Basque Museum on the first day in Bayonne to learn everything we know about Basque culture

On Sunday, we drove from Bayonne to Toulouse, spent a lovely last afternoon and evening in Toulouse seeing impressionist art, drinking wine, and enjoying our last meal of duck, then on Monday they headed to the airport and I headed to the train to come to Marseille to meet up with a friend.  I'm still there now and we're heading to Nice this evening.  I've been staying with a friend of Molly's in Marseille is really nice and fun and has been hanging out with us, showing us some stuff in the city, and introducing us to some of his friends.  I really love Marseille so far.  There are tons of immigrants, so it's really diverse and interesting, and it's also on the Mediterranean and is really beautiful too.  Unlike many other French cities, it's a little bit dirty and loud, which I love.  It reminds me a lot of Rome--not the cleanest city, but it has tons of history and character. 

I'll try to update where I am but I'm gonna be on the go until the end of May so I probably won't write very much.  sorry in advance!