I got to my hotel in Reykjavik at about 4 p.m. just in time to go to the spa – which was badly needed. The skin on my face felt as dry as the Sahara Desert, between having a cold and blowing my nose about 6,000 times and then just all the sun and reflection from the water, snow, and ice…yikes!
The spa was lovely. A hot pool. A sauna. A steam room. A cooling off pool. Amazing showers.
I enjoyed my time in there and enjoyed my dinner in the restaurant immensely.
I also spent some time reflecting (then and since then) on my trip and about what you gain from trips like this. I have two master’s degrees that were a lot more expensive than this trip, but I would argue that I learned more in eight days in Greenland.
For starters, it is always a good refinement of one’s social skills to meet a group of strangers and integrate yourself with them. You never know who you will get on a trip like this. The other eight people and two guides were just fabulous in this case. But it is always interesting when you are the only American because you do become both more and less patriotic, if that is possible. And sharing a bedroom and bathroom with strangers, well, that is just weird on the first day and by the eighth day, it seems just fine.
On trips like this, you learn that your language is not the only one in the world (say what?!). Everyone in my group (but me and the two guides) spoke German. So I missed a lot of things. I had to piece together bits of information the best I could. Sometimes I got the gist of it; sometimes, I was dead wrong. (Like when I thought four of the people on the trip were traveling together and concocted this whole story about how it was a new “blended family” and that the one daughter was not being very nice to the new step mom and it seemed like things weren’t going very well between them. As it turned out, none of that was true – the four were not traveling together – it was one dad and his daughter – which explained why she was so “possessive of him 🙂 – and then two women traveling alone – but they all met up on the first night of the trip and got along and so were hanging out speaking German because they were all German. Luckily when I told them what I thought was going on, they found it humorous. Sheesh!) Sometimes you have to be okay with not knowing everything.
I also spent most of my time in the back of the group. I was the slowest hiker. I liked to hang back and take pictures of lichen. I liked to stop and listen to the sounds of quiet. So often in my life I am in a rush to get things done, to be the first, to accomplish this and that. It was nice to reaffirm that the view from the back is just as good as the view from the front.
And of course, I learned about the Vikings, Inuit culture (the most important word is “immaqa” which means “maybe” – we heard that a lot), geothermal energy, the tectonic plates, the warming and cooling of the earth, glacier growth and shrinkage. It was not one subject…it was lots of things woven together. It also reaffirmed for me that we are so dead wrong in teaching children subject by subject. If I could make a sweeping overhaul to the US education system, children would be in outside nature schools until the age of ten. We are living longer and longer and kids are being asked to do more earlier. Why? And how will we ever “save” the earth if we don’t learn how to love it? You can only learn how to love it by being with it.
Well before I get too soapboxy for a travel blog, I will end this here with my last thought:
I am a very lucky human being.
Amy Oswalt 