Christmas, New Year's

Over Christmas Jox from Sweden came over, and we did a lot of walking around and visited different shops. We didn't go outside of the capital area because Jox didn't care about seeing touristy places. On the 23rd is when we went down Laugarvegur, the main shopping street of the downtown area, and the shops were open late. There were carolers holding candles, (I think?) the Red Cross giving out free hot chocolate, a few booths selling cotton candy and sugar-roasted almonds... I bought a small bag of the almonds for something like 500kr (which is a bit expensive if you ask me, but I was in the Christmas spirit at the time).

There were at least three spots where various people were singing into microphones or music was playing just on this one street, too. On the Youtube account there's videos of at least some of the things I'm talking about.

On the 24th of December, at least in my group of friends, the Icelanders go around delivering gifts to their friends for the day. Roxy and Snorri came by to deliver presents to me, then left shortly after to do the same to the rest of their friends. Jox and I just stayed at home if I remember, because one of us was sick.

On the 25th we went to Snorri's house for a dinner with his family. After that Jox and I walked around outside in the snow for a bit, looking at the Christmas lights on the houses.

For New Year's we went to Snorri's house for a dinner with his family again, and then everyone sat down to watch the annual New Year's comedy show which parodies all the Icelandic events that happened over the year. Some of it's political and some of it is "cultural", like the fact that one music video got really popular and was used to draw in tourists.

First I was sick for part of Jox's stay, and then Jox got sick after I recovered. So we didn't do a lot. But Jox just bought a plane ticket to come back on February 13th, to try and get a job here.

After Jox left I haven't been doing much, it's just school. Today I went to the fabric store to buy fabric and ribbons to make something like this, a Nordic flag garland. It seems popular to put bunting on Christmas trees with the flags of the country you're in here, and it used to be that you could find paper flag garlands with all the Nordic flags together on one string, but now you can only find them with a single flag (so, a pack with only Icelandic flags or only Danish).

I was thinking of getting a job in the summer, most likely working at a kindergarten because you don't have to have any qualifications except passable Icelandic for that. The first and second semester of school will probably be the hardest too. I heard that here, they make the first years of a major harder to try and weed out the people who aren't actually that interested. I don't know how true that is though.

Sorry that I haven't been sending many postcards, but I'll try to remember. I haven't been doing anything so it feels like I don't have anything to write about.