Colchester: the First Capital of Roman Britain

London is a quick hop from Reykjavik. I think I spent more time waiting to get out of Heath Row (and I didn't even have checked baggage) and taking the train into London proper than I spent in the air. Of course, part of the delay was that I had to buy some wi-fi time to give an ETA to my couch surfing contact for that night. I had (finally, I don't know why I didn't do so years ago) signed up for Couchsurfing, and this was to be my first time trying it out. I spent some time trying to figure out the best means of transport in the UK, only to discover there wasn't one. I didn't really want to be so inefficient as to have a car to myself in a country with public transit (or to learn to drive on the left side of the road), the bus passes were useless since they only work for individual bus companies, which all operate different lines meaning that one can't go across the nation on one bus pass. The rail pass was for all the companies, but only covered fifteen days of travel out of two months, and cost as much as the two months unlimited use pass across the entirety of continental Europe. The buses and trains in the UK are so messed up because Thatcher, in her infinite wisdom, opted for a system that utilizes the worst aspects of monopolies and competitive markets: all of the price and quality of service of a monopoly combined with the cooperation and the simple unified system of competitors at each other's throats.

I ended up taking the full price train Northeast to Colchester, a little town in Essex, East Anglia, that has an unusual castle. The theme of my whole Britain trip was castles and cathedrals, so be prepared for far too many pictures of cornices and battlements, cloisters and dungeons.

I managed to navigate my way to my hosts' house. I stayed with a family whose sons were both around my age. They treated me to a lovely dinner and I enjoyed discussing travel, philosophy, and maths with them. The next day the son who was visiting at the time and his friend took me on a walking tour of the town. Our first stop was the gate of St. John's Abbey. The rest of the Benedictine abbey is gone, but the gatehouse from the 1400s stands despite being bombarded by Parliamentarians during the English Civil War.

A short walk away lays the ruined nave of St. Botolph's priory. The recycled red Roman brick is quite distinctive.

The same Roman brick is part of what gives the castle its unique look. The structure's history goes back millennia to when Colchester was the first capital of the Roman province of Britannia. The location was first a Roman temple to the deified emperor Claudius. The temple was burned down in 61 CE by Boudica, a tribal leader who spearheaded a revolt against the Roman occupation. Despite some early successes (such as burning London to the ground), she and her followers were defeated when they faced the bulk of the Roman army in Britain. 1000 years later the Normans built their widest castle on it, reusing the still rock solid temple foundation and bricks from the Roman town. The castle was used in the 1600s for a jail for imprisoning and interrogating witches. Shortly after that the battlements were torn down and sold as building material by an owner uninterested in history, who also began hauling out the sand from between the arches of the Roman foundation, apparently not realizing that the sand was structurally necessary. The castle was restored, in a sense, by Colchester's member of parliament who was gifted it by his mother-in-law for his wedding. He added the Italianate roof and domed tower, which - combined with the Roman brick - resulted in a structure that would look more at home in Italy than England:

Colchester Castle is now a museum, which is very much worth the price of admission. It gives a clear and well-designed presentation of the history and is full of Roman and medieval artifacts.

The guided tour was highly informative as well, and it is the key to getting down into the vaults and up onto the roof. 

The Convergence and Decentralization of TV and Film

I knew that broadcast TV was doomed, to be replaced by TV on the internet that can be viewed at any time (TiVo/DVR is a transition technology, like combination VCR/DVD players, that will be phased out). I didn't realize until recently the extent to which movies are going to be forever changed as well. The cost of shooting and editing high quality movies has radically decreased so that anyone with talent can make one, not just giant studios. And of course distribution is no problem on the internet. The term 'independent' may drop out from in front of music and movies, not due to a lack of independent art but due to the absence of anything against which to contrast it.

This realization came when watching short films that are better than almost anything that a production studio has ever put out. Projects like Future Shorts and films like these on Vimeo are creating shorts that have more beauty and power in each minute than the average Hollywood film has in the full two hours. Soon full length films of this kind will become common as well, or better yet, the idea of 'full length' will be lost altogether and stories will just be told in the length it takes to tell them, be that five minutes or fifty hours. Long form TV is becoming less episodic to the point where shows are only indistinguishable from absurdly long movies by the presence of theme song intros and the frequency of the credits rolling. The Wire, Rome, Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, Band of Brothers, and the like may not simply be the future of television, but the future of audio-visual art.

I'm currently reading The Singularity is Near, by Ray Kurtz, which (appropriately) may be the last physical book I ever buy now that I have a Kindle. The central point of the book is that technology is advancing and growing exponentially, and we are just starting to enter the knee-bend of the parabola where it really begins to shoot upward. This will revolutionize every aspect of our lives, and we should remember that art is a part of that, which is all the more important since that new technology should also provide us with lots of time to pursue what we love.

Fractal Worlds: Awesomeness Beyond Words

Musicians With Guns - Astroblast from ricardo montalban on Vimeo.

An Iceland Addendum

I'll leave you with Iceland's tourism campaign:

Inspired by Iceland Video from Inspired By Iceland on Vimeo.

This video features another wonderful song by Emiliana Torrini. There was an absurdly long concert (at least 4 hours) titled Inspired by Iceland, which is fully documented on the eponymous Vimeo channel (for those who are unfortunate enough not to know, Vimeo is like youtube, but with standards and quality). The channel also has interviews with everyone from Viggo Mortensen to Terry Jones to Yoko Ono on how Iceland has inspired their work.

The Terry Jones interview lead me to the Monty Python sketch about an Icelandic Saga:

Update: Also, this is absolutely gorgeous:

Winter in Hell from Enrique Pacheco on Vimeo.

Shit, I'm a Nihilist AND a Minimalist

I regularly read Diesel Sweeties, but rarely does it fit my life this well. 

The Blue Lagoon

I spent my final day in Iceland at the famed Blue Lagoon. As I had read, it was both overly touristy, overly priced, yet still worth seeing. The water all around was a milky baby blue and looked rather surreal sitting in the lava fields.

I'm often asked if it was cheap to travel in Iceland. I thought it would have been since the entire country actually went bankrupt. However, while the currency fell in half, the prices doubled, which is of course terrible for the people living there and made it no cheaper to travel than it had ever been. The Blue Lagoon's prices had tripled in the three years since my Lonely Planet was published, and that's not even counting the bus ride out there.

Inside the manicured swimming area there were steam rooms, mud-floored pools, and fake steam vents where even warmer water bubbled forth. The mud here purportedly helps people's skin due to the high mineral content (or something), and there were stations where gobs of the chalky white mud waited to be applied.

After a couple hours I felt that I had soaked enough and headed towards the airport. My plan was to walk the 26 kilometers to the airport. The bus ticket to the lagoon included a shuttle to the airport, but it only ran twice a day, once half an hour after I arrived and once far too late for me to catch my flight the next day. It actually worked out well since I had all night with nothing to do anyway before my early morning flight and, as my fellow European Hobos know, the cheapest way to the airport is to walk.

I had some nice views of the sunset over the lava fields. Before it was fully dark a man pulled over and offered me a ride. I thought it was rude and thickheaded to refuse (though I almost did out of a stubborn desire to avoid taking the easy way) and he sped me on to Keflavik International. I then of course had all night in a shut down airport without free internet. I first walked a few kilometers to the actual town of Keflavik where I had one last Icelandic style seafood dinner. On my walk back a woman offered me a ride and seemed concerned for my safety walking along the narrow road in the dark so again I assented despite the fact that I would have that much more time to kill in the airport. An airport worker said there was no sleeping at the airport so I spent the whole time making plans for Britain and doing non-internet things on my computer. In the morning the airport began to show signs of life and I was able to sleep on the hop over to London.

Reykjavik Night Museums

I had a few more days in Reykjavik before heading on to Britain, but I had seen nearly all there is to see in the small capital, so I spent quite a bit of time reading comics in the library, playing video games in an internet cafe, and updating this blog about the end of my time Korea to keep up appearances. Wow, I feel exceedingly dorky admitting that, but I'm pretty ok with my nerdiness. One day there was (oddly) a concert in the library where what looked like junior high or high school students rocked out in the normally quiet space.

I was lucky enough to have the season's Night at the Museums fall during this time. All of the city museums and attractions were open well into the evening for free showings. I had been to most of them but had not yet managed to see the Einar Jónsson museum, which sits right next to the emblematic basalt-themed church I mentioned earlier. Jónsson presciently realized that this hill (which was completely undeveloped at the time) would become the center of Reykjavik and so picked it as the location for his museum. He donated his life's work to Iceland on the condition that the museum be built to house it. He designed the building and lived in it as he continued to work.

I had seen a few of Einar Jónsson's statues and correctly predicted that this would be my favorite collection of Icelandic art. I probably would have photographed all of the statues had it been permitted, so instead I only took pictures of the best lit of the ones outside.

The statues use powerful imagery to address topics such as death, relationships, and religion.

The other museums mostly had the same art up that I had seen earlier in my visit, though there were a few new exhibits, including one in process where the artist was dripping paint down the windows of the museum itself. 

Another new work was a light sculpture on the pillars of the city hall. The changing lights reflected perfectly in the lake, doubling the length of the columns.

The Golden Circle

The Golden Circle is a  circuit that takes tourists to many of Iceland's most famous sites that conveniently lay just inland of Reykjavik. (The 'Circle' is not at all circular but more like a mutant figure eight.) First up is Þingvellir National Park, situated on the edge of Iceland's largest lake. The waters are crystal clear and so deep that scuba-diving is popular within its trenches.

Iceland sits atop a point where tectonic plates are pulling away from each other, and in the park you can see the land being slowly torn asunder.

This spectacular landscape was the setting for many of the pivotal events in Iceland's early history. It was the location of the location of Iceland's parliament, the Alþing, from 930 CE to 1799 CE. After being dissolved for 45 years the Alþing was reinstated in Reykjavik and continues to this day, making it the earliest founded extant parliamentary system in the world. (Note: Iceland's political makeup is enviably liberal: right now the ruling coalition is made up of the Social Democratic Alliance and the Left-Green Movement, while the opposition is composed of the Independence Party [a center-right leaning party that was the result of a merger between the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party], the Progressive Party, three members of The Movement, and one independent who is a former movement member.)  The Lawspeaker and others addressing the parliament stood on the Law Rock, where their voice was amplified by the rock outcropping from the higher side of the fissure behind him. The exact location is no longer known, but a flagpole was put up at the best guess. The Law speaker would read forth all of the laws from memory and then the laws would be debated and added to or amended. The decision for Iceland to become a Christian country was made here during a meeting of the assembly.

A short walk away a powerful waterfall rumbles as it falls between the sides of the fault lines.

Downstream is the Drekkingarhylur, a pool used to drown women found guilty of infanticide, witchcraft, adultery, and other serious crimes. Men were also executed at the assembly meetings, but by beheading or hanging.

The area is full of fissures and the lake itself is there due to the North America and Europe being rent apart. Rarely do natural beauty and historical significance coincide to such an extent. I was hesitant to move on, but I had a great deal to see that day.

The next stop on the circuit was Kerið, a lake within the steep confines of a deep crater. Björk gave a concert here once from a raft in the lake. I bet it was a hell of a show.

The area along the rift is of course highly volcanic, and actively so, as can be seen at the Geysir Geothermal Fields.

The star of the area is Geysir, the geyser for which all others are named. It used to erupt fairly regularly, but then some idiot tourists tried to set it off early by dropping rocks in it, which clogged the workings so that now it only erupts during earthquakes.

The smaller geyser of Strokkur, on the other hand, erupts every six minutes. I watched it three times. I especially liked seeing the water level suddenly drop, suctioned down into the earth before shooting skyward.

The farthest point of the circle from Reykjavik was Gullfoss, a double cascade waterfall.

As it grew dark I headed back into Reykjavik where I returned the car and spent the night in a hostel.

Ring Road Day 7: Completing the Ring Cycle

I began the day by checking out the oddly flat basalt outcropping at Kirkjubaejarklaustur that supposedly was mistaken for a church foundation when it was first found. 

The town had a few other interesting sites such as this fantastic statue and a church that was the site of a memorable sermon about hellfire and brimstone and atoning for sins that was made dramatic due to the volcano eruption occurring all around it. The lava flow stopped just short of the church.

A hundred some kilometers down the road was the town of Vic which is mostly notable for the pillars of rock just off the black sand coast. A basalt column served as the pedestal of a statue commemorating trade with Hull, England.

 Some of the formations look like sails and are said to be the ships of giants that turned to stone in the sun.

Others look like twisted wrecks of towers.

The waves were also rather impressive.

Further along was a natural archway that smaller boats actually pass through.

Not much further down the coast was the Skógar Folk Museum. Outside was a friendly cat.

Part of the museum was a collection of restored traditional buildings and the period items that furnish them.

The museum proper was closed, but the proprietor, 88 year old Þórður Tómasson, saw me wandering around the buildings and unlocked everything to give me a personal tour of what he has amassed after 74 years of collecting. He was just as friendly and likely to rub up against me as the cat was. He kept wanting to hold my hand and kissed my cheeks in greeting rather often. However, his collection and his explanations of it (everything from bone ice skates to ancient wooden carvings to dried goat penis used in traditional folk remedies) were fascinating so I redirected his attention rather than saying anything.

My next stops were a pair of waterfalls, Seljalandsfoss and Uriðafoss. I decided it was best not to walk around the path behind Seljalandsfoss since it was presumably mostly ice at this point in the year.

Quite a bit further on my drive was Uriðafoss, which made up for its lack of height with the sheer power of the water churning over the rocks and ice.

From there I went on to the geothermal fields around Hveragerði. I wasn't able to find the geysers and boreholes that Lonely Planet described and was running out of light, so I satisfied myself with seeing the earth smoke around me. The whole valley looked like it was on fire. 

My final stop was the lava tube Raufarhólshellir. The ice in the caves made odd formations from the water dripping from the ceiling. I wandered the caves by the light of my headlamp and the patches of sky above from where previous cave ins had left gaping hopes in the rock above. As always, I was putting safety first by climbing around in there alone with hardly even another car driving by in the vicinity...

That night I made my way back to Reykjavik, where I found a quiet place near the bus station to sleep in the car for the night.