Remembrance

English: A simple wind chime

Wind Chime (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I remember the smell of smoke that clung to my grandfather and the sound of his breathing. It sounded like he was trying to pull a hurricane through the eye of a needle. He had a missing finger on his right hand.

 

I remember the spring when I stepped into a bucket of orange paint and left small orange footprints all the way from the front yard to our flat on the second floor and found my big brother. I was crying, but he just laughed at me.

 

I remember the boiling water from the holes on Iceland and how I shied away from all holes in the ground afterwards.

 

And I remember the wind chime on the terrace outside the room where my mother stared into space for hours after my father left for China and I never saw him again, and how the wind chime never seemed to sound as musical as they do in films or are described in books.

 

I remember straying into a dream where I was little red riding hood, and the wolf told me that he was the one who ate my grandfather’s finger.

 

I remember a smell of lavender in a meadow somewhere on the north island of New Zealand, but my brother says I’ve never been there.

The Land of a Thousand Amazing Holes in the Ground

If I had to choose a soundtrack for Iceland, it would be Valravn‘s “Koder på snor”

It is difficult to recreate the feeling with just pictures and music, but I’ll try anyway.

I went for a hike the first four days and every day I saw at least three different types of landscapes.

To get up to the first hut, I took a bus and on the way we drove through what was almost a desert.

Very sandy and very little vegetation

Then when I arrived at the hut, there was a hot spring and a rather swamp-like grassy area right up to the hut on one side

 

 

and what can only be described as troll-country on the other.

Looking down on the hut from troll-country. Some of the grassy-swamp can be seen to the left of the hut.

The next day I saw the first real Icelandic holes in the ground.

 

Small chimneys all over

The fourth day after hiking through emerald sand (yes, green sand) and over orange rocks, I reached the last hut and met these two:

Arctic fox cubs. They’re just that cute 🙂

They spent most of the time fighting and just ignored everything else.

Fighting and biting

Then I went on to more traditional sightseeing.

Gullfoss

A hole in the ground with bubbling water. Also known as Geysir.

A hole in the ground with bubbling mud

A hole in the ground with rocks. There’s also water down the bottom.

A steaming hole in the ground (very noisy).

Most of the holes in the ground were rather smelly because of the sulphur, but they were all amazing 🙂

I saw plenty of other things for example seals and whales, but if you want to see them, you have to take a trip to Iceland yourself, because I don’t have any pictures of them.

All in all, it was a wonderful experience, and I hope to go back there in the not too distant future.

Did you go anywhere this summer?

 

 

 

Nostalgia and Sketches then Iceland

The front cover of the first Elfquest comic. Elfquest is copyright Wendy and Richard Pini.

I used to collect Elfquest. At some point I forgot about collecting them and just reread the ones I had once in a while.

Recently, I found out that the entire series can be read online at http://www.elfquest.com/gallery/OnlineComics3.html so I’ve been reading a lot of Elfquest these last two weeks. The story is just as good as I remembered it to be, so I can highly recommend reading it.

It might be because of Elfquest that I suddenly felt like sketching wolves again.

And if I just throw in a couple of extra sketches,

you might forget to ask yourself why I haven’t published a story today.

The answer to that is that I haven’t finished anything new this week. And since I’m going to Iceland this weekend A bolg? will be going on holiday as well. Updates will return at random during August and be back to normal in September.

I hope you will all have a lovely summer holiday.

Are you going anywhere this summer?

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