Change of plans

We've decided not to go to Iceland after all. It's too expensive and I'm meant to be saving money for Australia. So our plan now is to go to the less-exotic, but still lovely, and likely much warmer Italy. The plan is to go to Lake Como in the north, which I've heard is beautiful, and also go to Florence. We've both been to Florence, but I went on my own and it was like 100 degrees at the end of June and I got two bad blisters on my feet from bad footwear choices, and O went on a school trip when he was 12 or something, not the most appreciative age, so we'd like to go, together, under better circumstances.

I am a bit disappointed in not going to Iceland. I was looking forward to the nature and beauty and sparseness of the country, as well as driving for the first time in Europe (and driving a stick for the first time in almost 6 years). But yeah, it would have been a lot of money and we are going to the US later this year and need to rent a car for longer than normal and San Francisco is also rather expensive, so better to have more money for that. I had gathered some weird and interesting facts though about Iceland that I was going to post after we booked our trip. I don't really want to wait 2 years or more to share them, so I'll post them anyway:

- Iceland is 2.5 times larger than the Netherlands, and only has 281,000 people (compared to the Netherlands' 16 million+).

- Traditional Icelandic food is something I think we'll be staying far away from. One of the most talked about is "putrefied shark meat that has been buried for up to six months to ensure sufficient decomposition" which even most Icelanders stay away from. Another fun one is "ram's testicles pickled in whey and pressed into a cake," as well as boiled sheeps' heads. Mmm.

- Serious crime is usually between people who know each other, and the police are unarmed.

- The Icelandic language is one of the most foreign I've seen without it being in Cyrillic or Chinese or something (the other two I can think of that could compete are Hungarian and Finnish). It hasn't changed much in 1300 years, so people in Iceland today are basically speaking what the Vikings spoke. There aren't really any regional dialects. While most people speak English well (thank god), they fight to keep English words out of their Icelandic, so they make up Icelandic description words for new inventions, like the phone (called literally "long thread").

There's all sorts of accents and umlauts and strange letters and long words (though I should be used to that by now). Some "simple" phrases:

How are you?: Hvernig liður þér?
What's your name?: Hvað heitirðu?
I'm from America: Ég er frá Bandaríkjunum.

Um... yeah.

Nouns can change spelling depending on how they are used, so, for instance, the name of a town or city can change depending on whether you are talking about going to it or coming from it. This is handy in the airport when you might be looking for your flight to a certain city but can't find it because it isn't spelt quite as you think it should be. The spelling of your own name could change depending on how it's being used in a sentence.

Names are another fun thing. Your last name in Iceland is your father's first name with son (son) or dóttir (daughter) added to the end. So the girls in a family have different last names than the boys, which can make things confusing to outsiders (especially when travelling; try convincing a UK or US customs person at the airport that you really are your kids' parent when none of you have the same last name). I don't think the woman takes her husband's last name either, so a family of four, if they have a daughter and a son, would have four different surnames. But the surname isn't that important anyway to Icelanders, and they usually forget about them and just use first names, even for the prime minister. Also, the phone book is alphabetical by first name.