Sharks, sources, and alumni

Iceland is accompanied, as in war. "What, drawn from the ashes?" Sympathetically interested friends. It was evident that my hopes for the safe return of their little. The eruption at that time is over, but television reports gave the impression that the country is knee-strewn with ashes, and its capital any day share the fate of Pompeii. (Or, at worst, Herculaneum.) However, the idea that my untimely end when - ever depicted on canvas future Bryullov partly reconciled to the inevitable. But, having landed, I discovered that the landscape around the PA looks surprisingly peaceful. Streams paws do not boil, ash clouds are not smothered all life. Bryullov would be disappointed ... My first stop on the road from the Airport-Blue Lagoon, the thermal lake with incredible turquoise waters among the black lava fields. Swim in it, the sacred duty of every tourist. However, swimming is a strong word. The water temperature -40 degrees, to make it swims, still that set Olympic records in the milk. The similarity is exacerbated by the fact that water is not near the blue and milky - white. They say that Icelandic young people are actively using this natural phenomenon for personal purposes. Couples in love come here specifically to have sex-good in the opaque water is already two steps can not see anything. On the shore stands a box with curative mud, which bathers carefully smear each other person. Here, directly in the lake, a bar. Tourists with white faces discipline from the mud line up for a beer. Spectacle worthy of the brush is no longer Bryullova and Bosch! Not easily wash off the face of volcanic make-up, food in the city, designer hotel 101 Hotel. I am told that in my room stopped by Leonardo DiCaprio, Jude Law and Harrisoi Ford (from excessive admiration forget to ask, at a time or all at once). Bath is a few steps from the bed barriers between them are absent. Well, if Ford and DiCaprio without them, and I'll manage. The next morning, going to the peninsula Snayfedlsnes-place that combines the savagery photogenic and good roads. Around-and-white masses of glaciers, lava fields, forests of dwarf birch ("If you get lost in the Icelandic forest-stand with his knees," joked the locals). On the Peninsula live seals, gulls, and the farmer Hildebrandur, supplying to the market the local delicacy, rotten shark. In its fresh meat is poisonous: it is dried before use in the wind, and then a few months kept in boxes, covered with earth. The result is something much pay-off ammonia, and the touch reminiscent of the rubber. According to rumors, shark helps cancer. Rings true: except under the threat of certain death so there will not be. My guide, a Russian emigre with a beautiful name, Boris Moiseyev, in paints poses happening in these places episodes from the sagas, interspersing the history of medieval murder and incest chilling episodes of his own biography. "He was an entrepreneur in Grozny, two million dollars in the bank lay. When the war began, the bank is bombed the first ... "Then the conversation to the local schools and colleges. His daughter, 22 - year-old Anna, tomorrow receive a diploma of financial engineering. I am invited to the ceremony. Received their diplomas, graduates are on the long runway, so that the process is much like a fashion show. Icelandic girls are obviously attracted to bright colors, extreme mini and tights with prints. Among the graduates notice the characters are not college age. At the Faculty of studying together, father and son. As I reflect, if they gave each other write-off and one of them who was blamed for two, the ceremony is over. On the way back I struck the building a strange-looking. A feeling that its architect was a robot WALL - I. For the decoration of the building used by all kinds of junk-rusty garden benches, street lamps, mirrors, etc. pomutnevshie Find out that live here are not bums with artistic inclinations, and a fiery fighter for the environment, the director Hrafn Gunnlaugson. However, for his house, he prudently chose such a beautiful place that spoil it could not even Egyptian pyramid collector.