20080713 CE Iceland - part II

We went to the mountains for 2 days camping. Iceland has such a beautiful nature! There are not so many insects, if any. A lot of clear water. We were drinking water from every spring and river which we found. They say if the water is moving, it's safe to drink. We saw geysirs, watched as they burst into the sky and then burble on the ground and then all over again. This hot water mixed with sulphur has beautiful colours, feels like magic.

We were walking around. At some point we got lost. Or some would say we just took a wrong turn so we explored more stuff. Some people were tired and very nervous. Situation was quite unpleasent in few moments, people started fighting and finally seperated into 3 groups. At that moment I was at the end so people already divided leaving in different directions. It was interesting to see people who are friends, volunteering together, improving their social (soft) skills and it all colapses when things get a bit hard. One group was going up-hill and the other was going downhill taking longer route. I decided following the one going up because it seemed better to be on the top and have a better sight over the terrain so I made my group go there. At some point leader of the "upper" team went to the lower team in order to join all of us together at the same spot, while we waited for them. We continued walking.

As we approached final destination, one of the girls fell and hit her head and a knee on the rock making it both bleed. We continued after a short break. Then we saw hot spring of water. It was too good to be true. Everybody put their clothes down and jumped into the river. We relaxed, had fun and forgot about all the stress which happened on the trip. It was around midnight and we were watching the sunset and mountains around us! Sunrise goes around 3 o'clock, if I remember, which means there is no real darkness during the summer time.

Next day we were hitchiking to Reykjavik. It wasn't too hard.

House were we lived wasn't it top condition. Sometimes we couldn't get cold water and sometimes, the toilet was stuck for hours. In the morning can be one hell of the problem. After few days it all got worse. Few of us where in great need to use it so we went out to some trees and bushes and felt call of the wild. Appereanltly one neighbour figured what was happening. She called Einer, the owner, and told him that we were shitting in the garden. He came in few minutes, jumped from the car, put down his sun glasses, said "what the fuck?!", went to the garden, search the whole garden and then returned and asked what was happening. He was relieved that we didn't shit in his garden :) Lady said that she would call the police because children are playing where we did what we did so we went back and picked up our shit in the bag and put it in the trash.

At the city, we ate some food at the super-market and a hot-dog fell from Bero's hands on the floor. When we returned from the city, Kirac figured that he had lost his wallet. We met some Croats who are living here for some years now. They come to work on a project and then they decided to stay for a while.

During the working days, you can see how Icelanders are relaxed and calmn. But when the weekend comes, it all becomes quite different. They start at home by drinking (because alcohol is so expensive in the clubs) and then they go out. When we came to the city at night, we saw a fight at the 1st club which we wanted to enter. I think we saw 3 fights during one night of clubbing. In front of the clubs there are usually queues so it won't be too crowded inside.

We started our journey home. At the airport, we learned that our plane was late. This was so not good because we bought a cheap ticket from London to Zadar with Ryanair which means we could be stuck in Stansted. The plane was late for 2 hours and we managed to get on time. At the baggage reclaim, Dim found jacket for his bag torn apart.

We had a great time there, altough trip was full of some small accidents.

20080713 CE Iceland - part I

After two years I'm looking back to the summer 2008 when I was in Stockholm, Iceland and Ukraine. Here are some notes which I made in that time. Trip to Iceland began in Stockholm which was described here.

20080713 CE Island

At the airport a policeman called me into a special room, took a look at my bags and found excessive amount of alcohol. Ok, it was mostly extremly cheap whiskey which I bought on Stockholm airport so I wasn't too sad about that. I bought it because I've heard how alcohol is precious and expensive here. So, I left some of the boose at the airport but still bringing domestic liquids. In the bus which was driving to Reykjavik we met rest of our team which was to participate on cultural exchange. Culture exchange (CE) is very cool event because you need to pay only for the trip and everything else is arranged by the organisers of the event. Now we were the guests, it was our time to enjoy, just like Icelanders enjoyed their stay in Croatia.

We were accommodated in one of many houses of one of the organisers (Einar). It was huge house with lot of free space and big windows. Perfect party place.

As you all know, Iceland is volcanic island and they use a lot of geo-thermal energy. Houses have 2 pipes of water: cold and hot one, which means they don't need to heat cold water like we do.

In the afternoon we went to public pools and enjoyed hot pool in the open. Now we come to interesting part. When you enter public pools, before going into the pools itself, you should walk naked to the showers and clean yourself. There is even a chart which shows few important spots on the body which require special cleaning :) At the showers there is always some weird looking guy whose job is to check if everybody goes naked to the showers before going to the pools. Which means he's looking at huge amount of dicks for the whole day. Personaly, I didn't feel very comfortable around naked men, but after few days I got used to it. Now I'm still not so stressed about it as before which is something which I always wanted to feel, freedom. Fuck the shame. And when you go back from the pool you can put you pants in a machine which uses centrifugal force to dry it out. Works pretty fast.

In the evening we met more organisers at the party at our house. I can say girls around there were pretty big, aggressive and "open". Well, yeah, it's cultural exchange, it's all very interesting.

Next day we went to the city and walked around. Some parts were full of birds which you could feed. Sometimes when you throw food you can watch air battle between birds fighting for the flying pieces. For the first time I've been to Lutheran church. Minimalism rules there, white colour, big space, no pictures, only few statues.

Did you know that you can enter a house of the Prime Minister whenever you feel like and go and chat with him, if he's available? Well, you can! They really seem open-minded people. You can also sometimes meet him during lunch time at nearby hot dog's. It's kind of special, president Clinton also ate there when he visited Iceland.

Buses in Reykjavik drive on hydrogen. At the time, they were testing it on the cars as well. Resulting product of using hydrogen is water. A guy who was giving us presentation of this technology even started the engine, waited for few seconds in front of exhaust pipe and picked up water which went out from it and drank it. Of course, this isn't the best water to drink, but it is kind of drinkable. At the time in Reykjavik was 1 hydrogen pump operating (without profit, but it's a beginning).

20100604 BEC Zagreb 2010

20100604 BEC Zagreb 2010

BEST Zagreb organised one hell of event. To be honest, I was really waiting for it, hoping to have fun with European students. And it worked perfectly. I felt like a student again and for me this was a great time of my life. So, here are some things to remember...

I've done my stealing camera prank again. When the guys are walking around the city, they aproach me wanting me to take a picture of them. I take a shot and run with a camera. 1st time it was in front of Cathedral. I ran down to Tkalca, one of the new organisers was following me. In a passage I stoped, waited for him, gave him camera and he instantly turned around wanting to go back. So I had to stop him and explain him whom I was and that it was a joke. Then I went to Tomiceva street where is "uspinjaca", a "tram" driving uphill to upper city. There I was exploring trash cans when the next group approached me wanting me to take a picture of them. On the same place I've done the same thing one more time, so 3x times in total that day. I was exhausted of running with cameras :) But it was really fun for most of us and people remembered me very well after that.

Same day we had hospital party, that was kind of cool. I slept for 1 hour, if you can call it sleeping. We got up early and left to Istra for the weekend.

During the weekend we visited Porec, Pula and Pazin, where we slept in a gym and had dinner with huge amounts of medica. Late in the night when we came to our sleeping place, we noticed how we left one of the organisers in the restaurant.

Near Pula we found a very nice beach, I must say unexpectedly clean and pleasant for our bodies. Waqas, a participant from Pakistan, didn't know how to swim so I gave him few lessons. That was interesting. I was suprised when I learned he is engaged to his cousin, I think she is daughter of his mother's sister. That would be quite unusual in my culture so I was interested into this subject. They find it acceptable if 3 generations before them didn't do the same (then it's safe to do it).

My focus was already put on one girl whom I find to be extremely beautiful and a nice person to communicate with. After the weekend I've told her what I desire, but it didn't seem to reflect on her the same way as me, so, nothing happened. Life has proven to be challenging because in during last week few times it happened that a friend of mine would tell me how some of his female friends gave a very positive feedback about me. Of course, it always happens during this times when I'm focused on somebody else so this feedbacks don't seem to be immediately useful except for a ego-buster. God truly had a lot of fun while designing us humans. Fucking oneitis.

New hit for me on international evening was Tatarsky čaj, nice drink, but still Beherovka rules together with Vana Tallin and Riga black balsam.

Pub crawling was true Sodoma & Gomora. In one pub a lady recognised me as she remembered me running with cameras down Tkalca. So she was curious what was it about this time. Murat from Turkey put the whole event onto another level by pissing into the bottle and drinking his warm piss which gave victory to his team. To make it more spicy he kissed with some girls afterwards.

Egyptian party had very funny trick. You put a fold on a person and bring it on the stick which is lying on the ground. In front of the stick are some pillows where a person will fall later. While he is blind standing on the the stick, some guys lift the stick up, just a bit. At the same time, onether person is helping blind person to balance himself by holding his hands and slowly going down. Going down makes the blind person feel like he is going up so he starts shaking like hell and you can notice how he's a bit afraid. Everybody starts shouting "jump, jump..." and after some moments blind person decides to really jump thinking that he is 2m above the ground while he's actually 10-20 cm above. Whole scene of falling down from 10cm looks hilarious!

Participants were supposed to make water bycicles which we used on a competition on lake Jarun. That too was a very nice day spent.

Next day we went on a walk through park Maksimir. It was interesting to notice how people were shy when they are sober. We were suppoused to make picture of naked asses, but it didn't work as expected. Still, this park is very beautiful and I hope people used the chance to enjoy it.

On Sunday we went to Hrelich market. We were divided into teams with a mission to dress ourselves for the following party. Each team had 50kn which they could use for dressing up 5 people. We managed to get clothes for less than 3kn per piece of a clothe and spending rest of the money on a special requisit. My team won the show, yeah!

That was the last evening. I felt great altough at one moment I almost burst into a cry so I decided to hurry up and go home and get some sleep before the work. I've meet some very cool people and had a lot of fun on this event and didn't need to sleep as much as usually :)

Life is funny.