#and then shit i dont do? like using other people’s dishes (im vegetarian. i only cook on pans i know are meat free so i dont get sick

[slenderfirebolt]

Since im up too late i may as well make a too-long post about my thoughts on meat consumption in its present form. So, while im not completely against eating animals on an ethical level (animals eat eachother in nature, we evolved from animals that ate animals, pretty normal stuff) most of my issues come from our means of meat production and the insane amount of food waste, which while especially bad in the US, i imagine definetly exists everywhere else. the main reason why i was fine with eating meat before is because it feels so wasteful to *not* get the benefits after everything the animal went through. i imagine myself from the perspective of the animal; i am born to be a product, i am fed and watered only so that my flesh may be harvested for consumption by a being beyond my understanding. i may live without ever seeing the sun or feeling the wind... that fucking sucks, obviously evil. So when i consider that the life of so many animals, i feel terrible thinking about how after that, so much of the meat is wasted, left to rot and be thrown away. while it would still be an ethical dillemna even if we *did* consume 100% of the meat produced by factory farms, the fact that we basically make animal grinders to mass-produce living, feeling things and then *chuck most of it in the trash* is utterly unacceptable to me. Factory farming is likely to continue forever, even though we have many alternitaves to meat, plenty of people still eat meat *because* it is from an animal, so that demand will always exist. worse than that, a sudden decrease in demand would lead to *further* food waste, and some meat alternitaves are too expensive for everyone to afford. also, theres a cultural aspect as well, many cultures are very meat-centric or have the raising of animals for meat as a core practice, what right would anyone have to decide that a tradition or practice should end? so if i have so many reasons why its ok to eat meat, why am i deciding to cut back now? it seems like, at least from my perspective, my reasoning is fairly ethically sound. well firstly, its expensive if its anything other than chicken and im a college student, and given the fact ill probably need a *doctorate* and at minimum a master's in my field, any savings is good. Holy fucking shit i hate having to use my teeth to scrape bones free of their meat, also eating tendons is annoying. overally, eating tofu and beans tends to provide me more enjoyment (an important part of good food) than eating most meats. they are more consistent, can have plenty a variety of flavors, and while certainly far from *cheap* depending on brand, the cost/enjoyment/calorie balance, at least for me, is better than meats. easier to cook alternitaves. wont poison you if you cook em wrong. also since its so consistent its fairly predictable, and you dont have to navigate all the bones. to be completely honest, im unsure if ill end up totally ommitting meat products from my diet, since i dont want to waste food thats given to me, and i still want to enjoy the foods i do eat that involve meat, but i think from now on im not going to buy meat as part of groceries, and instead consume the alternitaves. i have already been on track to do this for months, the chicken that inspired this is the first 'meaty' thing i have eaten in ages. If anyone has any particular favorite vegetarian dishes, especially on the cheaper end, lemme know, since im more than open to try them out.

[jigsisanalien]

It feels like my mom has a disdain for meatless food, more like shes closed minded to any food besides what she thinks its the norm.

Her two answers are always “im tired” and “i dont know”, for anything you ask her, the answer will be always one of those, nonetheless. For her bf, she always does everything for him, she wakes up early to give him breakfast and to prepare a fucking banquet for him, with expensive ingredients, something that she never did in our entire life. Juice? Whats that? We had tap water if we were thirsty, but for him she buys coke and even wine.

Anyway, so she never has time for her own two daughters, neither for her almost 2yo grandson. My sister and i always ask if she could just walk across the street to take care of my nephew or whatever, nope, her answer was always “im tired”.

Her job is easy and its only 5h a day, sat down all the time and quiet, i used to be on my feet more than 8h, carry heavy stuff and walk kms a day at my job, attending hundreds of people a day, waking up early while was still night, yet i still got home, got some comfy clothes and went to my sister to take care of my nephew.

Anytime we had food together which is on special occasions, it would be sushi, at least she was open to that. The other day i asked, just for curiosity, if she would cook us a meal for the whole family, her answer “i dont know”, we are vegetarians (obviously we are open for sushi because its rare the times we eat it), ive told her its exactly the same way, she continued to say the same shit, so i told her “well you could buy it”, she was silence and completely ignored me.

I mean, she was twisting her nose to my red beet soup, just because it was red, it was like she had a problem with it being red, you figure.

Today i was cooking a meal for myself, but i knew the dish i was doing would give me more than one portion, so i said “why not?”, texted my sister to invite them for dinner, grabbed a couple more potatoes and a couple more greens and did a meal for at least 4 people. As soon as they arrive, my mom tells me she already ate so she wouldnt be joining us for dinner...sure...but it was 7pm when i made dinner, no way she had dinner already and im sure she ate after they went home...so yeah, its like in her mind theres no such thing as meatless (either fish or a mammal) meal, even though it was exactly the same as a meat dish.

For me and my sister is like she doesnt care at all, she does everything for her bf but for us, it feels like a chore to her. Easter is coming up, ill probably be the one cooking a veggie meal for us, either she wants to join us or not, i dont care.

[rachelisnotatwork]

Iceland: finally we see the light!

The worst bit about flying to Iceland, or I should probably add flying to Iceland when you are too cheap to pay for a decent airline, is that you have to dress like you are going on a solo trek to the South Pole in order to reduce the weight in your suitcase. Luckily it was quite cold the day we left but we were still glowing, red-faced, as we headed to the airport wearing snow boots, scarves, big coats, all our heaviest stuff in our hand luggage etc.

The flight there was pretty uneventful and it was a beautifully clear day, which meant for good views over the sleeping tourist by the window. When we arrived we just had to pick up our car and go.

Now by this stage in the “life of constant holidays” game, we are pretty much Hertz deluxe members which means what normally happens is we book a smart car and turn up to be upgraded to a minibus. Often we have to scale back the excesses of the upgrade because we don’t want the hassle of trying to park a giant car/fuelling up a giant car. So we were pretty confident that whilst we’d booked a tiny and shit car, that wouldn’t be what we were given. Well that smugness came to an abrupt end when we collected our tiny and shit car. Turns out that Iceland isn’t one of those free upgrade locations...and car rental is expensive here so they had no desire to give us a freebie. So we puttered into town in our tiny and shit car, a journey made far more stressful than it needed to be by the fact that Marcel’s phone is an early adopter of Brexit and the GPS locator dot on google maps only seems to work in the UK. After a lot of swearing we did make it to our surprisingly chilly airbnb. It was in a converted garage and the host had made the interesting decision not to install an extractor fan but instead keep the windows open 24/7 (in Iceland electricity is pretty much free so no one cares about their heating bills). We closed the windows because the humidity definitely wasn’t our problem. 

We decided in the evening we’d go to the Pizza Restaurant we liked, so we headed into town, struggled to park (there’s a lot of snow, which means getting a tiny shit car into a space is quite hard) and skittered down the pavement in the -10c weather to the restaurant. Only to find it had stopped being a pizza joint last week and was now trialling its new menu. I wasn’t hugely keen as they didn’t have much of a vegetarian selection but Marcel didn’t want to re-park or go out walking in the cold so decided to stick with it.

I asked for a pearl barley dish, without the lamb that was supposed to be on top of it. Marcel selected their rutabaga dish. I advised him not to select this as vegetarian is always interpreted in expensive restaurants as “on a diet”. He said I was being silly and it would be a decent portion. He ended up with a palm-sized dish of pureed rutabaga with some crispy slices of it on top. Didn’t want to say “I told you so” but felt I had to, because that’s what life is like in a long-term relationship. 

The next day we headed out of town after a delicious breakfast somewhere that looked like a construction site, but was actually a decent cafe. We had quite a long way to drive so we decided we’d drive straight out to Vik and lunch there. As we headed out of town, the roads got pretty icy and once the wind picked up there were drifts of snow on the road. Always reassuring to see some people digging out a 4 x 4 that’s skidded off the road when you are in a tiny 2WD city car with about 4 inches of clearance.

We had lunch in Vik, which has got much busier since the last time we were there (it has 2 places you can lunch now rather than one) and went for a quick but windy walk on the beach, before setting off again.

We wanted to visit Jökulsárlón the next day in the morning and since there’s not much in the way of accommodation in those parts we had booked into a place called the Fosshotel Glacier Lagoon. It was surprisingly busy and we had to park right the other side of the car park. In my business putting on my gloves, I completely failed to notice Marcel getting out the car and immediately falling over on the ice, but thankfully he was uninjured and thus was able to complete his usual suitcase duties.

Our room had a pretty nice window seat overlooking the view down to the sea so we snuggled up on there and read books before dinner. The only option was the hotel restaurant and I decided I didn’t want to know how much I was going to pay for dinner so refused to do the conversions. It was an...interesting meal. My starter involved so much horse radish I spent the rest of dinner constantly wanting to sneeze. We’d decided we wanted to go hang out in the sauna after dinner so were slightly impatiently waiting for the bill, which they were tardy bringing. The delay was soon compensated for though by the announcement from the staff just after we’d paid our bill that the Northern lights were visible outside. We immediately stampeded onto the balcony to see a very impressive green streak of light across the sky.

We were torn between “this could disappear any second” and “I’m really cold and I want to go get my coat” so in the end we made a mad dash for our room, layers and my camera. Maddeningly, I almost always bring my tripod with me on holiday, but this time pressed for space and weight and with so many unsuccessful trips behind us I’d not bothered. I’m not sure I’d have photographed things much better with it though, because I hadn’t really appreciated that there’s nothing really to focus on through your view finder when what you are trying to photograph is green shimmering light on a black background. I tried though.

It did look amazing. We walked out to the front of the hotel (which incidentally involved us and a bunch of other guests stampeding past the sauna full of confused nude people to get out the quickest exit) and stood in the snow, watching the green waves slowly undulate and shiver across the sky. I hadn’t really got a grasp on the speed of how they move before. Sometimes they seemed like they barely moved at all, and indeed for at least an hour there was one solid green band across the sky that didn’t really change. In other areas you had to look at the edges to notice any movement at all. But occasionally something rapid would furl and unfurl and move across the whole sky in 10-20 seconds.

The other thing that I hadn’t anticipated is that I guess the light in the atmosphere warps our perception of the light from the stars so they looked very unfamiliar. Much bluer than normal and Sirius was swapping between flashing blue and orange so rapidly we thought it was a plane for a while.

Eventually we got cold so went back inside and sat on our window seat and watched it until about midnight. After that it had got pretty dim and we decided we’d better shut the blinds or neither of us would really get any sleep.

The next morning we rose with the dawn and headed over to Jökulsárlón. We did not want to pay 28 euros a head for breakfast in our hotel and we’d vaguely remembered there was a cafe there, so we decided to eat there. I don’t remember the food options being so basic last time. It has also got considerably busier so the indoor toilet is no longer open to visitors and we had to go out to the (thankfully perfectly clean) portaloos in the car park which were absolutely freezing. Climbing up a small hillock to look over the lagoon exposed us to such lacerating winds that my phone promptly went from 98% battery to 9% from the horrors of the cold. I had to tuck it inside all my layers to keep it alive. It was beautiful though.

There are two things to see at Jökulsárlón- the lagoon where ice bergs calve and you can see cute seals pop in and out between them and the so-called Diamond Beach where the ice bergs meet the sea and often get washed up on the shore. Last time we’d driven between the two sites but with the thick snow on the ground we didn’t dare take our car to the beach and instead plodded through the deep snow and strong winds over there.

It was beautiful, especially since unlike last time the sun was out and was glittering through the ice. However the wind was so cold it burnt my face, which ended up really painful and weirdly bright red on one side by the time we returned to the car.

We had gone to Jökulsárlón quite early because we had another 5 hours drive ahead to our Airbnb in Seyðisfjörður. The only reason we’d come back to Iceland was we’d loved our airbnb in Seyðisfjörður so much the last time we’d been there that we resolved we’d return one winter and just hang out there. And this was our plan.

The views as we drove east were spectacular. 

The road conditions driving out east were….pretty appalling. After Jökulsárlón, there aren’t many tourists which means there really isn’t much traffic. I think we saw more reindeers than cars as we fishtailed on ice and wondered why in the hell they only had crash barriers off the side of some of the roads that hooked around cliffs over the sea. At one point we drove past an abandoned van on it’s side with “accident” tape around it. By the time it was getting dark there was such a high wind driving over one of the passes you couldn’t see more than the 5m road marking pole in front of you. Which is when you really rue your car rental choices of a Kia Rio.

The winds had at least calmed down a bit by the time we arrived in Seyðisfjörður. All we had to do was get up our drive to our airbnb overlooking the valley. I said to Marcel I hoped the car would make it. He said he wouldn’t mind if we got stuck in the snow now because we could walk to our airbnb. He had to say that...seconds later our car gently skidded off the road and into the huge snow bank on the side of the drive.

Our hosts had apparently been supposed to email saying meet them in the town because the drive way had been blocked by a lot of snow, but they hadn’t. However they did use their monster truck to spend the next 45 minutes extracting us from the snowbank, so swings and roundabouts. In the end we ended up leaving our car at their house in town and getting a lift up to our cabin with our stuff. Thankfully we’d already done a shop and planned to self-cater so we could recuperate from the long and slightly terrifying drive with a soak in the hot tub and dinner.

Our hosts had been very emphatic that we could ask them for lifts in and out of town whenever we wanted, but a combination of Britishness and embarrassment about disturbing their dinner to get them to dig our car out meant that we decided to walk into town instead. It was a pretty gentle and pleasant 2.5km downhill and we felt very smug especially when we saw some locals “walking” their dog by driving slowly as the dog chased the car (later saw the tracks of someone who’d been driving their snowmobile to exercise their dog). 

The supermarket in town was...weirdly British. There were McVities digestives (Marcel discovered the chocolate and caramel ones on this holiday so I ended up having two packets wedged in my pocket for the journey home). Suede was playing over the tannoy. And a woman, who turned out to be the owner with a very strong midlands accent on the till. Apparently she met her Icelandic husband in Nottingham.

We pottered back up the hill (slightly less pleasant walk against gravity and into the wind when it is -12c outside) and spent the rest of the day living the dream eating biscuits, reading books and popping in and out of the hot tub. Just as good as I remembered it.

The next day we got slightly more adventurous and decided to go on a little snowshoeing adventure. It was -14c out and REALLY windy so I decided I didn’t want to venture far. Marcel wanted to go on the ridge behind our cottage but I said it looked avalanchy so we continued along our level of the valley a bit further. I love snowshoeing but our tracks were getting covered in seconds with the waves of snow blowing across the ground and it was incredibly cold so we only stayed out for about half an hour. When we got back Marcel said he was going to ask our hosts if it were safe to go up higher into the mountains but his conclusion was that it couldn’t be an avalanche risk area or they wouldn’t have built the town there. A quick google later and we discovered that the town is the site of Iceland’s worst ever avalanche tragedy with 24 people killed at the end of the 19th century and a factory flattened at the end of the 20th century. After that we decided to stick to the hot tub in safer activities.

The next day, despite stocking up on enough chocolate digestives to last several lifetimes, we had to go back into town to start our car because we’d forgotten that car batteries don’t really like it brutally cold. So down to town we pottered. Problem was, Marcel forgot that key fob batteries also don’t like it cold and he’d left the fob in an outer pocket. So when we got to the car we couldn’t remotely open it. We had to manually open it with the key in the lock, which triggered the alarm to go off. I think our hosts, whose house we’d parked outside, were fairly sure we were actually handicapped when it came to motor vehicles. We drove the car around a little bit and then tried to park it again, only to find ourselves menaced by a goose. I know this sounds like a joke but it was hanging out in our parking space, wouldn’t move and then tried to get inside our car. We had to lure it away with crisps (not sure if salt and vinegar crisps are good for geese. If anyone found a dead goose later that day, sorry[ish]). 

We pottered back up the hill and settled down to the rest of the day; an exhausting cycle of hot tub and reading in our beautiful cottage.

By the night time it had started to lightly snow. We decided we’d have a really long final hot tub soak so lazed in there like hippos. I was trying to catch some snowflakes on my tongue (sod’s law, none seemed to fall in my mouth but they kept repeatedly landing directly on my eyeballs) and suddenly we saw the northern lights again. Which was incredibly luck considering the night was reasonably cloudy. They whirled around for about 5 minutes and then disappeared, which was a very nice last evening at our cottage.

The next day we nervously checked the road conditions and headed off. Going south there was a huge storm forecast and the road was pretty much out of bounds. Luckily we were heading back to Reyjavik via the northern route. Step one of the journey was get over the pass to Egilsstaðir. No problem. The next step of the journey, which was between Egilsstaðir and Mývatn, is the least driven part of the circular road around Iceland, Route 1. We drove for about an hour. All was well. Then we noticed some cars slowing down ahead to find that the snow had drifted across an uphill portion of the road, where a little car had skidded and got stuck on the opposite side of the road (not dangerous, because there’s about 10 cars an hour on this road). This was unsettling to us in our tiny Kia as we clearly couldn’t turn around as the Southern roads were out, there is no other road ploughed at this time of year to get around this, and our car was clearly no better suited to it than the skidded car that a jeep was now trying to rescue. Marcel got out of the car and walked the hill to better look at it. We had zero phone reception (annoyingly we did at most places along the route but we had none there) to call the roads number to see when the next snowplough was due. So in the end we decided to risk it. We skidded and skittered but we eventually made it through!  Which was both good and bad as now we were aware that if we hit any further bad road conditions we’d be really screwed as we’d be unlikely to be able to go back the way we came as the snow was continuing to drift. We did however make it to Mývatn okay, which was good because after that the road is a bit more used so a bit more ploughed.

We had lunch in the cow restaurant we’d been to before and ate rye bread cooked in a lava vent and looked out the window at the 3ft of snow piled outside and debated thermal baths over further snowshoeing. 

There was however a road that wasn’t ploughed in winter but led up to a caldera, which we thought might be nice to snowshoe on as would have a level terrain under the snow and a decent end point. So we drove down there….only to find that some extremely optimistic/dim tourist had decided to drive their 2wd small car on what was clearly an unploughed road with several feet of snow on it and got stuck, and now the entrance to the unploughed road was filled with vehicles trying to rescue them. With our plans to snowshoe thwarted, we decided to head to the Mývatn baths.

The downside of this is that they turned out to be in a selectively extremely windy spot. We got out the car to find a wind speed best described as “scouring”. We are made of stern stuff though so headed bravely onwards. The pools are obviously hot, but the wind was so strong it was generating waves in the pool (fine) and then breaking those waves into spray in the air. Which meant the only tolerable thing to do was float on your back with only your nose and mouth above water. Unfortunately I suffer from a terrible affliction known as “extremely buoyant legs” so struggled over the next hour to stop them surfacing and exposing my feet and knees to a little light hypothermia. I ended up tucking them under Marcel’s legs which are incredibly unbuoyant (how lucky that of all the people in the world I found my leg buoyancy opposite).

We eventually got out and drove onto Akureyri. Our accomodation was right in the middle of town on a steep hill. So steep and so badly gritted (which I feel is a strange thing for a road in a pretty big [for Iceland] town in a very snowy part of the world to be) that our car got stuck trying to get up it. Eventually we got enough traction to make it into the car park of our hotel, but we decided to limit dinner choices to “restaurants within walking distance”. Luckily there was a burger joint in our street that we could totter carefully to.

Our final day was 6 hours of driving to get to the airport in time for our flight. Which was pretty stressful. Not going to lie. There seemed to be an uncanny (given how empty the roads were) link between where the snow was thickest and most slippery and the sudden emergence of a large lorry barrelling along in the other direction (the ring road is a single lane in each direction for about 99% of the road). But we made it! With just enough time to collapse with nervous exhaustion and eat some sandwiches before our flight home. Despite the terrors of driving and the discovery that renting a tiny car in winter is only a good idea 75% of the time, it was an amazing relaxing week and also FINALLY we got some decent northern lights!