A national day with non-nationals

On the 17th June it is National Day in Iceland, meaning there are loads of parades, concerts, candy for the kids and at the end of the day a bit of drunkenness…

We started off National Day at 5am in the morning, by heading to the lighthouse in bright sunshine (the first and until now, only time it has been sunny during my shift), to track some Minke whales. It was another first that day, as I managed to get 21 tracks of respiration data (simply noting down, when the whale surfaces) and about 12-15 tracks of the theodolite (gives you the longitude and latitude of the whale). So I must admit, I was very pleased with myself! On my first day I had hardly seen any whales and definitely did not have any useable tracks…

At 12pm we headed back to the apartment to let the guys take over, allowing us girls enough time to get real pretty for the evening. We used our time to have a well-deserved beauty sleep and about 10 minutes to actually get ready…but somehow it worked out! We were in Reykjavik at about 9ish, meaning we had enough time to meet up with everybody on the boat in the harbour and the head out into town to see the concerts. Plans did not quite work out; instead we spent a lot of time pre-drinking on the boat, heading into town after the concerts, meeting up with most people downtown, spending about 1 ½ hours in the bar, and finally heading back to the boat to drink some more! I would say we stayed in the true fashion of Icelandic people: pre-drink a lot at home to try to save some money in the bars (one beer costs about 5 euros here, cocktails make you even poorer!).

So yes national day past in blur, and I did not see much of the festivities, but it was great fun seeing everybody again, especially their drunken dancing on the boat…
Now we are back in Keflavik, working hard (more or less), getting up early or staying up late and taking a lot of afternoon snoozes.

Next week Fredrik and another volunteer are heading on to the boat, meaning it will just be us volunteers, having to sort out our shifts on our own and deciding when to go to the lighthouse and when not. This will be interesting…sleep…or work?
Cheers, until the battle of the conscience begins…