Réttir and the Golden Circle

I’m just going to skip right past Week 2—the short story is, I went to some classes and they were mostly pretty interesting and I’m really excited to read all my new books.

Instead, I’m going to write about the thrilling adventures we had on Saturday! With many pictures! Mostly of sheep! A large number of international students piled into four buses at 8:00 yesterday morning and drove out to the countryside to see the annual Réttir, or sheep round-up. Iceland is famous for its wool (and also for traditional dishes like boiled sheep’s heads and ram’s testicles) so sheep are kind of a big deal here. In the summer, the shepherds just let the sheep roam free wherever they please, but in the fall they herd all the sheep together into a big pen, then each of the farms goes through and sorts out which sheep are theirs, by reading the numbers on the ear tags.

Unsorted sheep.

There’s a large, circular pen in the middle, and then several pie-piece-shaped pens radiating out from it, one for each farm.

Sorted sheep!

In-the-process-of-being-sorted sheep.

When someone finds one of their sheep, they pull it over to their pen, then wade back into the sea of livestock to find the next one.

Check out THIS one. I think it looks a little evil.

It was a crazy scene, and what was even crazier was that they actually let us get down into the pen ourselves to touch the sheep. While I did not personally try my hand at wrangling a sheep, several people did, with success!

Edvardas, Derek, and Kara show us how it's done.

This was while one batch of sheep was dwindling down, and then suddenly everyone started clearing off to the sides. We complied, and soon saw why. Icelandic sheep are actually pretty small, as sheep go, but they do have impressive horns, and when hundreds of them are running towards you, it’s a little alarming.

!!!

At that point, we felt we’d had enough of sheep, and found an opening and escaped back over the wall.



After the Réttir, we went on a tour of the “Golden Circle,” which is a driving tour that stops at a few of the notable sites in the center of Iceland. Our first stop was the Haukadalur geothermal area, where we saw the Strokkur geyser—over 100 feet tall! There is also another geyser, called Geysir (which is where we get the word! Fun fact: Geyser is the only Icelandic word in the English language. At least, that’s what I’ve heard.), but that one isn’t currently active, so we didn’t get to see it.

I climbed up a little ridge and got some pictures from above!

The downside to the geothermal area is the smell of the sulfur in the water. Though the odor was particularly strong there, even the hot water that comes out of our faucets at the dorm smells vaguely like eggs—just something you have to get used to in Iceland.



Next up was Gullfoss (which means golden waterfall), a gigantic waterfall in a glacial river. When the sun is shining (which it was!) you can see a lovely rainbow. We actually had incredible luck in the weather yesterday—it was bright and sunny everywhere we went (or at least as bright and sunny as it gets in Iceland), and only ever started raining after we’d returned to the bus.



The last stop was Þingvellir (that letter at the beginning makes a soft ‘th’ sound), the site of the original Alþingi. The Alþingi is Iceland’s parliament, and sometimes called the oldest parliament in the world. As our history lecturer professor pointed out last Thursday, this is technically not true because the current version of the Alþingi is not the same as the old one, but it’s still pretty cool. It was founded in 930, and the parliament continued to meet at Þingvellir (Parliament Plains) until 1799. There isn’t anything left in the way of buildings; instead it’s a national park, and very beautiful.




I probably would have been more excited if I hadn't been so tired, and ready to go home and stop smelling like sheep and geysers.

After all the excitement of yesterday, today is much more mundane—just grocery shopping and homework. Fun fun!