My first stop in Germany was Bremen where I visited a friend I have not seen since 2014 for two days.
I spent them in a state of flowers and sun induced bliss.



The main activities were dancing, playing dodge ball in the park with a group of refugees, sun bathing and ice cream eating.



I decided that sitting in an ice cream café eating sundaes is one of the few parts of German culture, which needs to be shared and cherished.

I'm going to Germany tomorrow and am looking forward to eating my weight in strawberries and asparagus. Here is the program for my Germany tour:



I hope to see a lot of my friends and am of course looking forward to see my family again.

It is spring and we wanted to go somewhere new for our Friday after work drinks. As luck would have it, a new place just opened on Ingólfstorg, called Sæta Svinið. It has both the cheapest happy hour cocktails and my personal favourite "Dark and Stormy" a rum based gingery affair.

There were however a few things we found amusing, especially after the second round. The people who work there are extremely happy. Like on happy pills happy. I have a deep respect for the Icelandic: "I work here to gain money for my free time and smiling is too hard until then." service industry culture and to see all these smiling waiters was jarring.
Then there was a menu confusion (solved by one of these smiling singularities). There is a lunch and dinner menu, however, some of the lunch menu items have asterisks indicating they are not available for dinner, however as it turns out on the dinner menu, they are.
The most ridiculous thing however, was what they did to the Margarita. Don't get me wrong, I think a strawberry or blueberry Margarita is a good idea, but when juice, rather than Tequila or triple sec is the main ingredient and it is served with half a glass full of crushed ice without a salt rim, I get confused.
It does not help when the straw (which should not even be there) is so short that it actually is unusable.

The Daiquiris are nice, though, but have the same straw problem. Also they have a lot of good beer which does not require straws!

Last Christmas I was in Amsterdam, where I had lived for 3 years during my studies. It was a confusing experience, everything was familiar and yet I ended up getting completely lost.
The last two day I spent setting up a server and moving my blog as the laptop I had it on (I'm running this blog on an old laptop from home using pagekite) finally broke after being constantly running for 90% of the last 4 years. As a part time geek I have long stretches of time I am not working with servers, perl scrips and the like, so my experience is always very much like being in Amsterdam. Everything is familiar and yet I am confused.

Anyway, now that I'm back I can catch up on posts I meant to write last month. I will be writing about the inadequacies of Icelandic Karneval, board games and my usual politics and geekery.
And of course there will be more pictures.

I bought Henna when I was in the Netherlands and my ex-flatmate helped me dye my hair, thoroughly amusing my current one, as dying hair with Henna basically looks as if someone is plastering mud in your hair. It was worth it though, I am completely happy to be a red head again.



Red was my go to hair colour ever since I started colouring my hair. Many of my childhood heroines had red hair (Anne of Green Gables, Pipi Langstrumpf, die rote Zora, Arielle, Scully) and I have happily bought into the trope that having red hair means being proactive / rebellious / independent.

Also I really love the way Henna smells and after all the bleaching to be blond it is time to be good to my hair again.