Icelandic Christmas

In December, after receiving happy news about grant award for my research (Santa Claus certainly helped!) I decided, for a proper snowy holiday, to visit Iceland.

Since I was not restricted by dates of any event (no conference this time), I wanted to exercise my election skills and derived a chart for the trip start. Although the vacations began on December 22, I wanted to wait until the Moon would come into its own sign Cancer, and moreover, would pass very nasty detrimented retro Mars there. Thus, I bought a ticket for December 24 with the following election.

To understand how lucky this choice was, one can look at newspaper archives and find the story of the fog which covered Heathrow on December 22-23 and caused multiple flight cancellations. Thanks to the election, my travel next day was smooth and easy.

Iceland is unusual in many ways. Not only it has only three hours of daylight in winter, but also sulphur [smelly] hot water in the pipes directly from geyser sources (due to the advanced isolation technology, hot water +83 at the sources looses only a couple of degrees on the way to homes, and pipes remain cold outside and are covered by snow!)

I visited the mountain waterfall

and the active area with karst aquifers (see that deep hole at the bottom?)

It is very interesting to observe how the geyser explodes every 5-10 minutes: first there is just a plain pool, then a water bulb appears, bluish and growing, and then – bang! – a jet of steam and water rockets to the sky

Yet another unforgettable impression is the express boat trip

This amazing device moves at speed 29 knots (about 55km/h), jumping on the waves (which happened to be of a minor storm, about 4 at Beaufort scale). I saw very calm passengers and wanted to believe in better, but the steward started recording our names to report onshore, which was rather disturbing. Imagine a large boat flying over the crests of the waves (if lucky, not parallel to them – the most dangerous position). But I remembered my election: it had Saturn in the 8th house of death yes, but Saturn ruled 2nd house of money, not the ascendent!

As you have probably already realised, I didn’t die. Yes, my money (2nd house) died (8th house) in Iceland, which is one of the most expensive countries in the world. But I admit before dying the money was already thin and sick…

I came back to London and had wonderful New Year Eve in my beloved city. Ah yes, yet another photo - a nice poster from a shop window: