Cora Pop's Blog, page 3

Iceland - Day 8

A peaceful, beautiful, perfectly sunny day, driving the North Fjords among sheep, the blue ocean, and colourful houses...





We had great coffee here...

Iceland - Day 7

This is for my blogging friend, deep poet of the real and great editor, The Walking Man. I wish to you with all my heart that you see this dream come true. It might have to be by other means than by foot or by boat, but I truly hope that it will be.



This is the Arctic Circle Monument on Grímsey, an island situated on the Arctic Circle, 41 kilometres off the North coast of Iceland. The island is 5.3 square kilometres, 5.5 kilometres long, volcanic rock surrounded by the Arctic Ocean, covered in...

Iceland - Day 6

Godafoss, the Waterfall of the Gods, is nicknamed by locals "The Beauty", as opposed to Dettifoss, "The Beast." Its name has to do with the conversion of Iceland to Christianity in the year 1000, when all the old Nordic gods were thrown in the water as a symbolic act of conversion.


Heading north into Akureyri and Tröllaskagi, the Troll Peninsula...



Krap, funny (for us) name for very yummy Icelandic slush...




Trolls in Akureyri...



Almost midnight in Ólafsfjördur... with focus on the ground and o...

Iceland - Day 5

We drove through an eerie lunar landscape, to reach Dettifoss, Europe's largest waterfall by volume (500 cubic meters per second)...


...then through more alien landscapes (perhaps like Venus) to Hverir, with boiling mud and steam...



to the Krafla volcano crater, now filled with water...



An entire day closest to what it would be like on other planets...

Iceland - Days 3 and 4

Internet connection was very week last night... so I couldn't do much... We spent the night in a small cabin on a farmer's land... At past 11:30 pm, it was full light outside, strange birds were chirping, horses were munching on thick, crisp grass, and across green fields, pretty close, three glaciers were looming...

I was going to leave you with this image of ice age old ice washed up on the beach at Jökulsárlón...


Here are a few more from day 4...



Said cabins...


A Viking village...



Boats at Djúp...

Iceland - Day 2

Lava fields... lupin fields... waterfalls... glaciers... black sand beaches... a hallucinating landscape with a distinct end of the world feeling...


The entrance to Raufarholshellir Noas lava tube... a mouth of the Earth... 

A wild lupin field, blue and fragrant, just below Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano that stopped all air traffic to and from Europe a few years ago...

Skógafoss waterfall...

The sun at 11 pm... with Myrdalsjökull in the far background... the Katla volcano inside the glacier...

Iceland - Day 1

There is something about Gullfoss waterfall that is fascinating and profoundly disturbing... more than height or volume of water...


...it's imagining in what depths it goes... and what it would be like to follow it there...

Journey to the Centre of the Earth

Descend, bold traveller, into the crater of the jökull of Snæfell, which the shadow of Scartaris touches before the Kalends of July, and you will attain the centre of the Earth. I did it. Arne Saknussemm

You probably recognized this as the message found by Professor Lidenbrock and his nephew, Axel, in a runic manuscript of an Icelandic saga, which led them to their fantastical adventure to Iceland and beyond.



Well, doing just that has been one of my childhood’s daydreams. And I put a lot of wor...

A Map of the Way Forward

I’m writing a story —or shall I boldly call it a novel?— that’s been giving me a lot of trouble.

All the stuff I’ve written before has seemed to flow easily. Things made sense; POV, voice, choice of scenes, etc. all seemed to come to me (relatively) with no trouble. Mind you, except for the short stories, most of it is just lying around, not at the bottom of a drawer, but in a (forgotten) folder on my computer.

Well, this time, scenes came to me easily too, but that was about it. A lot of scene...

Ripe

inverted grapes
flirting with the sky
-already drunk
with the promise
of summer