að læra íslensku

I’m sorry for disappearing. To be fair, I did that for like a year last year, and to be fair, I did that for two months four years ago as well, when I was busy living my last two months in Rennes. I disappear a lot, and I should probably try to get into a posting rhythm. It’s hard, though. I’ve spent eight weeks seeing my friends for the last time, going to London Pride, Stratford-Upon-Avon, Bletchley Park, and making memories I’ll cherish forever.

I had one last night in London; I took National Rail into the city from Clio’s, where I stayed on that last night and I walked from Waterloo up to Covent Garden, trying to soak up the last of the metropolis before going to one of the most remote places in Europe.

Now I’m in Iceland, learning Icelandic thanks to a generous grant from the University of Chicago. I’m in Ísafjörður, a tiny town of 2,000 residents barely south of the arctic circle. I’m so far north that the sun only barely sets in the evening. As I write this, it’s a quarter past ten and the northern twilight is still bright and blue.

I’m trying to push myself so hard into learning Icelandic. Now, what I have more than I’ve had the past nine months, is time. I spend all day learning Icelandic, in class learning Icelandic, listening to Icelandic music, watching dubs of movies in Icelandic, telling the doctor I have bronchitis in Icelandic. Now, I think I remember what made French easy. It was how oblivious I was, how much I had to let go and allow myself to make mistakes. Once I was a five-foot four sixteen year-old who couldn’t say her r’s or u’s and made four conjugation mistakes per sentence, and in order to become a twenty-one year-old in a hostel in Iceland getting asked “et toi, tu es de quelle région?”* she had to stumble over her words and forget things and screw up her tenses. She had to use flashcards.

*what region [of France] are you from?

Icelandic was something I wanted to learn for years. I don’t know what drew me to it. Maybe, because I listened to Sigur Rós sometimes I was drawn towards the country that had inspired this kind of haunting, ethereal and melancholy music. What could it possibly be like? When I was fifteen and first applied to study abroad, I named Iceland as a destination, and the sponsor laughed. I chose France because I spoke French and because it was realistic. Because of UChicago’s FLAG grant, this, too, became realistic. I had already been to Iceland, because I stopped over here for a few days both two summers ago on my way to visit Martine and on my way to London last year. The first time I spoke not a word of Icelandic, and the second time I had studied a little on Icelandic Online. After a year of auditing Basic Modern Icelandic I really just wanted more. Without taking the class for a grade, with four other classes to worry about, I didn’t learn as much as I would have liked.

In Ísafjörður, I walk through the tiny town along the harbor to class every day. There are fjords on both sides, and on some days they’re ringed with clouds and look like the came from Tolkien novels. Other days, clear days, they don’t look that different from the Rockies where I was born. Every few days, I pop into the bakery and order a kleina, which I almost always decline wrong. Here, the summer is winding down, the days are getting colder and windier, but they’re still used to tourists. They start in English, and I try to insist on Icelandic until I hit a word I don’t know and can’t dig up from the back of my memory. I pronounce things wrong all the time.

Here I am, stumbling over my words, learning yet another way to say ‘r’.