We were invited to not one party, but two on Saturday!! The first one was a 9 year-old birthday party for one of my nephews, and the second party was a rather hurriedly organized hello-goodbye/birthday party!
Eyþór, the Birthday Boy, in the center, circling the mouthwatering feast on the table.
We were rather tired after the trip to New York, so we didn’t take a whole lot of pictures the first couple of days in Iceland. Here is a sample of the few we took.
Thursday, June 25th, 2010.
Inga, one of Finnur's sisters, stopped by to say hi and let us greet the rather new Edda. She whipped up some waffles while she was here! The fourth person at the table is Anna, their (grand)mom.
I’ve belatedly added pictures from our last day in New York. Scroll down to June 22nd, or click this link!Read more
Just so that we’re all on the same page… We landed on Wednesday evening as planned. The trip was uneventful, and I will forever be grateful for Icelandair and their individualized tv-programming. We squeezed a full 2 hours out of the children’s programming for Bjarki, he then had a rather wild/squirmy hour before falling asleepRead more
Here’s another blog-format conundrum, now that we’ve combined the ‘text-blog’ and the ‘photo-blog’ into one. What to do when I want to post pictures about an event that happened before the newest blog post?!? Say for example “New York, Day Seven” which happened before Finnur’s $99.99. Do I backdate the New York entry, so thatRead more
One of the tasks before leaving the States was to take all the coins Hrefna and I had accumulated around the house and convert them to bills so we could use it up during our last days in the country. If I had been in Iceland, I would have handed a bag of coins toRead more
For our last full day in New York, we decided to head east across Central Park. We stopped at two playgrounds along the way, saw the outside of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, saw a little bit of the Upper East Side, had a rather bad dinner, then in a big loop southwards to get home on the subway, going via Grand Central Station.
First playground of the day, the Mariners Playground.
Today’s motivation was to go and visit the Google office in New York. As always, we crawled out of the hotel room shortly before noon with the children suffering from acute cabin fever, and Finnur from football/soccer fever. The subway ride went well, but when we got to the address in question we didn’t see a Google sign anywhere. We ended up asking a clothing store clerk where the Google office was and he told us it was in the building, but that we had to ask the security guard where to go.
Sure enough, once we were out of the elevator, the Google logo was everywhere. For some reason we’d gotten the address of the “satellite” office, so we moved across the street to the “real thing” (also not marked anywhere) and had lunch on the engineering floor. Bjarki sort of lost his mind in the cafeteria, he kept going back to the drink coolers to stroke the gleaming cans of Mountain Dew and Ginger Ale, and he was overall pretty unable to focus on eating. We’re not sure if his appetite is still so poor because of the pneumonia (thankfully, his crazy coughing fits seem to have vanished, except after he’s been running around) but he’s eating a lot less these days than usual.
Finnur asked for the location of one of his coworkers that he knew from New York, and he told us the really fancy cafeteria was on the 8th floor. So we headed up there, and boy was I glad we didn’t eat up there. Turns out there is a balcony there which I’m sure is great for eating, but the railing was not nearly high enough to stop parental heart-attacks.
Yes, I'm aware that it looks like Finnur and the kids are standing in front of a painted background picture, but no, this is the view from the Google cafeteria balcony.
I’m guessing you’ve noticed that we’ve started blogging in English. Will this be a permanent feature? Perhaps! It seems only fair since we used to blog in Icelandic when we lived far away from Iceland and were blogging for our friends and family there. Now we’re mooooving so it feels like we’re blogging for ourRead more
Today was really toasty. We headed out into the world shortly before noon (aw, shucks, Finnur missed the last few minutes of the last World Cup game!) and settled for sandwiches for lunch. Then we tried out a new playground in Central Park, where the kids had a great time playing in sand and water. Somewhat surprisingly (to us anyway) we ran into yet another Icelandic mom with a kid in tow (Ásta, wife of Kjartan). She told us that the Upper West Side is home to quite a few Icelandic families, and then we proceeded to name all the people we knew in common (which included a large percentage of the Icelanders living around Stanford). It’s a small small world.
Yet another playground in Central Park with a water-feature!