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Hvitá

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When I drove across the bridge, I was so busy looking for oncoming traffic I almost missed the sign:

Hvitá

On the other side, I pulled the car off the side of the road like you’re not supposed to do and jumped out with my camera. I had laryngitis, so my squeals were more like squeaks, barely visible even to my own ears over the icy wind:

Hvitá! Hvitá! Hvitá! It’s the Hvitá!

I was on a pilgrimage to visit the sites of Egil’s Saga, and here was the salmon-filled river that marked so many boundaries, the site of Egil’s first murder, where the timber was stored that his son Bodvar drowned retrieving. If I had meandered into Lantern Waste I could not have been more excited.

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Ominous

“It’s not an omen,” she said. She said it out of principle. Omens were inconsistent with the world view she was trying to impart to her daughters, who would face enough obstacles to their own agency without divine messages portending predetermined outcomes. Read More

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Ticket Season, Part Two: Pacific Northwest Ballet

16-17-renew“I love tickets!” squeals Cameron Diaz’s character in the first Charlie’s Angels movie. (And why has no one ever made a gif of that?) It’s supposed to illustrate what an eccentric character she is, but I understand completely. I love tickets. And spring is ticket season. Season-ticket season, to be precise. All of the arts organizations announce their upcoming seasons, tickets go on sale, and I spend hours each spring planning what I will be doing on Saturday nights all next winter. I’ve already written about next season’s offerings at Seattle Opera. Now let’s talk about ballet.  Read More

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Tjörnin

Tjornin

Tjörnin Lake in downtown Reykjavik just beginning to freeze in late October, 2012.

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High Seat Posts

Reading the sagas, I always wondered what “high seat posts” looked like. This replica was at the Saga Museum in Reykjavik’s Perlan. Now that I’ve seen them, I wonder why Vikings bothered carrying them across the ocean when they moved to Iceland.