Back from Iceland

And boy was it great!  Everything that Togo isn't so it made for a perfect vacation from my point of view.  Gorgeous weather everyday except for a brief period of rain one afternoon when we were driving (with only one windshield wiper as a bird actually hit the windshield in the dark and broke the wiper somehow - I didn't think it was possible to hit a bird but it is).  I got to actually wear sweatshirts for the first time in 7 1/2 months.  Hardly any people.  Very tranquil and restful even with all the driving.  Good roads even when they weren't paved.   Delicious food once we got over the sticker shock.  It's expensive (which Togo is not) but you get what you pay for and sometimes in Togo you can't get it no matter what you're willing to pay.  I did get a really bad sunburn on my nose because it was light out 20 hours/day and I've avoided that the whole time in Togo.  So Iceland is a beautiful and remote place.  We drove around the Ring Road counterclockwise so that we ended up in the most touristy part at the end of the trip.

This is a glacier (part of the biggest glacier in Europe) and the tiny black dots are people walking on it.  We didn't do that ourselves but the sight of it was amazing.  We had been to Glacier National Park a few years ago which was very beautiful but the glaciers there are like icecubes compared to this baby.

The landscape in Iceland goes from looking like the moon (barren as can be) to being emerald green like this photo.  That's a tiny cottage dwarfed by the cliffs above.  The rock formations are endlessly amazing.  And there are so many waterfalls (big long ones from the cliffs above) that you get jaded after a while.

Here they all are.  We traveled around in a large minivan and did quite a bit of driving which is typical for a vacation for us.  Everyone handled it pretty well.  The kids played B for Botticelli for most of the letters of the alphabet and watched old Seinfeld episodes and slept.  This is a picture of a glacial lake that has icebergs in it.

This is me at a geothermal field.  The gases are sulphurous, hence, the face.  Iceland's energy is also entirely geothermal.

We took a walk/hike (depending on your viewpoint) above this little village in the Westfjords area.

Near Humavik in mid northern Iceland.

Walking around an crater made by a volcano near Myvatin.

A thermal pool near Myvatin.  We loved these thermal pools - warm in the cool air.

A puffin.  They are adorable when they take off to fly with their orange feet dragging behind.  They're more graceful in the water, I hear. 

A basalt mountain - the columns are like ones we saw in Northern Ireland.  Puffins nest in the grass above.

The Blue Lagoon early on Sunday morning before anyone was in the pool yet.

This is a picture from the more north western part of Iceland which is mostly fjords.  Just spectacular.

So visit Iceland by all means.  We intend to go back and spend more time sometime not too far in the future.

Now I'm back in Togo and it's kind of like I never left but it was great to have a break that really seemed like a break.

More life in Togo

Me in my office taken by my coworker the other day.  I spend a lot of time at my desk in front of a computer monitor.  Patients don't come into the office all that much although I do all the physicals which are done at midservice (at one year in Togo) and when the volunteers leave.  The rest of the time much of what we do is over the phone - assessing and telling the volunteers what to do to take care of themselves.  When they are really sick (and not to far away) we will tell them to come into the office sometimes, particularly to get lab work done.  But often they are managed over the phone.  It's kind of an interesting skill to develop - you have to imagine what you are looking at from the volunteer's description so you learn to ask very pointed questions that help you do that.

Pat has been here over a month and we're getting ready to go to Iceland the day after tomorrow.  After worrying about all the arrangements and what could go wrong (it's different leaving from Togo somehow), I've reached a state of peace and am looking forward to what should be the opposite of Togo.  Although Togo is pretty nice right now - temperatures mostly in the 80s with a nice breeze a lot of the time.  I would have never guess that Togo would be a great place to be in July and August from how it was in March, April and May.
Pat has been having a really good time getting out and about in Lome in a way I've never done.  He goes running many mornings and sees a lot of the city that way.  He also strikes up quite a bit of conversations with random people on the street.  He has found pick-up basketball games to play in and has played soccer and basketball for Peace Corps teams comprised of a mixture of staff and volunteers (and some tangentially related people - boyfriends, siblings, etc. - who are good at the game being played).
He and I have been playing tennis at the ambassador's - it really is kind of like our private club - a tennis court and a pool mostly just for us.  My tennis is not good but it's not as bad as I would have thought it would be and we're basically just doing it for fun.  It will be hard for him to leave but we're not thinking about that right now.
So life goes on in Togo - the ups and the downs.  Some days I really like it and other days it just seems so dysfunctional it's maddening.  You really have to learn to go with the flow in a place like this.  It's not like things have to be done all in a rush but, as a dedicated New Yorker, it's hard for me to get out of that mentality that everything should work and run on time.  They're digging up the road outside of our office (which is dirt) and we've heard they're going to replace it with dirt to let it settle for 2 YEARS before they pave it.  It's so hard for me to conceptualize living like that for that length of time but I'll be gone before it's done, apparently.
So next time, pictures of Iceland.