Books on the Menu

Seine Woche auf Teneriffa

@brittarnhild

Note to self 1: I must refresh my knowledge of the German language

Note to self 2: It is possible to write a whole book after only week in one place

 

In the souvenir shop in Güímar a book caught my interest. I knew I had to buy it, I did buy it. There was one problem though, the book was in German, and as far as I can see (now after coming home, doing an internet serch) there is no English, nor any Norwegian translation of the book.

I did learn German when I was in school, after English, before French, and I do think it will be possible for me to decipher the book, with time, patience and a good dictionary. Still how I wish that there would be an English translation available.

Well, German, English, Norwegian, Spanish, Greek, Japanese or whatever. The book is mine and somehow I am going to read it.

Alexander van Humboldt, Seine Woche auf Teneriffa, 1799 by Alfred Gebauer.

The title tells me that it si possible to write a whole book after only one week in a country or on an island. I have spent one week x 2 on Tenerife, and I am busy writing my travel letter from the last stay.

And who knows, one day this travel letter might turn into a book.......

 

 

 

A Vision of Eden

@brittarnhild

I have a very good friend in India. She is the age of my mother, and when I think of her, I think of her as mamma India. We have been penpals for almost 20 years, and I have met her three times......so far. First, many years ago, in Rome, where Carolyn, or my mamma India, spent a spring, visiting her daughter. Then, some years ago I gave myself a trip to India as a 50th birthday present, then again, a little over a year ago, I was able to go to see mamma India again.

On my first visit I stayed with Carolyn and her (now late) husband for three weeks. In between travels in the area, I spent quite a lot of time exploring Carolyn´s book shelves. We have much of the same taste when it comes to reading, and I found one treasure after another. Most of all in the genre female travel literature, which is my favorite literature genre. One of the first books I read from cover to cover during my three Indian week was A Vision of Eden. The Life and Work of Marianne North. Some time later I went to Kew Gardens in London, hoping to see the Martianne North Pavillion, but I had no luck, the pavillion was under renovation.

Three years ago, when we went to Tenerife for the first time, I had just reread the book about Marianne North, and of special interest to me was her travel to the volcano island in 1875. It was then that I learned about the Botanical Gardens on the north coast of Tenerife, and either through A Vision of Eden, or through one of my guidebooks, I can´t quite remember, I also learned that there was a kind of a botanical museum in La Orotava, a kind of nursery for the bigger Botanical Garden further down the hills on Puerto Cruz.

 

One day my husband and I drove up north. We found the 4000 years old Dragon Tree mentioned by Marianne North, in the end we found the Botanical Garden, but we had no luck finding the nursery park. Last week we were in Tenerife again, and spent a lovely morning in the Botanical Gardens. After lunch we drove up the hills to La Orotava, and I decided to look for the park.

This time we found it........

.....only to discover that we should have come before lunch!!!!!

 

Well, we will be back on Tenerife, and anyway, we walked around the park, looking through the fences the best we could.

Now I know where the park is. I know it is waiting for me. And I am rereading A Vision of Eden, dreaming of travels to come.

 

 

 

:::::::::::::::::::::::::

Here and here are links to my visits to the Botanical Garden on Tenerife,
and here is a link to my day in Kew Gardens.

 

 

Names for the Sea

@brittarnhild

Some books are found by pure accidents. Pure, happy accident I must say. Like the travel book which is following me around these days, taking me back to my beloved Iceland.

The book is "Names for the Sea. Strangers in Iceland" written by British Sarah Moss.

Sarah Moss is, according to her own homepage, a novelist, a travel writer and an academic, now living in West Cornwall, teaching in the University of Warwick´s Writing Program.

Some years ago, when she found herself with a husband without a job and two small children, she applied for a job in Iceland, the University in Reykjavik, she got the job and the family of four moved there.

Here is what Sarah Moss writes about Names for the Sea on her homepage:

Just after Cold Earth came out, in the summer of 2009, I moved to Iceland for a year with my husband and two sons. People always ask why we went and the truth is that I still don’t really know: because it was there, because we could, because we thought it would be interesting (it was), because I’d fallen in love with the place when I was nineteen, because we didn’t want to spend the rest of our lives in Kent.

We lived in a newly-built flat in a largely empty development in Gardabaer, a wealthy suburb of Reykjavik which we chose to be close to the International School and the sea. I had a lectureship at the University of Iceland, where I taught Romantic poetry and creative writing. I found the experience of being a foreigner very hard. I didn’t know how to catch a bus or pay a bill, where to buy light-bulbs or calpol. The early days of living abroad are infantilizing, and made harder by a certain kind of Britishness that would rather kill itself (without making a fuss) than make a stupid mistake in public. I talked, one day, to some of my students about this paralyzing sense of idiocy and they, who had almost all lived abroad themselves at some point, told me that the Icelandic word for stupid is ‘heimsku’, one who stays at home. You stop being stupid by embracing your stupidity.

So that’s what Names for the Sea is about, living in a new place and asking questions. It’s partly about the landscape and seasons; the way we noticed the migratory birds whose passages tell you the seasons almost as reliably as the changing light, winter walks haunted by the aurora borealis, the hours of sunset and sunrise that make summer nights. It’s also about living with the volcano, and the financial crisis, but mostly it’s about the conversations I had with Icelanders when I started to seek answers to my foolish foreign questions. How do you live with a landscape that might come and get you in the night, with boiling geysirs and earthquakes as well as Arctic blizzards and active volcanoes? How do you reconcile the obsession with national independence and separatism with openness? How can you define national identity by physical and emotional toughness while explaining that it’s ‘unIcelandic’ to walk anywhere? Last but not least, who really believes in the Hidden People?

So far I have only read 85 of the book´s 350 pages.
I had planned to leave it at home when I fly south to Tenerife tomorrow, but now I know it will have to travel with me. 

Moss´writing is too good,
Iceland has such a strong place in my heart,
the book will come along,

and as always another travel to Iceland will be forming in my mind.

 

:::::::::::::::::::::::::

You can get the book yourself from here:

 

and here is a link to Sarah Moss´page