Iceland | August 2015

This is my mom's story, not mine. This is a story of her dream, and of how she spent a whole impossible year planning her dream through, going through flights, looking through maps, reading through stories and dreaming, dreaming, dreaming. This is the story of my mom's dream coming true and of the country she dreamt about - a place so beautiful it was almost not perceivable, with its glaciers high, and its people rare to encounter, and oceans around it endless.

This is also a story about how she took aboard her three children to see the country of her dream, and how her three children (me included) were being overly emotional, and always hungry, often arguing, sometimes trying to run of the edges of cliffs, rarely quiet, and immensely, unconditionally happy.

So, Iceland and our 10 days of trying not to get too soaked by the rain, not to get too far off the road looking for volcanoes, and not to miss a single hot spring or bowl of meat soup. Too many stories to tell, too many photos to show. Off we go.

Well done, mom.

Well done for taking us where North America and Eurasia meet, crushing into each other and drifting apart with these huge tectonic plates they stand on. 

Well done for letting my brother do a million and more of selfies, always breath-taking, but not just always safe enough. Like the time he climbed here - or the other one, when he got on the top of an iceberg floating next to a glacier, and got his leg stuck in a crevice there.

Well done for showing us the colourful side of Iceland at Gullfoss, and for figuring out that while "gull" is for "gold" - legend says that there is the whole pot of it under the waterfall, - the "-foss" is always for "waterfall", which helped us in not missing a single one of them on our way.

Well done for never being afraid to ask, be it direction, or additional blanket, or where to have the best ice-cream in the neighbourhood.
The guesthouse essentials in Iceland are, as you can see: a place to sleep, a place to eat an ice-cream, and a place to ride a horse. Fair enough.

Well done for being ok with my travel buddy - for those, who don't know him yet, his name is Gosig Mus and he is from Ikea, - and my endless photos of Gosig going places, like this one, in the geothermal zone on the south of Iceland, just behind the original Geysir, the one after which all the other geysirs were named.

Well done for always finding us a lunch, even if it is to be cooked it a hot spring and make us local stars for 15 minutes. The eggs were tasty and perfectly cooked too.

Well done for driving us on a car in places that were giving you a heart attack, and driving anyway. With the maximum speed allowed being 90 km/h, we were doing 50, slow yet determined, and definitely hated by every single vehicle on the island.

Well done for not missing this -foss, the only one in Iceland that you can actually make a full circle around.

Well done for taking Iceland fully and unconditionally, with whatever was it that it was bringing. One day we had waterfalls, and the other we had cliffs on both sides of the road, and then we had nothing at times - like this endless moss covering endless lava fields, going on and on and on. And so we stopped, and so we breathed, and so we kept going.

Well done for enjoying out petty little fights with my brother for the only pair of glasses per two of us. However, I have to admit, being a winner didn't always mean I would see things, especially next to Skogafoss and all of the water dust that flies half a kilometre away from where it actually is.

Well done for letting Gosig Mus to have a photo with the first glacier on our way. The glacier was so magnificent that, just as it stayed out of focus, its beauty to some extent stayed out of our comprehension.

Well done for dropping our car's speed to around 35 at this point. A huge truck got stuck behind us and started beeping us away, which was embarrassing and funny both and made us feel pretty badass.

Well done for priceless pieces of information concerning Icelandic sheep and how they always go in three in August: mom and her two lambs. Icelandic communism: here is a common road, and here are common glaciers, and here are common sheep, and please 15 euro for a pair of mutton steaks. 

Well done for finding a road to the ocean and black Icelandic beaches. We run from these waves and we run from this ocean, but run or not, it's always right behind the corner, and our shoes are always wet anyway.

Well done for enjoying little moments and little things. Just an elf house found while being lost in the fields. Moving on.

Well done for giving us our choices (sometimes). You can see glacier going down to the valley, or you can choose to see the dragons hunting each other in the sky. The choice is always yours, obviously, my mom - and Iceland - are pretty democratic.

Well done for organising the best meals on Earth: stopping on a gas station, buying two bowls of meat soup, asking for a free refill, and, before leaving, buying on a counter a package of mutton and disposable grill. 

Well done for making days when not much was happening ever more beautiful.

Well done for loving small towns - you find the most amazing things in those, be it a town on the ocean's shore, or next to a glacier, or grouped around a gas station, which is encompassing the choices Icelandic little towns have. Going around the town takes us 15 minutes. On the outskirts we find the a souvenir shop, museum, a huge dog to play to and a couple of whale's skeletons, all of it - belonging to an old Icelander, who right at that moment was busy carving Icelandic runes on bones, and woods, and whatnot else.

Well done for taking us to the most surreal place of our lives, where one of the glaciers commits suicide by sliding into lagoon, and  melting slowly, and crushing, colouring shores in blues, drifting into the ocean. A very special way to die.

Well done for finding my brother a waterfall where Prometheus was filmed.

Well done for taking 15 kilometres more to let us see the fjords. Famous fjords ended up being an over sized bay, good for making the road way longer, for watching wales, for seeing fish farms slowly drifting past us. Fjords, see you next time in Norway.

Well done for not being afraid to walk on a giant volcano that has erupted just 30 years ago.
It often feels there like Iceland tries hard to minimise its losts - in case it all will blow again, and so it will, covering the ground with lava, thick and deadly black, - but Icelanders just don't care, or don't learn their lessons.
It will blow and erupt and crush, and they will wait again, until it will dry, and will clean it up a bit, and put paths there, and will bring tourists to the place, like us and our mom, more and more after every eruption to follow. Impossible, majestic, omnipotent people.

Well done for teaching us to see beautiful in small things.

Well done for having a heated argument with me when I was saying those should have come from sheep. They didn't, that's just how Iceland does flowers.

Well done for taking us to beautiful Akureyri. I learnt few things about Iceland there:
- They hate Christmas Trees for ruining the landscape;
- A Post stamp costs more than a postcard;
- The main church of the city is closed on Sunday.

Well done for the sense of wonder.
Icelanders should have it as well - why else would they draw Gagarin on their walls?

Well done for taking us on a photo hunt for whales. We did see many of them, and that was beautiful.
I just have to add that whales have priceless expressions of serenity and not caring on their faces. 

Well done for having the best places for short breaks.

Thanks for being an inspiration, and someone to hold on to.
I'm sure that even this totally supportless tree from the middle of nothingness of Iceland could not have wished for a better support.
Well done for being very special, one-in-a-kind mom.

Expo Milan 2015 | July 2015

I was pretty sure it will be an easy thing to write - because, firstly, I've already done an article on Expo once, and, secondly, there was so much to write about there.

That first article, however, was written long before I actually got to Expo, so I based it on the Expo's official website's information - which was  still  so much to write about; after I did get there, though, and after I've spent something like seven hours there - seven hours of zigzagging through the pavilions under the blinding, ruthless sun, classics of our summers, - I feel like it is not that much about the details - details are worth seeing in person, - than it is about the message Expo tries so hard to pass along that I want to write about, make photos about, and that was totally worth almost dying from dehydration that day.

First things first - Expo stands for Universal Exposition that is held regularly from 1844 (much thanks, Queen Victoria). They are united through the topical themes; Milan's Expo used "Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life" and exploits the topics of the malnourishment, hunger, food sources and their varieties. In a nutshell, it is a lot about how not to make an Interstellar movie out of Earth.

The number of participants of this year's Expo is more than 140; the pavilions are lined up along the main street of exhibition - so-called "World Avenue" - that stretches over 3 kilometres. Pavilions are of the three main types - the ones belonging to individual countries/companies/entities (the pavilion of Catholic Church - check); those from the thematic clusters, that unite the countries not being able to build their own pavilions; and thematic areas that explore often very specific (and always endlessly cool) themes (those include both children amusement park and the supermarket where food is packed by robots. The robotic part for now is limited to apples being packed into small boxes though).

All these endless things to see - pavilions, supermarkets, clusters of chocolate and coffee; drinking fountains and lanes of sea salts; restaurants, and coffee places, and outdoor markets; stretches of South American, or Polish, or God-knows-where-from plants growing right in the centre of Northern Italy; the giant Tree of Life that is a part of spectacular light show every evening, - all of those and more are built on the Milan's outskirts to be a living reminder - for these 5 months at least, - that the world, after all, is just a street. Even more so - it's our street, with the rules we set, pavilions we built, food we grow, resources we use, and choices we make. Milan's chosen to feed the planet; now tell me - where is it that our choices can't be just as ambitious.

Expo is somewhat moving, questions-provoking, and endlessly inspiring. It makes you wonder at the potential of our science - Israel is growing vertical fields now; Germany is using projectors that recognise pieces of paper with three tiny plastic buttons on it and automatically play recordings on them. It makes you feel the food (and that was delicious); feel the world (that's such a beautiful place); feel the choices - and the way they define the world around us, for better or for worse.

It also made us feel a bit like having a mild dehydration; we've had to stop our zigzagging and found one of the "water houses" - constructions a Lombardy water company has built specially for Expo. The text on them promise that after Expo will finish these water houses will be used on Italian street on regular basis - we need it desperately in summers anyway, so that might be just the heritage Italy needs.

So you walk that world - that street - up and then you walk it back again, and every country out there is just a part of its neighbourhood, and every pavilion - even the one with the apples-packing robots, - is just a part of something more, and the street you walk through is just as clean as thousands of people passing it daily leave it, and the food you taste is just as awesome as those who grew it, cooked it, served it are. We come through the street and, perhaps, the best that we can do is to leave it better than we've found it; to make it equally beautiful; to share and love what is worth sharing and loving out there. 

One of the stuff members of the Lithuanian pavilion told us that food is something we share rather than own - and that was one of the beautiful moments when somebody else's words make everything going on in your head to make quite a bit of perfect sense. The phrase was so right and so totally won me over that I've insisted to have a lunch at their pavilion - even though Lithuania is just three hours away from Belarus, the friend I came to Expo with is actually Lithuanian, and my mom makes the cold borscht just as good as the one I ate there. Still:

Share that food; feed that world; walk that street - with the respect and dignity that it deserves. Make your choices - with all the awareness and consciousness that it takes, because doing so might just be our first common steps to - well, - feeding the planet (and not ending up looking for a new one with the help of the space wormholes).

And make sure to come see it - Milan has never been just so powerfully beautiful.

Expo Milano 2015

Feeding the Planet

Energy for Life

Proper Expo greetings next to the entrance

Pavilion of Israel on the outside

Pavilion of Nepal proudly presenting all the crops growing on all the crazy altitudes.

South Korea: what is you favorite dish?.....

...PIE. DUMPLINGS. Add yours <3

Now that was quite weird - carnival-like action on World Avenue around 4 in the afternoon.

Korea does it high-tech or not at all.

Performance in Argentina's pavilion that's involved quite a bit of trash (drums from the trash bins and so on) and sounded quite awesome.

China does it traditionally or not at all.

Magic in Azerbaijan: the flowers were glowing as we were doing all these strange above-the-flowers hands' passages.

Pavilion of Azerbaijan.

Pavilion of Azerbaijan.

Lithuanians posing while cooking traditional cake, sakotis. We've also run into sakotis later on in Poland. But, again, sharing is caring.

Pavilion of Lithuania.

I have to add that the number wasn't quite always increasing. Pavilion of Gabon.

Fiat is covering its cars with a material participating in air's purification. Also, the tree is growing out of it, yes.

Pavilion of apples being packed into small boxes.

Pavilion of Czech Republic making chairs of recycled plastic.

Life-savers. One could also choose between still and sparkling water (although it took us a while to distinguish between them; look, there are tiny bubbles drawn on the icon above the tap. Stupid us).

Czech Republic has always struck me as quite a straightforward country.

[Finally, just a few words - after going to Expo, or before it, if you feel like doing something out of ordinary now - try read something on circular economy. Like how they make jeans out of jeans now; or what is it in there for food industries or what the whole thing is about ( (that's an awesome one and huge one, so take care). Ok and now I'm done. Have a lovely day out there and stay hydrated - it's damn important.]