Akureyri
Tuesday March 26, 2024
It was a little bit of a logistical inconvenience to get here. Reykjavik domestic airport is an hour’s drive away from the international airport in Keflavik, and I basically arrived right on 30 minutes before departure to drop my luggage off for my connecting flight. On arriving in Akureyri in the north, the arrivals hall was empty of staff so I had to go outside, lugging my giant suitcase in the snow and wind, to go to the departure hall to find someone to call a taxi for me. I made it to the hostel though, and luckily check in was smooth.
On Saturday, I had a free day to do grocery shopping because I knew food here is super expensive and I wanted to pack my own lunch for the day trips I had booked. I also wandered around town, but it’s a very small city so that didn’t take long at all. I ended up chilling in the mall for a while because they had free wifi and it was warm and there were heaps of people around. My driver for the aurora tour that I had booked said the weather was not good at all, and postponed the excursion for Sunday.
On Sunday, I covered most of the major sights in North Iceland. Our tour group was me, two Brits and four Australians, who said my Kiwi accent had been a bit diluted from being in Canada. We started off by going through Hvalfjarðargöng Tunnel, which connects Akureyri with the eastern side of the eponymous mountain range, and the interior of the tunnel reaches temperatures of 16C because of the hot springs that the tunnel passes through. We stopped at Goðafoss, the waterfall of the gods, and Skútustaðagígar, false craters created by exploding lava and steam bubbles. That area overlooks Lake Mývatn, frozen over on the southern side, where they filmed Fast and the Furious 8. We continued to Lavator Dimmuborgir, columns of rock formed from lava, which the locals have many myths about, since the formations resemble trolls. It turns out Icelanders really love mentally scarring their kids. After visiting the geothermal activity at Hverir, we spent the next couple of hours at the Nature Baths. One of the Australians on the trip had prebooked a ticket for the spa but had injured his foot, so he let me have it for free, and in return I have to stop saying mean things about Australia. For a bit. The spa was really nice though, but not worth the $70 for an hour.
There had been an epic double sunspot solar flare - they call this a sympathetic solar flare - that had produced a strong CME that hit the earth around 2pm Icelandic time, which meant, ironically, that New Zealand was in prime position to view some magnificent auroral displays. It was so overcast in Akureyri that night, that we saw nothing on the drive, so I got booked in for the next night as well.
On Monday, our tour group was me, two Danish and two Germans, and though we covered most of the sights I did on Sunday, we also covered the main reason I had come to Akureyri - Dettifoss. The road to Dettifoss is closed during winter and the government doesn’t plough it because they want to discourage tourists from visiting during this time. Sure enough, the road was a metre deep in snow, and it is only thanks to the skill or outright insanity of our driver that our chunky jeep made it through, sliding and slipping along the way. The entire one hour journey felt like constant turbulence in an airplane. We still had to walk 20 minutes in knee deep snow to see the waterfall, but after all that work, it seemed like a rewarding experience. That ice and snow aesthetic is magnificent.
As we were driving back to Akureyri, gaps of blue in the cloud began to break through, giving me hope for a solid auroral display that night. Our group this time was a French marine biologist from Lyon called Alex, and two Singaporeans, one of whom was also called Jeremy. We started off in the south just after 9pm, and we managed to see a thin band of green activity hovering over the mountains. As twilight gave way to darkness and the moon started to rise over the clouds, we relocated to the north, near the tunnel. All of a sudden, I started to see some ghostly clouds, waving about in the sky, moving suspiciously quickly over the stars and fading in and out. We stopped by a lookout point and took out our cameras for some beautiful pictures showing that brilliant green so clearly visible on the long exposure pictures, yet so dull to the naked eye. Though I only had my iPhone 12, I managed to snap some fantastic shots that I’ll treasure forever. Finally, after all the bad luck I’d been having, it was nice to have this moment of beauty to appreciate on my last night in Akureyri.
Posted by Jeremy at 11:35am on Tuesday March 26, 2024 :: 0 comments :: 
The Road Home
Friday March 22, 2024
It’s finally time to leave Barcelona. Despite all the ups and downs of the last few months, I have enjoyed my day to day here, the city remains one of my favourite in the world to visit. It is getting more expensive and the drought is pretty bad, but there’s charm and character and very good food. This time I’ve had an opportunity to try other cuisines as well, like Korean, Japanese, Indian, Lebanese and Italian.
Several people visited. Loïc came in from France, which was really lovely because he visited specifically to see me. Sarah Jane and Hannah came in from Toronto with two others for a whirlwind tour of the city, which contained about of shopping and Instagramming and TikToking (this is making me sound old, but I am, so there). Within the two groups, I did a lot of walking - Montserrat, Tibidabo and of course, from shop to shop in the Gothic Quarter. Also went on a bike ride from Barceloneta to Port Forum and then back through Diagonal and Arc de Triomf. The weather has been fantastic, save for a single day of rain.
I got to see Castellers as well, which I found super exciting. These are the towers constructed by people standing on top of each other, reaching several storeys high. They even have kids - I’m talking four or five years old - climbing to the top to add that extra height to the tower. What results is an impressive display of strength and balance, and I’m so happy to have witnessed this first hand.
My next destination is Iceland. I’m spending a few days in Akureyri and then the rest of the week in Reykjavik. Hopefully the volcanic activity won’t disrupt anything, and additionally I hope there will be some fantastic aurora sightings. This excursion has already had a huge problem - a few days ago, Booking.com messaged me to say my Reykjavik hotel had cancelled my reservation and I had to panic book an alternative at $200 extra. I later found out that the hotel owner had been arrested by police on suspicion of money laundering and human trafficking…and I can’t help but think I might have dodged a huge bullet.
Posted by Jeremy at 10:10am on Friday March 22, 2024 :: 0 comments ::
Amsterdam
Monday March 4, 2024
The last time I was in Amsterdam, I got food poisoning from a smoked salmon wrap at the Van Gogh Museum. I wanted to come back in January 2022 but the Netherlands went into lockdown because of the pandemic, so I cancelled that leg of the trip. Finally, I’m back here to visit some places I missed and try some foods I didn’t the last time.
There’s a few things I’m not a fan of in the city. The absurd number of drunk and/or stoned Brits would probably be my number one. The lack of good savoury Dutch food also comes to mind. Yes the fries are good and the cheese is very famous, but those by itself do not make a meal. There’s an abundance of baked goods, waffles, pancakes, apple pie and poffertjes, and I know I love desserts, but this was too much, even for me. It’s not that I had bad food while I was here, it’s that Dutch cuisine is just not exciting or interesting. I had an amazing steak and some very good brunches but I wouldn’t classify those as authentically Dutch.
There were a lot of cats. My hostel had a resident cat called Rocker that was very affectionate. I went to De Poezenboot, a cat adoption agency based on a boat in one of Amsterdam’s many canals. I also went to the KattenKabinet, a cat museum, and I played To Zanarkand on the piano for the furry residents.
I was lucky with the weather, with only the first two days being wet. It was a bit cold and I still had to walk around with my winter jacket, but was pleasant once the sun came out. The buildings in the city center have interesting designs, and some of the churches are quite elaborate, but in general, everything looks quite brown and boring. It doesn’t have the charm of those colourful, bright houses you find dotted around the Mediterranean. What it does have is canals and bridges, and many decorated bicycles adorning those passageways. Amsterdam has character, but it’s a particular brand that is trying to distance itself from the party going, drunken, rowdy atmosphere. There were some really nice moments walking around the city in the stillness and quietness of the mornings.
It feels like a long time before I’m back in Canada but with people visiting and places to go, March is going to breeze by.
Posted by Jeremy at 11:40am on Monday March 4, 2024 :: 0 comments ::
Malaysia and Chinese New Year
Tuesday February 27, 2024
Just over three weeks ago, I had departed Barcelona for Kuala Lumpur via Doha. The first leg of the journey was uneventful, though my entertainment system had some very bad lag issues and I couldn’t watch any movies. The second leg from Doha to Kuala Lumpur was handled by Malaysian Airlines, and I took advantage of the free wifi on board by chatting with some friends in Toronto and my workmate Pete in New Zealand. Suddenly Pete’s tone changed to that of panic, saying we’d been sent an email halting production immediately and that we’d been furloughed - that is, suspended from our jobs temporarily without pay. I spent the next 90 minutes of the flight hyperventilating.
A few days later, the company found out that it is illegal to furlough Canadians, so they laid us off instead. We’ve engaged an employment lawyer to help us through the proceedings and we’ll have to wait and see what happens next. For the Americans, it’s even worse because this is an underhanded tactic to lay them off without severance, which is contradictory to all the messaging about care and respect that the CEOs have been spouting on social media.
We’re finding it difficult to reconcile what’s been happening. No one saw this coming, no one expected it to be done this way, and no one could believe the lengths that Jeff and Annie have gone through to escape responsibility for their critical failures. Soon after we were furloughed/terminated, Prytania general staff and Game Science were let go as well. We set up a couple of Discord servers for everyone to discuss their options and provide support, and the way that we’ve come together in this month of dire need is testament to how amazing our team was.
I think that’s what hurts the most. That we had such a cool project and talented team but we’ll never be able to bring everyone together again to finish what we started. The Strains have gone completely silent and haven’t fronted media at all, let alone had the decency to talk to us directly, and instead have deleted their LinkedIn profiles as well as the Prytania one. And why? To hide all the posts they made about layoffs being the fault of leadership?
What that has meant in the short term is that suddenly my time in Malaysia freed up. In spite of the stress and lack of sleep, I’ve been able to enjoy the delicious food and catch up with family. The festivities of Chinese New Year were awesome to see as well, with lion dances and dragon dances, dragon displays, and of course, all the different kinds of food and goodies available during this time - yee sang, pineapple tarts, peanut cookies, almond cookies and more. And yet, on an occasion where I should have been celebrating success and prosperity, I could only fight to hold back tears, disappointed that all this had to happen during Chinese New Year.
In amongst all the eating, I’ve been doing interviews and practicing code tests. Live coding - where you solve a coding problem while your interviewers watch everything you type - is an incredibly stressful method of interviewing that is absolutely not indicative of the kind of conditions that programmers normally work in, so why do we continue to subject each other to such torture?
The last few days have been a flurry of fooding as I’ve tried to tick off the last remaining items on my list. On chap goh mei, the final day of Chinese New Year, we were treated to an exquisite meal at Copper Mansion, with suckling pig, abalone and prawns. I’ve been spoiled silly by family, as usual. I’m on my way back to Spain now, and things are looking up. I’ve got some time to travel and take a breather, and I’ll definitely be making the most of my time in Europe.
Posted by Jeremy at 9:03pm on Tuesday February 27, 2024 :: 0 comments ::
Hasta Luego
Sunday February 4, 2024
It’s time for me to leave the sunny shores of the Mediterranean and swap my idyllic Catalan lifestyle with the bustle of South East Asia. My time here has picked up since I moved to a different place, a little further away from downtown but more spacious, more natural light, warmer, more spices for cooking (there were five at the last place) and best of all, Odin, an adorable ginger cat who used to have feline leukaemia. He’s been keeping me company while his parents go to work, and he’s become comfortable enough to curl up on my bed and protect me from anything that might suddenly enter my room while I’m working.
Last weekend, Owen took me to a Michelin star restaurant for lunch, which I found to be of incredibly high quality, but lacking something particularly unique about the dishes. On Sunday, we took the train to Vallvidrera, which sits on the ridge west of Tibidabo. We wandered around for a bit along the Carretera de les Aigues, a popular road for running and biking, and then we followed a trail down the hill towards Les Planes, where Bea joined us for a calçotada - a Catalan barbeque where they grill spring onions over the fire and serve with romesco sauce. It’s nice to be able to share food with friends, especially at these very local restaurants where knowing the language and customs are a huge advantage. While we were there, there were two birthday parties for a 53 year old and an 80 year old, and the atmosphere was wholesome AF.
The remainder of my days have been spent wandering around the neighbourhood. It’s a 30 min walk to the beach, and there’s definitely been a few shorts days to enjoy. But the constant sun has caused the existing drought to worsen, and stricter rules have been imposed on Barcelona in an attempt to curb water expenditure. The region desperately needs rain and it’s another wake up call that climate change is really messing things up.
Work has been busy. European time means the morning are quiet and I can focus on my work without interruption, but evenings are when the North Americans come online and there’s a bit more conversation happening. I’m not sure how this is going to work in Malaysian time though, but work has thankfully given me permission to work “regular” Malaysian hours so I can still join my family for dinners. There’s a few holidays while I’m there though, so it doesn’t actually add up to that many days on awkward working hours.
Posted by Jeremy at 9:31pm on Sunday February 4, 2024 :: 0 comments ::