Eggshells

My little feet hurt. I canna shop no more. Plus, I have to get down to the tjorn (pond) tomorrow and whirl through some museums before I get on a plane and come home. Ooooooh, maybe the museums have gift shops! It's in my blood, I tell you, the shopping. I feel the need for concrete things to take home with me, especially since I haven't been writing nearly enough. There just hasn't been time.
I do have to say, Reykjavik has an amazing culture of creativity. You wouldn't really think this would be a place where you find tons of fashion designers, but in fact there are some really cool Icelandic ateliers here in town. I have dutifully gone into and photographed a bunch of their stores, since I can't afford 99% of the actual clothes. The style here is very wild, with lots of metallics and snakeskin. Sort of a cross between 80's excess and Viking wildness. Here's an example:

Note the heels are metallic.
I also stopped into a ceramics studio today and talked to the woman who does all the ceramics in her store from her work space in the back. In addition to selling dried fish, the flea market also sells these gorgeous big old turquoise and black eggs that come from cliff-nesting birds called razorbills. She had a bunch of eggs in one of her dishes, and they were all different shades of bright turquiose, pale turquoise, and cream. She told me that the blue-green color fades as they get older, so the eggshells she has from last year are paler, and the ones that are several years old have lost all their color. Something about the impermanent nature of that intense color really struck me. I was wishing I could take some of those eggs home with me, but then I realized I would just end up with plain cream and brown speckled eggshells eventually anyway. It really reminds me of the the very beginning of the very little Proust I've read:
"Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase, up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb, was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand."


p.s. If you ever want to look up an entire book online, check out www.gutenberg.org. Also, www.bibliomania.com has some pretty interesting stuff.