Fulbright final report

When I published my last post a few weeks ago, I never imagined that I would be writing my next one under such unprecedented, life-changing, and scary circumstances.

As of March 20th, my Fulbright program was officially terminated due to the severity and far-reaching range of the COVID-19 outbreak. However, we were given the option to remain in Iceland as private citizens, a freedom which I immediately chose to exercise as I greatly feared contracting and spreading the virus while traveling, felt much safer sheltering in place in Iceland, have a much stronger personal support network in Reykjavik than I do in any one place in the United States, and since I've already been confirmed as an Árni Magnússon Institute scholarship recipient and University of Iceland student for next year.

To have my Fulbright grant terminated and so many aspects of my daily life that I've built here in Iceland so abruptly brought to an indeterminately long halt is incredibly scary and deeply heartbreaking. Moving back here, as a Fulbright fellow no less, was nothing less than another dream of mine come true, and I'm still often struggling with a strong sense of loss and resulting anger and resentment from having that experience in all its beauty cut short.

But moving forward through these difficult times, I'm going to try to make something out of the current situation. I've not often had time or especially energy to blog in the last several months, and I'm going to try to do so more often moving forward. Cut short though it may have been, this experience still remains intact. My Fulbright experience in Iceland was one of the most beautiful and important periods in my life, and as I'm staying here, I look forward to continuing to build my life and strengthen my roots here. I've decided to share my final report to the Icelandic Fulbright Commission here, which I wrote in Icelandic as testimony to how much my language skills have progressed since I came here and how proud I am of how far I've come. I'll of course include an English translation below the original Icelandic text, and continue to update this blog further in the coming weeks. Enjoy.




Þegar ég kom til Íslands sem Fulbright styrkþegi í ágúst 2019 var landið nú þegar mikilvægur staður þar sem ég hafði upplifað sérstaka og áhrifamikla upplifun. Núna er ekki bara það. Í gegnum síðasta sjö mánuði hefur Ísland orðið heimað mitt.

Sem nemendur við Háskóla Íslands, hef ég dýpkað þekkinguna mína af íslenskum máli og íslenskri menningu í tímum í talþjálfun, málfræði, og íslensku máli. Út af því að ég hef stór áhuga á norrænum tungumálum og menningum almennilega, ég hef líka kunnað að meta tækifærin til að bæta við notkunina mína af skandinavískum tungumálum, gegnum tímum í dönsku og sænsku. Að frátöldum venjulegum tímunum hef ég njótað líka marga fyrirlestra um tungumál, menningar, sögu, og líðandi stundir Íslands, norrænna landa, og alls heimisins.

Ég tókst við að vera meðlimur nokkurra samfélaga. Sem félagi í Háskólakórnum hef ég lærði mikið um hefðbundna íslenska tónlist, eignast góða vini (bæði Íslendingar og útlendingar), og bætt íslenskuna mína mjög mikið gegnum samtölum með þeim. Sem sjálfboðaliði við AFS á Íslandi hef ég byrjað að taka þátt á ný í samtökum sem ég var mjög tengdur við í fortíðinni, og tengjast við bæði fyrrverandi íslenska skiptinema og útlenda skiptinema sem komu til Íslands. Og sem Fulbright styrkþegi hef ég tekið þátt í menningarathöfnum og fengið einstæðan möguleika til að tjá Fulbright á Íslandi í ráðstefnunni “Our Voices” í Amsterdam.

Auðvitað hefur ástandið sem er í gangi haft áhrif á upplifunina mína. Núna er háskólinn lokaður og kennslan rafræn. Það er frekar erfiðari að æfa sig vel og bæta við, en kennararnir hefur ábyrgst að við ætlum að klára misserinu og taka próf. Ég er nú þegar staðfestur sem þátttakandi í náminu á næstu ári og styrkþegi við Árnastofnunina. Ég hlakka til að halda áfram að vera partur Fulbright samfélagsins á Íslandi og að hjálpa með viðeigandi viðburðum. Ég er djúpt þakklátur Fulbright stofnuninni fyrir tækifærið til að flytja aftur til Íslands og styrkja ræturnar.

When I came to Iceland as a Fulbright grantee in August 2019, it was already an important place to me where I had had special and influential experiences. But now it's not only that. Over the course of the last seven months, Iceland has become my home. 

As a student at the University of Iceland, I have deepened my knowledge of Icelandic language and culture through lessons in conversational practice, grammar, and Icelandic language. Because I am greatly interested in Nordic languages and cultures in general, I have also appreciated the opportunity to improve my knowledge of Scandinavian languages through lessons in Danish and Swedish. Aside from regular lessons, I have also enjoyed a great many extracurricular talks and lectures about languages, culture, history, and current events in Iceland, the Nordic countries, and the whole world. 

I successfully became part of several communities. As a member of the University Choir, I have learned very much about traditional Icelandic music, gained many close friends (both Icelanders and other foreigners), and improved my Icelandic immensely through conversations with them. As an AFS Iceland volunteer I have begun to take part again in a community in which I used to be very active in the past, and connected with both Icelandic AFS returnees and foreign exchange students who have come to Iceland. And as a Fulbright grantee I have taken part in various cultural activities and gotten the chance to represent the Icelandic Fulbright Commission at the "Our Voices" Fulbright conference in Amsterdam. 

Of course the current circumstances have affected my experience greatly. For now the university is closed and teaching is online. It is quite a lot harder to practice well and improve language skills in this way, but our professors have assured us that we will be able to finish the semester and take our exams. I am already confirmed as a University of Iceland student and a recipient of the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies scholarship for next year. And I look forward to continue being a part of the Fulbright community in Iceland and to help in relevant events in any way I can. I am deeply grateful to the Commission for giving me the opportunity to move back to Iceland and strengthen my roots.

Fulbright: Semester I Overview

Hello, everyone!

Although I have put out a couple of miscellaneous posts about different issues and happenings over the last few months, but since arriving in Iceland last August for the start of my Fulbright year, I haven't properly updated my blog with an overview of my experiences so far, and I figured it was high time to remedy that.

I'll be dividing it up by month, giving a brief summary of the exciting or noteworthy things that I did in each of them.

August:
As I was only in Iceland for four days of August, not a ton happened. I landed on August 27, greatly excited and full of anticipation and optimism for the year ahead and the new beginnings in a beloved place which it represented for me. I spent two days in a hostel before my rental period began and I was able to move into my dorm on the University of Iceland campus, Gamli Garður, and did my best to get ready for the busy days ahead.

September:
The beginning of September started off a bit crazy, as I found myself having to jump through a lot of bureaucratic hoops to sort my life out (i.e. needing to pick up my residency permit from the Directorate of Immigration in a different city in order to open a bank account, until which I couldn't get my scholarship payments deposited, etc). Once I managed to sort everything out, I found myself with a residency permit, a registered address, a student card, a bank account, and in-room Internet, although all of them had been touch-and-go or represented challenges and frustrations in one moment or another, and sorting those out was a good start to feeling settled and happy.

I started classes, taking Icelandic language, conversational practice, and grammar, which were the main three from the standard setup of the first semester of UI's Icelandic as a second language B.A., in which I'm currently enrolled, as well as an extra self-study course in Danish that I spontaneously decided to sign up for.

As several friends of mine that had studied at UI recommended it as an ideal way to get involved in a community space, make friends, and practice Icelandic, I auditioned for the University Choir, and luckily got in. Having sung for five years in middle and high school while growing up in the States, but not having been in a singing ensemble for four years, it was exciting to get back to something that always was very fun for me and made me very happy, and even from the beginning, getting to know people in the first rehearsals and the newbie party, though it was a tad intimidating to try to get to know such a big group of people full of so many dynamics and backstories, I could tell that it would become one of the social cornerstones of my Icelandic experience.

I took my first major step outside the capital area, a day trip with three new friends of mine to Akranes, a city about forty minutes away from Reykjavik, to the national park Thingvellir, and to a crater lake called Kerið, stopping at a couple of lakes and other miscellaneous pretty views along the way.

I attended the Global Climate Strike on September 20th, which I had been greatly looking forward to and persistently advertising at diverse locations on my social media for several months. It was an indescribably important experience to me, as in the months and weeks prior my concerns about the environment had been impacting my anxiety and depression to dangerous extents, and it was deeply validating to take action in a meaningful way, protesting together with so many other people that were ostensibly just as concerned about the future of the world and the environment as I am. I even got interviewed by a woman from the Reykjavik Grapevine, the city's English-language newspaper, who was curious about the homemade sign I was holding, which read "loftslagsverkfall fyrir jöklana," meaning "climate strike for the glaciers," inspired by Greta Thunberg's iconic "skolstrejk för klimatet" ("school strike for the climate") sign. Numerous scientists and concerned citizens spoke openly and candidly, and a few well-known artists on the local music scene performed for us.

Gamli's cozy attic loft

Me and my friend Elena from Italy, who's become one of my best friends here, at Thingvellir

October:
October was full of amazing and rewarding opportunities and experiences, and by far the busiest and craziest month of my experience so far. When I first arrived in Iceland, I reached out to the local chapter of the high school exchange program AFS (of which I am an alumnus), thinking that living in the capital, it would represent an ideal opportunity to get involved in the organization and community again for the first time in a while, and get to know Icelanders and practice Icelandic in a space with like-minded, internationally-oriented people with similar experiences. The month kicked off with an AFS Iceland volunteer course which I'd been told about when reaching out to the AFS office. We spent a weekend at a summer house in the countryside about an hour away from Reykjavik at a place called Ölver, and took part in some fun, engaging, and exciting activities in which we told each other about our experiences and practiced or thought of ways to ensure hosted students would have similarly positive and informative stays. I met a lot of really great people with diverse backgrounds and experiences, both former AFSers in Iceland that have since returned to live here, and Icelanders that had been abroad everywhere from New Zealand to Chile and Brazil to Hungary, and of course, being of similar experiences and backgrounds, it was amazing how easily and comfortably we were able to get to know and open up to one another.

The next weekend, I attended my first choir camp with the University Choir, which we spent at a former wool factory about an hour or so from Reykjavik (in the other direction from Ölver), just beyond the town of Selfoss. We did a lot of rehearsing (in all honesty an exhausting amount ahaha), as we were hard at work on our big project of the semester, which was getting ready to perform the Latin and Middle High German classical piece Carmina Burana by Carl Orff. But in our down time, we had a dinner on Saturday night with fun guessing games after, and were then free to play cards, have some drinks, relax in the hot tubs out back, and play card and party games.

A few weeks prior, my Danish teacher (who also was my Icelandic conversational practice teacher, incidentally) let me know that there was an opportunity for students of Danish at UI, which included us participants of the self-study course, to take a trip to Denmark and participate in a conference in inter-Nordic affairs in a town just outside Copenhagen during our reading week, and I decided at the last minute to join. The morning after I got back from choir camp, I flew to Denmark and took the train from the center of Copenhagen to Gentofte, the town where the conference was being held.
I have to admit that upon arrival, I felt a bit intimidated, as all of the lectures and activities were mostly taking place in Danish, which I'd only just begun to haphazardly study, and most people were conversing in their respective Scandinavian languages (they're similar enough that Scandinavians can mostly understand each other when they all speak their own languages to one another). I'm pretty sure that I was the only non-Nordic citizen, and definitely one of few non-native speakers of a Scandinavian language. But once I started to calm down and loosen up a bit, I got to really enjoy myself. The conference was attended by, aside from our little UI group, two considerably-sized groups from Finnish universities, and two rather massive groups from Norwegian universities. We had lectures on topics from contemporary Danish literature and film to blended Scandinavian-immigrant identities and strategies for how to understand "neighbor languages" (the other Scandinavian and Nordic languages that are not one's native tongue). We also got to take two trips into the city of Copenhagen proper. It was a super interesting and informative experience in which I got to practice and expand my knowledge and understanding of various Scandinavian languages, and was critical in affirming and strengthening my passion for inter-Nordic affairs.

During the last weekend of October, I took part in Reykjavik's Climathon, an overnight lock-in event recommended to me by my friend Farah, which was a local iteration of a worldwide hackathon event to come up with ideas for initiatives and startup ideas to tackle climate and environmental issues. My team and I focused on improving current bike paths and holding free bike days biannually to encourage more residents of Reykjavik (which tends to be a highly car-dependent city) to take to their bikes more often.

As happy and grateful as I was to have partaken in all these amazing opportunities, I came to the realization close to the end of the month that I was overworking myself to the point of exhaustion, and perhaps taking on too much in my desire to take advantage of every opportunity that came my way, and grow, learn, and represent as a Fulbrighter as best as I could. In the coming weeks, I resolved to focus on self-care, spending time with friends, relaxing, and catching up on my studies.

November:
As I mentioned above, in November I did my best to honor my promise to myself to take better care of managing my time, and self-care. I still stayed busy and attended lots of cool events when I got the chance, but in a much more relaxed and balanced manner than before.

I unfortunately had a battle with a particularly nasty week of sickness that went from fever to flu to head cold to pink eye, but finally managed to break out of it after going for broke and paying a visit to the doctor (shoutout to socialized medicine).

I went to the choir's Halloween party dressed as a Glee warbler as a little tribute to the first openly gay character I saw on television, and then had lunch the next morning with my Dutch friend Laura, who was in class with me during my second summer program at UI, and was back in Iceland for a visit.

I added a couple of new cafes to my list of ones I've visited in Reykjavik, trying out the Syrian Aleppo cafe with my friend Arlène, who graduated from the Icelandic B.A. in 2018 and was helping to run the summer course that year, and the delightful Kattakaffihúsið (Reykjavik's premiere cat cafe) with my friend Malen, an AFS alumna who went on exchange to Italy (and speaks quite flawless Italian with a Sicilian accent, I might add) and is also a student at UI.

After a semester of intense work, and a week of dress rehearsals as sections and together with the orchestra we played with, the choir performed Carmina Burana three times to nearly full houses at a church called Langholtskirkja in Reykjavik's neighborhood of Laugardalur, about a fifteen-minute bus ride from the university area, to great success, which was greatly enjoyable and satisfying.
I took advantage of a chance that Climathon participants got to visit the museum at Perlan, a science museum and planetarium in town, for free in an organized tour.

I enjoyed the uncharacteristically bright weather that we got due to cold temperatures and highly reflective amounts of snow and ice, bracing myself for the ever darker winter ahead.
And I did my best to buckle down and get ready for exam season, spending long and productive hours studying grammar in particular in my favorite cafe in town, a cozy little place called Stofan in the center near the parliament building.

December:
December was a busy but rewarding month, characterized in particular by the excitement and novelty of experiencing the beauty of the Christmas season in Iceland, which I, having wanted to experience Christmastime in a Nordic country for many years, was simply over the moon about.

The month kicked off with a Christmas dinner held preemptively at Gamli so that it wouldn't conflict with people's exams and departures, which was a truly lovely and enjoyable event in which we put together a delicious spread of homemade dishes from around the world and enjoyed the company of our friends from both within and outside the dorm community.

I got to know my friends from the choir more and more after we'd all grown closer during the Carmina Burana concerts, and we went for a great many walks, pool trips, movie nights at people's houses, and game nights at Stofan.

After a scarily stressful go of it studying for exams, I not only survived my exams, but passed most of them with flying colors, finishing grammar with 6,5, Danish with 7,5, Icelandic language with 8,5, and conversational practice with 9.

I got into the Christmas spirit quite a lot with the choir, performing a Christmas concert of classical holiday songs (both familiar tunes in translation and distinctly Icelandic ones I'd never heard before), which turned out beautifully.

I took an overnight trip to the south of Iceland with Elena and our French friend Clémence, seeing both places I already had before, such as the beautiful waterfalls of Seljalandsfoss and Skógafoss, and completely new ones such as the famous glacier lagoon and the nearby Diamond Beach, known as Breiðamerkursandur in Icelandic, where chunks of the ice from the nearby lagoon accumulate on the black sands.

Once we got back to town, the Christmas season was just about in full swing. On the 23rd, which is known as Þorláksmessa (Thorlak's Mass, after the patron saint of Iceland), we participated in the Peace Walk, an annual event where a great crowd comes together at Hlemmur Square on the other side of downtown Reykjavik, and walks to Austurvöllur Square in front of the parliament building, holding lit torches and singing Christmas carols all the way. This was one of the most magical moments of the whole Christmas season for me, and indeed up at the top of my list of favorite things I've done on my whole Fulbright so far. It felt like something out of a Christmas movie, full of warmth and holiday spirit and a sense of tight-knit community. As I joined in singing many of the Christmas carols, knowing them myself from the holiday concert with the choir, uniting my own voice with that of the crowd of friends, acquaintances, and friendly strangers all around me, I knew I'd made the right decision to stay in Iceland for the holidays.
We then partook in another staple tradition, wandering up and down Laugavegur, one of the main streets in downtown Reykjavik, doing some last-minute shopping, enjoying the atmosphere, and inevitably running into and catching up a bit with friends. Also specifically the Jólabókaflóð, literally "Christmas Book Flood," which refers both to the annual commercial release of new books which takes place right before Christmas, as well as the quite literal flood of people flocking to bookstores on Þorláksmessa to purchase one of the most popular Christmas gifts for their loved ones.

On Christmas Eve, those of us left in Gamli held another little Christmas dinner, which was a cozy and festive way to pass the evening. I also sang in a mass with the choir at the church where we normally practice, and though I have to admit I wasn't as much of a fan of the way the songs sounded with the organ underneath than when we'd sung them a cappella, it was lovely all the same, especially at the end when we turned all the lights out while singing "Silent Night" holding candles, and then were all hugging one another and wishing each other a merry Christmas in the crowd near the door after the performance. We didn't do much on Christmas day itself, but a few of us exchanged gifts, and we had a wonderful and comfortable time.

A few days before New Year's, my friend Katla from the choir very sweetly invited me to her birthday party, where myself and mostly other choir people, but also a couple of miscellaneous cousins and high school friends of hers, gathered at her house for some drinks, party games, nice conversations, and an eventual escapade to the center for some dancing. Not to mention getting to pet her cat Glói.

Much of the rest of the break passed relatively uneventfully, simply hanging out together, going to the pool, watching movies and TV shows, and relaxing, until New Year's. For those unfamiliar with Icelandic New Year's, it's a pretty big deal, a colorful and exciting bonanza of fireworks that would be illegal in most countries exploding above every home (in recent years it's started to attract a bit of controversy due to its extreme noise and environmental impact, but so far has remained untouched as an important tradition and the cornerstone of fundraising for the country's often overworked, underpayed, and understaffed emergency response services).
I spent the first part of the evening at my Fulbrighter and medieval scholar friend Tiffany and her Icelandic husband Ólafur's house, where they'd invited a couple of other Fulbrighters and friends over for a delicious Thanksgiving-adjacent holiday dinner. We then went to see the big bonfire near their house atop one of the tallest hills on the peninsula of Seltjararnes (bonfires are another staple Icelandic New Year's tradition), and got quite a treat, as not only was ours big and burning, which was more than could be said for many others that day due to the wet weather, but there was also live music playing, and as the hours passed and the fireworks were ever more present and constant, we had a beautiful panoramic view from atop the hill of the fireworks going off all over the city.
We then returned to their home to watch the Áramótaskaup, an annual hour-long New Year's special that satirizes social issues and current events in Iceland which were characteristic of the past year, and rang in the new decade.
I then bid my dinnermates a happy new year, and headed back towards Gamli to meet up with my university friends. Agnes, one of my friends from the choir, was hosting a party in her house that we were welcome to bring people to, and so I brought my Gamli friends with me to her house, and we chatted pleasantly and played some card games for about an hour and a half before heading downtown to dance until the early morning.
I would say that my first New Year's in Iceland definitely lived up to the hype, and was a beautiful, memorable, and happy way to ring in the new decade spent with lovely friends from all walks of my life here.

January:
It truly feels bizarre to write about January as a month that's now at its end, as it feels like it's gone by in the blink of an eye.

At the beginning of the month, my good friend Juliana, a delightful Brazilian-American fellow language nerd who I'd met during the summer program we both did here in 2018, was visiting for a couple of days. We met up at Stofan and spent a bit of lovely quality time together, getting to catch up for the first time in quite a while on everything from her law degree at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, to Iceland, to our respective lives and identities and all kinds of fun experiences.

A few days after New Year's, I embarked on a crazy but fun last-minute trip to northern Iceland with Elena and our friends Elin from Sweden and Lillian from Germany, who had been home for the holidays but came back for New Year's. It was a greatly improvised and sometimes wild adventure, but we managed to make a beautiful experience out of it all the same. We stayed in an isolated guesthouse on a country property about forty minutes from Akureyri, the de facto regional capital of northern Iceland and the largest city outside the capital area. We learned just in time before leaving that there was no kitchen on the property, and so managed to meal plan and cook all of our food the evening before we set off (placing it in the snow outside our door as an ideal makeshift fridge).
We had to adjust our schedule a little bit to account for rather dangerous inclement weather, but still managed to see a lot, visiting the beautiful and relaxing natural baths at Mývatn lake, the insanely beautiful natural rock formations at Dimmuborgir, a cave with a geothermal pool inside called Grjótagjá where scenes from Game of Thrones were apparently filmed, Námafjall crater, which has an ethereally steamy geothermal field and a reddish, Martian-like landscape, and Goðafoss, a famous waterfall where legend has it that lawspeaker Þorgeir Ljósveitningagoði cast his pagan idols into the water after Iceland converted to Christianity around the year 1000 C.E. It was a beautiful trip to a region of the country with a dazzling and spellbinding landscape, and I can't wait to go back.

Just two days after that, Elena and I left for London, a trip which we'd booked a few weeks earlier.
Having been in Iceland since October, it was a bit hard to get used to being in such a crowded and busy place again, especially one as much as London is. But it was also an excellent and enjoyable change of scenery, and a fantastic first trip to the U.K.
We stayed in a centrally located hostel called Generator, and visited many of the great nearby sites, including the British Museum, St. James Park, Westminster Abbey, the London City Museum, Sky Garden, Borough Market, Trafalgar Square, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. I met up with a surprising number of people I know: my friend Scout, who I knew from my first program in Iceland three years ago, Ellie, a Londoner who was on exchange at Beloit all of last year, Rahul, another Beloiter who was in London with his sister visiting family friends (both Ellie and Rahul were housemates of mine last year), and Catharine, another friend from my first Icelandic program, who just moved to London from northern England to start an Icelandic degree at University College London (the only full Icelandic degree that exists outside Iceland, I might add).
Although it was short and a bit crazy, I'm truly glad for the trip. I've been wanting to visit London for many years, and having been very interested in British history (particularly the Elizabethan era) since I was a small child, it was truly magical to be there and to see places where these historical events I'd been interested in for such a long time had taken place.

The day after we returned from London, classes started again, and the rest of the month since then has been pretty uneventful, but nice. Classes have been proving a bit busier and more challenging this semester, and I've been trying (key word: trying) to do my best to stay on top of things. Choir rehearsals started up again, and last weekend we had our newbie party for the newly accepted singers that have just joined. I've been hanging out with friends, studying in cafes, doing my best not to lose my mind with the rather hellish construction taking place around my dorm right now, and getting back to my everyday routine here. It's really nice to have the feeling of a daily routine, I must say. The first days back to campus were very cozy; as I kept running into people, saying hi, and catching up after the holidays, it felt like a homecoming.

Some general thoughts to leave off on:
As I'm doing my best to get back into blogging and write more often and about more things, I might save some of this stuff for another post. But for now suffice it to say that my Fulbright so far has been a beautiful, critical, life-changing experience for me, although in different ways from many of my past experiences. In my past experiences living abroad, usually as an exchange student, I was coming to new places that I had never been to before, doing my best to create entirely new lives from scratch that would be all too temporary, and that I knew I'd leave behind in a few months. Here, instead, I'm returning to a place that I've already been to, am familiar with, and had lovely, formative experiences in, and strengthening that familiarity that I already had with networks, friend groups, community spaces, and the like. As such, this experience hasn't been as much of an insane and constantly adrenaline-inducing adventure compared to my past exchanges. But because it's different, a homecoming of sorts. I'm settling down here in a place that I already knew, building a life here, and it's feeling ever more like home. And this time it's not temporary: I'll be staying here next year as a recipient of the Árni Magnússon Institute's scholarship, and so I'll be able to keep building and benefiting from this sense of home and community that I'm building here.

And that, perhaps, is one of the most beautiful things about my experience so far.