Month: December 2013

Lunch with an astronaut on Florida’s Space Coast

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The week before Christmas has been dominated by an out-the-blue trip: Florida’s Space Coast.

Maya and I spent a long weekend in Cocoa Beach, researching a family-travel piece around the theme of introducing children to the space race.

This ties into the 25th anniversary of the moon landings in 2014.

Our trip was anchored around the Kennedy Space Centre, where the highlight of our visit was meeting the astronaut DonThomas [pictured above] for a private interview.

We also spent time getting to know the space story and trying our hand at being astronauts [pictured below].

Look out for the story in the Sunday Times Travel Magazine in February as part of a Florida Total Guide.

What’s your favourite space story for kids? Share your thoughts below. 

Gazetteer

Florida Space Coast 

Kennedy Space Centre

Sunday Times Travel Magazine

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Story of the week: Elf hunting in Iceland

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* The last dip into the archives of this year, so let’s end with a suitably festive and seasonal story from the back catalogue. 

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I never realised Icelandic road building was such a tricky business.

Driving through the lava deserts topped with neon-green moss on the Alfholsvegur road outside Reykjavik, I’d been puzzled by the strange contours of a large bend in the tarmac.

The explanation, I later discovered, was that the Icelandic Roads Department, after their equipment had broken in a series of mysterious accidents, had been instructed by local mystics to build the road with a hefty deliberate kink so as to avoid bulldozing a large rock where the elves lived.

That’s right. Elves. Iceland’s 280,000 population has the world’s highest literacy rate at 99.9 per cent. Some 82 per cent of Icelanders are regular Net-savvy computer users.

Yet, despite their propensity to embrace modernity, 70 per cent of Icelanders still believe in the old ways – ways that include the existence of a huldufolk or a ‘hidden world’ of elves, dwarfs and spirits with magical powers.

Elf school

As I started to ask around about this so-called hidden world, it became clear that Iceland with its glaciers, geysers and a landscape somewhere between that of Ireland and the Moon, had a long and proud heritage of being close to nature.

The hard-living inhabitants have told folk tales of ‘little people’ since the time of the Sagas, medieval stories of Nordic life dating from the 12th century.

Today, however, Reykjavik has been transformed from rural fishing community into one of the coolest world cities. 5,000 locals and tourists crowd bars such as the Damon Albarn co-owned Kaffibarinn each weekend to revel in the city’s ebullient nightlife.

Mass tourism has mushroomed with revenues now accounting for 13.6 per cent of Iceland’s foreign earnings, second only to the fishing industry.

Nevertheless, the old ways survive.

For a glimpse into the marriage of old and new ways, I hooked up with one of more enterprising locals who was turning ancient folklore into a nice little earner. As such I found myself outside an ordinary grey building in Reykjavik’s east to meet Magnus Skarphedinsson, historian and headmaster of the Reykjavik Elf School.

From these premises, shared with a psychic school, Magnus has devoted 19 years of his life to documenting eyewitness reports of contact with the hidden world.

He has also helped 2000 students – mainly Germans and Scandinavians – successfully complete their diploma in elf studies, a course comprising a half day in the classroom followed by an afternoon’s elf hunting around town.

As I took to my desk diligently, pen poised, Magnus explained to the class that there are, in fact, two nations living in Iceland: the human world and the hidden world.

The latter, he assured us, gesturing to a large ceramic elf in a jaunty red hat and britches on the shelf above the whiteboard, live in a different dimension to humans and have their own unique culture. Only psychics or the odd lucky student actually gets to spot one.

Fairy dust

His main rival in the elf studies stakes is Erla Stefansdottir, a local mystic women who lives in an unassuming corrugated iron house on the edge of Reykjavik. Erla claims the ability to communicate with the hidden world and espouses the need to respect their culture, not exploit it for material gain.

On a rainy Monday morning, I joined Erla for a guided elf tour of Hafnarfjordur, a fishing village seven kilometres south of Reykjavik built on lava and lay lines.

The village is, reputedly, the elf capital of Iceland. Indeed, according to Erla, the local population of 20,000 people share their home with over 20 types of dwarves and four of gnomes.

The town’s Hamarinn cliff, in particular, is a centre for activity with its elfin inhabitants believed to be of royal elf stock.

Erla agreed to assist with tours, which have proven so popular they are set to go twice daily from next summer, on the proviso that visitors are encouraged to show love for the earth by patting rocks gently.

Having been assured by the Hafnarfjordur tourist board, she went about drawing up a hidden world map of key sites around town. And the tourists promptly flocked in.

The battle for the hidden world tourist market is rapidly escalating into a showdown between Reykjavik’s two leading elf-spotting experts with their drastically different approaches to elf folklore.

However, while ‘non-ethical’ tours continue to carelessly trample over the rocky lava field elf homes, Erla is concerned that if humans continue to violate the hidden world, the elves will soon take their revenge.

And, as the Icelandic Roads Department will tell you, nobody messes with a seriously angry elf and gets away with it.

This story first appeared in the Guardian in 2001. Liked this? Try On the Edge in West Greenland.

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Story of the week: Posting a letter to Santa in Finland

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* Today marks December 1st and the official onset of the Christmas silly season. So here’s a suitably festive tale from the far-distant archives. 

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I am going to meet Santa. No, really.

This is not some department store wannabe with a beer gut, a stick-on beard and halitosis, nor a drunken uncle in a dressing gown and wellies.

Ever since I was little and new Space LEGO was about as good as life could get, everyone has told me that Santa lives at the North Pole. Yeah right, I thought.

But this year I’ve made the ultimate pilgrimage to Rovanieme in northern Finland for a private audience with the big man himself.

This is my chance to check Santa’s credentials and ask whatever happened to that Scalextric I wanted in 1978.

To be honest, though, now I’m about to meet the big guy, I’m a bit nervous. That’s why I’m on the toilet.

Santa’s toilet! Can you believe this? I’m actually sat on Santa’s toilet. The very one where he settles down to practice his ho-ho-hos and deposit his little Santa parcels.

Come to think of it, I think he has warmed the seat for me. But that’s Santa, eh? He thinks of everything.

I’ve got a confession too: I had reindeer for lunch.

Now I know eating Rudolph is tantamount to saying I’m a bad, bad boy and deserve no presents, but hey, it’s minus 10 outside and I was hungry after the night train from Helsinki.

And besides, Rudolph comes served on a delicious bed of mash potato and loganberries.

Santa knows about my bon-viveur tendencies because, naturally. Santa knows everything.

Special delivery

Now, before I get my one-to-one with big daddy Xmas, I’ve got to work to earn my keep. You see, I’ve been recruited for the day as one of Santa’s little helpers.

I know what you’re thinking. I don’t look good in red and haven’t worn pixie boots since a brief and, frankly, embarrassing Fields of the Nephilim phase when I was 15.

But they’re an elf down at the Santa Claus Main Post Office in the official Santa village and so I’ve manfully stepped into the breach.

It is, after all, Christmas.

When children around the world write letters to ‘Santa Claus, The North Pole’, this post office, located next to a marker for the Arctic Circle in a Santa theme village is where they end up.

Better still, and in the spirit of Christmas, the resident elves sort through the letters and send out typewritten responses from Santa to the best.

The post office today handles around 600,000 letters per year. During December, it receives 32,000 letters each day from 184 counties with Japan, the UK and Poland providing the largest bulging mail sacks.

That’s a lot of mail to sort while festively dealing with the Japanese coach parties and enduring the endlessly chirpy Christmas music, which is piped around the whole complex on a repeat loop tape.

To me, it’s enough to make the most ardent Christmas fan want to go out and terrorise turkeys.

Thankfully, however, Santa has sagely hand-picked helpers like cheery Salla Taurianinen, a 21-year-old business studies student who is one of the three full-time elves employed to sort the mail this year.

“I guess I’m a Christmas freak,” she smiles as we sit down next a box of mail ominously marked X-files. “I’ve always loved Christmas since I was little and love the atmosphere here as the big day approaches.”

As we start sorting through the mail, Salla teaches me the rules for which letters get a place in the ‘deserves an answer’ pile.

“We will send out 40,000 replies by next Spring but that still means we have to be very selective of the deserving letters,” she explains.

She adds, her little elf hat at a jaunty festive angle:

“I look for letters which are more than just a list. Maybe it has a picture or some special message.”

Once we start wading through the piles, it soon become clear that the task provides a rare insight into the human condition. Present requests range from Emily aged three in Hampshire who asks for “Pillows, priced £3.99” to Sayo Yamanashi aged 12 in Tokyo who wants “wings to fly like a bird in the sky.”

An ambitious request given air traffic restrictions over central Tokyo but, by way of a sweetener, her dad has enclosed a cheque.

As the piles grow and more tourists pour through the doors en route to the grotto, we come across a single letter from Iraq, adorned with stamps of Sadam Hussein in strikingly festive pose.

“In our country, Christians are few but God is always with us,” writes Osama Mohammed Shash aged 10 of Baghdad.

The standout letter, though, has all the elves reaching for the Kleenex. It comes from Ilhovana Perez who explains she first heard of Santa aged 23 when she escaped Cuba and fled to Germany.

She writes: “I find it very sad that I never experienced the joy of Christmas and I want so much for my little girl now aged six to know your kindness as I never did.”

“Please send her a reply so both she and I can forget the sadness that has touched our lives.”

Private audience

My shift over, the moment has come for an audience with the big man himself. As I approach tentatively, I can see he’s reading Harry Potter and waving off another Japanese coach party in near-perfect Osaka district patois.

Of course he is. Santa is all knowing. I feel suitably chastened. How could I ever have doubted this was the real Santa?

“Normally I get a lot of letters which are just big lists of presents but, this year, I’m reading more letters wishing simply for peace and understanding across different cultures,” he explains as we settle down in his grotto.

“I feel a bit sad that Christmas has become a big business; I fear the original meaning has been lost under the weight of materialism,” he sighs, waving at the webcam and smiling as the resident photographer snaps a souvenir shot (available for a token fee after my consultation).

“Then again,” adds the old man wisely, “I suppose that’s why I’m still needed – to make sure that children still have their dreams.”

This story first appeared in The Big Issue in 2001. Liked this? Try Last Tango in Finland.

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