One week of class in San Francisco should be about right. See some of the hold haunts, notice that all of these little barriers I've built over the years against returning are more fiction than fact. Crowded, yes. A Starbuck's on every corner, literally. But I actually found a seat on BART coming back to Oakland this evening. Everyone seemed relatively pleasant. Riding in, there were more than two or three rather well dressed young women catching naps in their seats. You could tell they were living a full blast upper middle class existence, advertising careers and the like during the day, a crisis every hour, husband and kids in the suburbs, sleep a luxury. They'll be OK when they arrive in a few minutes, coffee in hand, hyped on caffein, ready again to rule the world. I was there with them when I was younger. Ruling the world. Tomorrow, on BART, a long lens for the camera.

There's a Nova segment on public television this evening about the Vikings. My grandparents on my mother's side were Icelanders and on my father's, Danes. The Danes, well, the male Dane, he married a Frenchwoman and they came over, I believe, in the mid 1800's and I've always assumed the Danish side has been thinned over the intervening generations. So I'm sort of a semi-Viking. Anyway, the thing that made me think about all this and will probably get me to watch the Nova segment is that I saw The Thirteenth Warrior on video over the weekend. An OK movie, better than I expected, Antonio Banderas playing a Muslim nobleman banished to the outer lying territories, is thrown in with a bunch of Vikings, who are racing to the aid an allied clan in trouble. The interesting thing about the movie for me was the way they portrayed the Vikings. There was a distinct feeling of a societal culture that was both interesting and different.

I've read some of the Sagas and skimmed some of the histories, but I've never really paid much attention to Icelandic or Danish history and I've never really considered visiting Iceland, although I've talked about it. I'm one of the few members of my family who haven't returned, one of my cousins spending weeks out on the, what, Tundra, on a horse, others who have travelled to Iceland with the Seattle Icelandic Chorus for a series of concerts. The Thirteenth Warrior was a movie, of course, and whatever feeling for the Norse culture it was able to create, is more in the imagination of the writers, I suspect, than anything to do with reality. Not that the reality of a medieval Norse town is anything anyone knows about.