A carnival of technology

So I went to Iceland last week.  I had some money and some vacation saved up, I was already hopping on planes and going places on account of Chris’s getting hitched (congratulations!), and I just wanted to get out of the country for a while and see something new.  Here is my self-indulgent attempt to document the trip.

One bit of common wisdom about the Scandinavian islands is that Greenland is made of ice and Iceland is green.  This is a gross over-simplification.  Iceland is the Alaska of Scandinavia: it’s a barren, inhospitable land, full of active volcanoes, frequent earthquakes from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge a few miles east of Reykjavík, and, by the standards of a travellin’ Southern boy, some really awful weather.  A day over 50°F is a good day in the summer, and the varied landscape of oceans and rivers and glaciers and volcanoes ensures a constant, brutal wind nearly everywhere on the island.  The most common sight is a lava field, craggy rocks reminiscent of the American southwest, covered in the only green that so much of the land can support: moss.  Agriculture consists of a handful of hot spring greenhouses and a whole lot of pasture.  The only creatures that can survive on this island are sheep, some curious-looking hairy horses, a fox or two and a bunch of stubborn Icelanders.  To say that the island is green is very misleading.

Icelanders have a reputation of being awful drivers, but I didn’t see it.  Maybe I’m just used to bad driving.  They seemed to make do pretty well in a country where pretty much anything outside the one city is a poorly-maintained country road.  The speed limit is a reasonable 90kmh, and I didn’t see anyone crash or veer of the road or cut someone off even once.  One thing I found interesting with their traffic signals—and maybe this is something they do elsewhere in Europe, I don’t know—is that lights would do the usual green, yellow, red thing, and then the red light would add a yellow again just before the green, letting drivers know when to get ready, and, by encouraging everyone to jump the light a little bit, ensuring that no one ever ran a red.

I have a weird knack for blending in a lot of the time when I travel.  If I stay somewhere long enough I’ll be asked for directions or advice or whatever one asks a local, but here it meant that a lot of people assumed I could speak Icelandic.  Of course it’s reasonable to address someone in your native land in your native language, but it seemed a little weird when in a knickknack shop for tourists, stuck behind people unable to figure how to spend a Euro or a dollar, to get to the front and be greeted by a cheerful “Get ég hjálpað þér?”  I feel like I should have at least learned the numbers.  I think I let a lot of people down with my constant English apologies.

Iceland has better Mexican food than New England, but it’s still not quite up to par.  I guess it’s a little hard to get some of the herbs and spices, like cilantro or adobo, but at least one place there knows how to swing a pepper.  The Indian dude must have had some connecs; that daal I had for lunch one time was delicious.

My first meal in Reykjavík was in a vegetarian restaurant full of people in keffiyehs, copies of an English language alt-weekly spread around and Joanna Newsom on the stereo.  I’m not sure if that says more about Reykjavík or about me.