The Icelandic People

In public, Icelanders can be perceived as a bit cold in public. It only takes approaching them and talking to them a bit (most speak excellent English as all Icelanders are required to learn Icelandic, English, and Danish) and truly, they are very warm after that.

Icelanders are a curious people. They are very individualistic. The young ones out in public are not clones of each other. Sure, there are fashionable ones, but really, they all have their own thing going on. It kind of flies in the face of their personalities, but it is part of their charm.

It's been wonderful having a second visit to Iceland. One visit to any place is more of just getting your bearings, but a second visit really helps to start understanding the culture.

Hopefully we can post some pictures soon. We have taken over 1200 pictures between both of us, so we should be able to get some of them online so you can see how varied the terrain is here.

Tuesday

As we head out, Reykjavik by the way is 200,000 people in its metro area.

We are driving east (of course, Reykjavik is on the west central coast) and south.

Iceland is a land truly of a thousand terrains. At the Blue Lagoon, you feel like you are on the moon. Very rocky and very barren with a lot of lava stone.

Looking out of the window today, we are looking at mountains, some covered with low vegetation (and very green.)

Actually, Iceland is probably the least socialistic country among the Scandinavians. The church and "family" groups have some power here (although an American ex-pat explained that it is more "general morality") as well and Icelandic law is very strict when it comes to "morality." Drug laws are strict, no prostitution allowed, and they even did not get strong beer (over 2% alcohol) until 1989!

Iceland, of course, suffered the most during the financial crash with 80% of their banks going broke. Iceland in the financial bubble imported more Range Rovers than Norway and Sweden combined (and Norway and Sweden have 50 million people compared to 400,000 in Iceland.) The tour guide joked that Range Rovers are now called "Game Over's" in Iceland. :)

There's a lot of shame from Icelanders in general about their financial crimes. Some do the "I'm from Finland" thing overseas since they are ashamed. :(

First full day

Hello all...

Just wanted to check-in with everyone and let you know that we made it fine and after a fairly tiring trip from Tulsa to Baltimore Saturday (turbulence was horrible, jerky, and constant - the worst kind) our 5 1/4 hour flight from DC Dulles to Keflavik airport in Iceland was fairly smooth.

After walking in DC 5-6 miles on Sunday morning we were dead tired on the overnight trip to Iceland. We left out at 8:50pm and made it here around 7am local time. (Iceland is on GMT, the same as England even though they are not quite that far east.) Our seats were in the emergency row and did not recline, so we had to play "lazy schoolboys" and put our heads on our tray tables in front of our seats to try to sleep. :)

Still, we got to go to the Blue Lagoon on our way in for the day. If you don't know about it, check out this link on Wikipedia or check out their home page and read about it. Maybe one of the most relaxing places on Earth, at least in my book.

We will be posting pictures as we go along. Hope all is well back in the States.

Russ and Will