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The Icelandics are an interesting people. They are very friendly, but can also be quite blunt. Iceland is a quite isolated place, and this isolation and their viking past have deeply coloured their psychology. They are very conservative and cherish their Viking past. For example, Iceland, unlike any other first world place I know of, doesn't use family names, but the Viking system of naming, i.e. your last name is "son of"/"daughter of" whoever your father is so all Icelandic names end in -son or -dottir and that's not a joke. In other words, brothers don't have exactly the same last name as their sisters and your uncles/aunts have probably very different names. They also tried to keep their language as original as possible; they invent new words to describe things like "computers" instead of taking loan words and use letters like þ/Þ/ð/Ð/æ/Æ, the first of which is an actual runic letter. The Icelandics are very laid-back and don't appear to be under a lot of stress - in fact, many people don't really seem to be doing anything at all. They also show a very strong air of carelessness and they never appear to be worried. They don't even charge for their tourist attractions, where any other country would've charged solid gold. The national Icelandic pastime is swimming, unlike sauna like you might expect, probably because their country was blessed with many natural hot springs which are fantastic to dive into. There are naturally-warmed swimming pools everywhere and many people have a "hotpot" at home which is basically a jacuzzi. They are quite strict on hygiene, requiring you to shower well before you go into a pool, especially the armpits, and you are required to shower without swimming attire. They also take off their shoes inside, not just in their houses but also inside some public buildings. Icelanders are also very fond of stacking rocks for some utterly arbitrary reason and everywhere you can find piled rocks ranging from small to big.
Iceland is not a big but not a small country either, but it's very sparsely populated - there are only 320,000 Icelanders, almost all of whom live in Reykjavik ("Bay of Smoke"), the world's most northernly, and most peaceful capital city. The worst crimes that are committed there, as with any place in Iceland, are pickpocketing and public drunkenness. The Icelandics simply don't think of committing crimes, the thought doesn't occur to them. Reykjavik is a nice, cosy city, but not a very pretty one - pretty much the prettiest view I managed to score on camera was this. Outside of Reykjavik, there's almost nothing - by comparison, the second-biggest "city" in Iecland is Akureyri, which has a population of 17,500. As a result, everybody who lives outside of Reykjavik is a farmer. This is easily visible in their cars too, as in Reykjavik the locals drive pumped-up Land Cruisers while everybody outside of it drives a kitted Hilux. Tourists, including us, drive Suzuki Grand Vitaras.
Amazingly, in this time of global energy crisis, the Icelandics have an excess of free, green, renewable energy at their disposal due to the huge geothermal activity and countles waterfalls of their island. They tap only a fraction of this, but 99% of all electricity in Iceland is fully green and renewable. Though they are broke now, they might get very rich in the future because of this.
As in Scandinavia, religion seems to have taken a deep hold of people and even the tiniest cluster of houses has its own church, sometimes even just a pair of houses. There is a church literally every few kilometres and they are all very small and extremely ugly.
The weather in Iceland isn't as cold as you would think, with it having a type of marine climate and they are near the warm gulf stream or something, so it's relatively temperate for its latitude. We were told that during summer it's a very comfortable 20 degrees outside, but as it turned out, by "summer" they mean only a few weeks and we were just outside of them so it was between 0-10 degrees everyday. It's very wet in Iceland, with short, small showers showing up very frequently, and it's very windy - it didn't drop below wind force 7 on the Beaufort scale. We also had hail, and at the end of August, snowfall during the night all over the country.
The facilities in Iceland are quite poor - you'd almost think they just didn't care. In many places, the water, even tap water, reeks very strongly of sulphur so it's hard not to gag when you're taking a shower or doing the dishes. The roads are similarly outfitted - they have only one highway, road 1, which is a ring road going around the edges of the island. Most other roads are closed outside of July and August, leaving most of the island completely inaccessible for 10 out of 12 months of year. Most roads are not tarmacked, and those that are are liable to stop suddenly and convert into gravel roads at some point. Not even the 1 is fully tarmacked and parts of it flood every year, which brings us to another thing - many inland roads have unbridged rivers which need to be forded if you want to follow them, hence why the Islandics drive such big cars. There is tourism on Iceland, but though it's popular now, it's only become so quite recently and the Icelandics haven't made a lot of facilities outside of the popular tourist destinations. One very popular tourist route called a Golden Circle which is a few things near Reykjavik is outfitted very nicely with tarmack roads and buses leading to them and walking paths around the attractions. Outside of the Golden Circle however, it's not always easy, but to be honest I hope they keep it that way. Iceland is much more beautiful in its astounding natural state. The most well-known tourist spots are very easy to identify as they are extremely chock-full of Americans, one of whom, in an overdose of stereotypicalness, insisted his camera was a fine example of "American ingenuity" even though it was a Nikon.
Iceland is pure nature, and the Icelandics seem to want to keep it that way. Many rivers inland are teeming with salmon, and the ground appears to be very rich in iron, but they don't want to ruin their beautiful landscape with mines and stuff so they just leave it be. Let's hope they keep it that way, too. Though in the time of the early settlers a lot of grain was cultivated there, the climate no longer supports any crops and there are only animal farms now. There are no trees at all on Iceland and though the land as a whole looks quite green it's mostly moss; very little can take root in the soil now. As a result, Iceland has to import almost everything, and many things are quite expensive. We were especially surprised by finding a lot of Dutch produce there - I guess we finally found out where all our export is going
.All in all, Iceland is a fascinating country you simply have to visit. And do it soon, before it turns into a tourist staple
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