The Icelandic Burqa

Take a look next time you're in the company of more than three Icelandic women and you'll notice that the dominant colour is black. Even in summer.

The 'high-street' fashion landscape here is sometimes so homogenous that women dress virtually indentically.

I've been witness to conversations where groups of women talk about Islamic countries, remark at how oppressive the burqa is, saying how they lucky they are to have been born here, whilst all wearing mainly black.

The irony of this is not lost on me.

Tip of the Day: Creating The Right Impression

If you're Icelandic and you want to create a good impression with English-speaking foreigners, having a ringtone that sings "...'cos I'm a muthafuckin' P.I.M.P." does not make you look professional, or even cool.

The UK For Newbies

The most effective way to insult anyone from the UK or Ireland is to accuse them of being from the wrong country. Here's a simple map to help:

Great Britain is the bit on the right: that's England, Scotland and Wales put together.

U.K. is actually an abbreviation of The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. So that's Great Britain plus Northern Ireland.

Ireland is a completely seperate sovereign country. They have their own parliament and nothing to do with the British Monarchy. They have the Euro, whilst Great Britain has the Pound Sterling.

Northern Ireland is the top-right corner of the island of Ireland that comes under the remit of the UK. I'm not going to go into the history of this.

The Scottish people are rightly proud to be not English and get understandably very upset when people ignorantly refer to them as being English.

The Welsh people are rightly proud to be not English and get understandably very upset when people ignorantly refer to them as being English.

The English people get a bit upset when people ignorantly refer to them as being Scottish or Welsh.

So:

Scottish people, Welsh people, English people and Northern Irelanders are all from the UK.

England is not the UK.
The UK is not England.

All four places speak English, but the accents vary a lot by region. They can be very hard for visitors to understand. A friend of mine who grew up in southern England moved to Scotland and it took him two months to fully understand the local accent. Search for any interview with Sir Alex Ferguson on YouTube if you want an example.

In some parts of Wales, Welsh is the first language. In some parts of Scotland, Gælic is still used.

Icelanders: if you want to understand the effect of getting this wrong, try to imagine how you would feel if someone said "Ah yes, Iceland. That's part of Norway, right?"

Overseas Travel

Overheard recently:

Icelander #1: I've not seen you for a while, where have you been?
Icelander #2: I was abroad for a few days.
Icelander #1: Ah, of course. Is Tivoli open this time of year?

Don't Use A Handkerchief In Iceland

One of the most obvious indicators of cultural difference between the Icelanders and Brits is the attitude to nose clearing.

In Iceland it's considered disgusting to blow your nose in front of other people. You are expected to do this in the lavatory.

Even more disgusting is the use of the handkerchief, apparently because the user not only often inspects the outcome of the nose-blow, but then puts the handkerchief back in their pocket.

Brits that visit me here are disgusted by the Icelandic way of clearing their noses; it's done by simply sucking hard up the nose, then swallowing the product.

It's normal to do that in company here, whilst sitting at one's desk or even at the dinner table. It's not considered spectacularly rude.

Most Icelanders that I know will, upon departure of a handkerchief-using Brit, animatedly explain to their friends how disgusting they found it to watch the Brit use the handkerchief at the dinner table.

Most British and American expats that I know find the suck-up-the-nose habit a bit gross.

The strength of the tradition for handkerchief use amongst Brits is illustrated by a story from an ex-colleague: he went to a fairly generic grammar school in Wales and explained that they had a strict rule that every boy must carry a clean hankerchief at all times. The headmaster would periodically check this by asking everyone to stand during morning assembly, then thrust his hand into his pocket, retrieve his hanky and raise his hand. Anyone failing to hold a hanky, or even committing the crime of holding a soiled hanky, was punished.

Icelanders Are Sociopathic

I was picking up a friend from Keflavík airport recently and had a classic demonstration of Icelandic behaviour.

The arrivals space in the lovely 'Kef' is now fairly typical of the genre, if somewhat smaller: there's a large sliding door where the arriving passengers emerge, a ribbon-barriered broad walkway down which they walk while they squint and scan the crowd for their loved ones, and an open space in front of that where said loved ones wait. This open space would probably hold around five hundred people rock-concert style, or comfortably around fifty Japanese or English people if their personal space rules were to be not infringed.

I got there very early and stood somewhere just forward of off-centre in the open space. There were five or ten other people there: most of them lingering towards the front, a few at the front corners and the remainder randomly scattered.

Here's a crappy picture that neatly illustrates the point:

So there I stood, patiently waiting and doing what any good nerd does these days: checking my Twitter feeds and reading The Grauniad on my smartphone. All in the world was good. My plan to get there early and chill out was working just fine.

People started to fill the space, until most of the space was taken up and there were obvious walkways in between the human obstructions. Here's a picture no less crappy than the previous one that shows this:

The inevitable then happened: people starting using the walkway directly in front of me and I was being treated as the human equivalent of a wall: something to graze or bump off. I was standing as you'd expect someone to stand using a smartphone: holding the phone around sternum level with one hand, whilst gently caressing it -er, sorry: scrolling- with the other hand. This meant that the phone was sticking out maybe ten centimetres from my body.

This was clearly too much for Siggi and his pals to handle. As they were walking past me, my finely-tuned proximity alarms were going off like mad and warning me of impending collisions, of people walking straight at me and that if I didn't get out of the way a collision would happen. A couple of years' living in London taught me the gentle give-and-take dance that the people in cities in real countries develop, that Brownian motion of being in close proximity whilst not invading other people's space. The people coming past me were walking straight through the space occupied by my phone. They were clipping it with their arms and nearly knocking it out of my hand. I found I had to hold tightly on to it for fear that I would actually lose grip.

I decided to carry out a small experiment and see what would happen if I fought the Brownian motion instinct and just stood my ground. The bumping got worse.

Then, a glorious thing happened. The actions of one man demonstrated so clearly the collective instinct of the Icelanders when it comes to thoughtfulness, consideration for other people and social awareness.

A man wearing worn-out sports clothing, scruffy black sneakers, a cheap gold necklace and unwashed hair stood directly in front of me, with his woman at his side. See picture.

The distance from the front edge of my phone to the centre of his back was round ten centimetres. Unlike many of my anecdotes, this is absolutely true.

So not only was Captain Cretin completely blocking my view, he was also seriously invading my personal space. He'd obviously planted himself there because he wanted a clear view of the arriving travellers and it didn't even occur to him to that he might have been blocking someone's view.

The proximity alarms in my head were now screaming: 'Ah-ROO-GAA!... Ah-ROOOOO-GAA!!!'.

But, no. I stubbornly stayed where I was and made the sacrifice of my comfort for the sake of social science. I decided it would be interesting to see what Captain Cretin would do next.

He surpassed himself. He was so keen to get a good look at the arriving people that he was bobbing and weaving a lot to get a better view. A quick glance confirmed why he needed to do this: yet another peasant farmer had planted himself right in front and blocked his view.

In the course of his bobbing he actually backed into me. Several times.

In a country where social history is measured in units larger than nanoseconds this would have been the offense that prompted gushing apologies and made him realise that he was standing way too close to me. But, no. Our superhero did nothing whatsoever. It clearly didn't even register with him and that's the interesting point: he saw nothing wrong whatsoever with what he was doing. To him it was perfectly normal behaviour. He wasn't trying to to be rude, boorish or ignorant; he was just standing waiting for someone. If he'd wanted to be rude, he would have done something rude by his standards, like the fart-cup-sniff-assess trick, or spitting on the floor. Or far, far worse: pulled out a handkerchief, loudly blown his nose, examined the product and put the handkerchief back in his pocket.

A quick skim of the interwebs turned up this interesting information about sociopathy. It tells us that what used to be called Sociopathy is defined as:

 "...a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood."

...which means that according to this definition, Icelanders are Sociopathic.

Footnote:

How can I be so generalised? Well, I've lived here long enough to know that this is typical behaviour, not just for white trash and didn't-learn-it-in-school seventy year old taxi drivers, but typical behaviour even for apparently civilised people in business suits.

This may actually be a more accurate definition, giving us the following:

"Anti-social behaviour is behaviour that lacks consideration for others and that may cause damage to society, whether intentionally or through negligence, as opposed to pro-social behaviour, behaviour that helps or benefits society."

...but the effect is the same, methinks.

Yet Another Great Piece Of Journalism

A very nicely made video from The Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/video/2011/dec/13/iceland-volcano-eyjafjallajokull-marcel-theroux-video

...but of course, they got the crucial detail wrong: he wasn't on Eyjafjallajökull, he was on the col between Eyjafjallajökull and Mýrdalsjökull named Fimmvörðuháls. This is where the earlier of the two eruptions took place.

There Are No Trains In Iceland

There are no trains in Iceland. This is not because the population and the economy are too small to justify it. It's because the whole idea of punctuality doesn't exist in Iceland.

Icelanders are at least seventeen minutes late to everything. I've been here eight years and the only thing I've ever seen them arrive punctually to is funerals. No: hang on, the last one I went to saw some stragglers drift in a few minutes late. No, I think I can safely say that Icelanders are late for everything.

A train system where passengers expect to be able to lean out of the window and call to the driver: "Hey, hang on a minute, Siggi will be here in five minutes, he just SMSd me!" just wouldn't work.

How To Ask The Time In Iceland

Asking the time in Iceland is not the same as it is in the UK or the USA. It's one of the best ways to show the social differences between the Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic approaches.

If an Icelander were to ask a Briton, the Icelander would come across as abrupt, possibly pushy, even rude. He'd say "Hey, what time is it?", and nothing more. He'd expect a short answer: "Quarter past ten.", to which he'd reply simply "Thanks". He may even not say thanks.

A Brit, on the other hand, would do the full humble-polite-apologetice routine: "Excuse me, er, sorry to bother you, but could you tell me what the time is please?", then when told would reply in similar detail: "Oh, thank you. I'm in such a hurry, off to this meeting, you see. Anyway, thankyou...".

What's interesting about it is that this sort of expansive courtesy and choreography come across as affected, possibly even silly to the Icelanders. The two societies' approaches to this are neatly polarised: the Icelanders value pragmatism and simply do not have the hundreds of years of social tweaking or the influence of the Victorians or the French aristocracy from whom the Brits learned their affected ways. To them, asking in a direct way is polite: it doesn't waste anyone's time and allows the exchange to be over quickly, meaning they can rapidly get back to important things like surviving the winter.

The Brits would find the Icelanders' directness simply rude. Curt and interrupting, their social efficiency would socially unbalance the Brits, who are unused to having their personal space invaded without warning.

What's interesting about this is that both cultures can cause friction, possibly even offense or annoyance simply by trying to be polite, or at least 'polite' as it is defined in their own social frame of reference.

It took me a few years to really grasp this and whilst I learnt to adapt and suppress my learned reactions, there are still times when something grates or I find myself needing to make just a little bit of effort to understand that the Icelanders are not trying to be rude. I find it interesting to realise how ingrained are the social rules that I learned for the more than thirty years that it took for me to find my way to Iceland.

Christmas

Outside my window it's a Christmas scene straight from a greetings card: a good cover of glistening snow, twinkling fairy lights and brooding winter twilight.

This weekend I made one of my annual Christmas shopping trips and for some reason I always have such mixed feelings. I resent the corruption of Christmas into a reatial-fest, of course, and as an atheist I see no point in celebrating the festival.

Iceland does Christmas rather nicely, I think it's fair to say. Since I've been here I've started to resent it less and actually enjoy it. Being with my Icelandic family, relaxing together and seeing the pleasure it brings to the children makes it worthwhile.

I've always felt that an end-of-year celebration is a very valid excuse for fesitivity and as such have always felt that New Year's Eve holds much more significance for me. Fortunately, the Icelanders know how to celebrate it with style.

I still have more shopping and planning to do, and no doubt won't be able to relax until it's completely done, but the feeling of being here is so much more mellow and less retail-manic than being in somewhere like the UK or USA.

I could rant for ages about the joys of Icelandic Christmas, but a few gems spring to mind:

The sale of trees and fireworks is organised by the rescue teams, and they benefit directly from it. It's nice to know that one's money goes to a good cause, rather than some evil capitalist empire.

Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and just about all social events involving children are generally alcohol-free, which is a welcome change from the traditions of my home land.

People are much happier here than in my home land, and the retail pressure is much less.

I think I can say I'm actually looking forward to the Christmas break now. I find it a little surprising. It will be a welcome break from the recent feeling of my life being like Groundhog Day.

Nice Article

We like it when people write nice things about Iceland:
http://gourmettraveller.com.au/plunging-into-reykjavik.htm

Dating Icelandic Women

Many's a true word spoken in jest:

Snow

Well, winter is finally here.

We've had some cold temperatures recently, and the forecast is for below 10°c. There's about ten centimetres of snow everywhere and the effect on these dark December nights is great: it's so much brighter. Combine that with the Christmas lights (Icelanders are really terribly enthusiastic about them, and do it with style) and the effect is charming. Even for a Christmas curmudgeon such as myself.

It's at moments like this that I'm glad I drive a... well, what do I drive? The Merkins* and Ozzies would call it an SUV, the Brits would call it a 4x4, and the Icelanders simply call it a 'Yeppie', then when they translate it into English the origin of the word becomes clear: 'jeep'.

One of the joys of being here is having ski slopes just half an hour away. It's possible to take my gear into work, change after work, drive up to the mountain and be sitting on the first lift just an hour after standing up from my desk. The snowboarding is often best in the evening, floodlit and well-groomed. The best nights are cold, less than -3°c at the top of the mountain, with clear skies and little or no wind. The hill stays open through til 21:00 and there's often virtually noone there; lift queues are tiny. The texture of the snow becomes so visible and the riding is just heavenly on these evenings. If there's powder in the off piste areas, that just adds to the fun.

Having my beast of a truck really enhances the experience, knowing that I can get there and back even in the worst snow and not get bogged down in the parking lot. Ok, so it drinks like a problematic sixties rock star, but I don't really care. There are far worse vehicles on the road...

The website for the local ski area, Bláfjöll, is here. There's another area on the other side of town called Skálafell, which is better for snowboarding, but in recent years it's not been open very often. Even Bláfjöll has been struggling to open very much.

For reliable boarding it's best to go to Akureyri's wonderful Hlíðarfjall. From Reykjavík it's a five-hour drive or a very nice one-hour flight, which is quite cost-effective even for us empoverished locals.

*Americans, of course...

Christmas Brew, or 'Jólabjór'

This year I feel like I've been hearing more than the usual clamour about the Tuborg Christmas Brew.

It seems that my fellow rock-dwellers are in love with this Danish beer, and I find it regrettable. Why are they so enamoured by a mediocre beer from Denmark, when their own Christmas brews are so very, very good?

Could it be that it's one time of the year when any discernable difference can be noticed from the bland, urine-coloured concoction that is usually on offer? Is it yet more evidence of the special relationship?

Here's some interesting data, from this page.

What it shows is that Tuborg sold nearly twice as much as the best-selling local brew. Let's try to turn that around a bit, shall we? I've been celebrating the rise of the Icelandic beers, so here are some ideas:

Named after one of the 'Yule-Lads', this one's very appealing.

I visited the friendly chaps at Bruggsmiðjan recently and their Jólakaldi is great.

Egils Jólagull is a great-tasting brew, albeit from a big producer.

Egils Malt Jólabjór is a nice, chewy brew from the same people.

Einstök Doppel Bock Jólabjór looks like a bundle of laughs...

I've not sampled Gæðingur Jólabjór yet, so the brewers are more than welcome to send me a couple of bottles to review. I promise to be honest.

Please go out and try them, of only for the sake of the age-old wisdom that the best beer is the one that's travelled least.

I really do hope that the Icelandic beers gain a bigger foothold and that people see how amazing they are.