I’m back from Iceland. Boooooo! It’s never fun coming back to normality after you’ve had an amazing time in a foreign land. Iceland is a truly unique place that I’m glad to have visited and that I hope to go back to sometime. Its uniqueness is shown in the photo above which you dear reader get to see before it gets released for public view on my Flickr stream. What you’re seeing is a natural occurrence. Hard to believe, right?
I’ve uploaded all 250 photos to Flickr already, but as usual, I’ll be releasing them in batches of 10 or so over the courses of the next couple of weeks. Tagging and describing them all takes time. Coming up here on the blog, there’ll be my hotel review and reviews of all the restaurants and attractions I visited, so follow and subscribe to find out what I got up to.
In the meantime, I’d like to revisit the uneducated assumptions of Iceland that I made before I went to see how right or wrong I was. The first assumption I made was that Iceland is expensive. Well, it is and it isn’t. One of my meals cost £30.00 all in, about £15.00 more than I like to spend. The food was amazing though, so I decided it was just about worth it. So, in that respect, Iceland was expensive. But then, I had no trouble finding things that were about the same price as they are in the UK or even cheaper. Supermarket prices were almost identical to prices in Britain. Clothes seemed to be about the same too. At the other end of the scale, hot dogs are an absolute bargain. In the four days I spent in Iceland, I had four of the best hot dogs I’ve ever had. They were £1.00 each! One night, I had an amazingly authentic and delicious 16” pizza for £7.50. There are bargains to be had in Iceland, but you have to do the research before you go. So, is Iceland expensive? Sort of.
My next assumption was that all Icelandic people are nuts. Wrong. Some of them are. Bjork for example is nuts. The street sweeper who declared his love of Liverpool FC and then sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone” at me in the street was nuts. But on the whole, Icelandic people are quiet, polite and reserved. I actually found them to be quite ‘British’ in their general mannerisms. I felt comfortable in their presence.
They eat Whale in Iceland. This is an assumption I made that proved to be spot on. I had the option to try some, but I substituted it for Saltfish (a wise choice for it was delicious). The closest I got to Whale meat was seeing it on a skewer in a fish restaurant. It was a very dark red-brown colour. It looked worryingly appetising.
Upon arrival at the airport, I immediately realised my assumption about the Icelandic language as also spot on. There is barely any correlation between the English language and Icelandic. Their word for ‘Police’ is ‘Lögreglan’. See? No correlation. At least in Denmark, their ‘Police’ were called ‘Politi’. I had no problems though, as everyone spoke English. Everything was written in English too. In fact, such was the prominence of the English language that 90% of the magazines and books on sale were in English. The magazines in particular were almost entirely British magazines. I could only find gossip mags and Vogue in Icelandic.
Iceland is an island of amazing natural wonder, so said I. I was correct. The photo above is one example. I have a couple of hundred more for you to see. As I said, keep an eye on Flickr to see them. In short though, Iceland is an arrestingly beautiful place.
