Not so grim up north

In between the strikes and the meetings madness I had a long weekend in Iceland - a slightly delayed birthday present. There are too many impressions for me to be coherent, and the surface of this weird, wonderful country was barely scratched. It's beautiful and bleak; American and European (culturally and literally: I stood in the tectonic plate rift, a foot on both continents); Nordic and Celtic, cute and terrifying, liberal and conservative and many other binaries. The food is wonderful, the architecture goes from sublime to traditional to banal, the weather is gloriously changeable and I must go back. There were bookshop cafés and geysers, waterfalls, lakes and wool shops, dried fish heads and cinnamon buns, sagas and whale-watching boats moored next to whaling ships.

My pictures are here but here's a taste - click to enlarge.

The Chuck Norris Grill

Selfie by a fish-drying house

A geyser about to blow

Gullfoss

Gullfoss

Gullfoss selfie

Hallgrimskirkja dominating the harbour

Hallgrimskirkja

Hallgrimskirkja organ - the only decorative relief in the bare concrete Lutheran church 

Failed to visit this - bit of a cock-up really

Reykjavik from Hallgrimskirkja tower

Harpa: all Scandinavian capitals have big glass concert halls on the harbour edge. 

A mountain-top selfie

Thingvellir: the ancient parliament site and the rift between the continents

Waterfall at Thingvellir

Painted on the side of a shop

Rockjavik

All Icelandic music is now apparently designed for natural history programmes or Lord of the Rings soundtracks (the poor old Sugarcubes must be turning in their bankrupt graves): too ethereal by half.

That said, I'm rather taken by Rökkúro. I've got their first album, which I can't spell on Blogger because it won't do Icelandic characters - but you can find it here.



Now, who's got the mushrooms?

He's on fire

Given a time-lapse video camera, a Sigur Rós CD and a healthy dollop of aesthetic appreciation, Sean Stiegemeier has produced something wondrously beautiful from the Icelandic volcano.

Hover over the picture and click the symbol to the left of 'vimeo' for a wondrous full-screen vista.


Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull - May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

Well done, Iceland

All it took was national bankruptcy, but they've done it: McDonald's is quitting the country. The article describes this momentous event as a 'blow', which I don't get. They're leaving because the cost of importing all the 'food' from Germany is prohibitive due to the exchange rate and taxation - but that's just because everything is preprepared and identical rather than just sacks of onions and mince to be made in situ.

In any case, a local chain will replace it, using locally sourced ingredients. Icelanders will still be able to contract heart disease, but the economy will actually benefit from profits staying in the country and workers might even be able to join a union!

Let's make the same happen here!

Coming in from the cold

Iceland held a general election yesterday. The previous goverment collapsed because its policy of encouraging reckless financial greed and speculation despite having a population the size of Wolverhampton and West Bromwich combined and a fish-based 'real' economy bankrupted them. So now, the population has elected a Social Democratic/Left-Green coalition.

How did the US react to economic meltdown? It booted out the party which encouraged, enriched and was enriched by Enron, Goldman Sachs etc. etc.

What's Britain going to do? It seems that the British population is going to elect the Conservatives, who invented all these dodges and wheezes, who openly proclaim that government is an evil imposition on the free market and on individual ambition, and who see the solution as 'cutting back' on 'wasteful government'. Now, I'm well up for scrapping ID cards and nuclear weapons, but what the Tories mean is sacking nurses, teachers, tax inspectors and all the other low-paid, unappreciated public sector workers. It won't save much at all, and will contribute to making a brutish and inefficient public sphere.

I'm not excusing Labour - they've been rightwing for 15 years now, the party hierarchy entranced by Thatcherism, never meeting a tycoon they didn't like, never meeting a lefty they did like. But still: while everybody else votes Left against the obvious depredations of capitalism, we're going to vote Right for the party which sowed the seeds of our destruction. Well done!