Random Observations on Iceland

By Astrid

(This is going to be the first of my two posts on my recent trip to Iceland. This post will focus on Iceland the country. The second post will focus on Iceland the travel destination.)  Link to the pictures.

Iceland is a small Nordic country in the middle of the North Atlantic, halfway between Europe and North America. Aside from the climate (more on that in the second post), I found Iceland to be a thoroughly pleasant and progressive country that will warm the heart of Bay Area folks who love to proclaim "it's different here." The people I meet were well scrubbed, pleasant and English speaking. I found Icelanders on average to be on par with physically attractive than the residents of your typical upper middle class coastal bedroom community, but less tanned and more confident.

The owner of this blog knows far more about small open economies such as Iceland than me.  However, from what I can observe, Iceland appear to be setting itself in for some hurt from the global housing and credit bubble bust. Believe it or not, tiny Iceland has its own housing bubble, especially of Reykjavik mid-rise condos and office buildings. I have no idea if they are intended for locals or for rich foreigners...I suppose that if rich people can make London real estate the most expensive in the world, they might be foolhardy enough to buy in Reykjavik. They might even get a used house salesman from the Reykjavik branch of ReMax. 

I was also surprised by the amount of new and large vehicles. I live near Washington DC, one of the most car-obsessed metropolitan areas in car-obsessed US, but I felt very much at home in Iceland. I saw almost no vehicles over 10 years old and most vehicles appear to be less than 5 years old. A good many of them were gas-guzzling SUVs, even though Iceland petro is about $8/gallon (so much for the theory that high gas prices contribute to greater gas efficiency). Many of these vehicles are obviously not tourist rentals (Porsche Cayenne, BMW 7-Series, modified jeeps).

One of the most surprising things about Iceland is the prominence of accounting firms. I saw KPMG/Deloitte/PWC offices at all major settlements (some with less than 5,000 people). Sometimes it feels like Iceland society is composed exclusively of gas station attendants (there are several hundred gas stations for a country of 250,000) and accountants.

Some other random observations:

• The US embassy in Iceland has concrete blockades in front - do not attempt to photograph those concrete blockades.
• You can see Northern Lights in late August if you're extremely lucky (largely cloudless night sky are hard to find) and stay up until at least 11:30 PM.
• Reykjavik's harddrinking reputation is well deserved.  A reveler climbed onto our extremely dirty rental at a crosswalk and spent the next two minutes telling the car (or us) "I loved you. (In fact, be wary of crosswalks in general.  At the start of our trip, a bunch of kids pushed one boy onto a crosswalk and we had to jam on the brakes to avoid hitting him.)

--astrid

Comments

[Reed Hedges]

Many people in Iceland actually use the potential their 4wd SUVs and trucks-- if you do much travelling outside of Reykjavik and off the paved highway you will see why.

[randolfe_]

astrid

I've done some format & presentation edits to your thread. Just adding keyword tags, moving the bulk of the entry to after the jump, and I'm still working on making the authors more visible from the main page.

I'll also be adding sub pages and removing a lot of personal/specific content off the main page soon. Let me know if you want an author profile attached to your name.

[astrid]

Reed Hedges,

I was in Iceland during the summer, so I don't have the best perspective on the full range of usefulness for SUVs. 4X4 and high clearance certainly makes more sense in Iceland than in the DC suburbs.

However, we were able to drive through a lot of pretty rough unpaved Icelandic roads on our rental Toyota Corolla. (Westfjords amongst them) 2/3 of the population does live in Reykjavik with has excellent roads. There were a few places we would have liked to go but couldn't, including Landmannalaugar and Thorsmork, though there are regular bus services there.

What's more interesting to me is that so many Icelanders could afford to import a wide assortment of new large vehicles and then pay $200 per fill up.

[randolfe_]

Astrid

Mind sticking a couple photos in your OP? You could also post the link to the rest. There seems to be quite a bit of interest in things Icelandic of late.

[randolfe_]

Astrid

Just curious, what was the general breakdown of cars by nation of origin there, and if you remember, which for what class of vehicle. I'm wondering who's marketing what to the Icelanders. I'm interested not so much because of the market size but because of the carry-trade effect on Iceland's consumer market.

[skibum]

astrid,

Care to elaborate more about the food in Iceland? Did you guys splurge on any fancy meals? What's the prevalence of fast food there? Is it true other than some livestock, seafood, and of course puffin, most stuff is imported?

[skibum]

I was also wondering about a factoid that's interested me about Iceland for a while. Did you come across any discussion about deCODE? If you're not already aware, this is the biotech company that's working with the government to catalogue the genome of every single Icelander. Interesting bio-ethics issues, of course, and the interesting rationale is that the gene pool there is so small that the project should yield answers to lots of questions about genetics...

[astrid]

Randy,

It's a bit difficult to say. By outward appearance, I would say most of the vehicles came from North America. We saw some Peugeots, Opals, Landrovers, and very few BMWs, but the majority of vehicles were Japanese or American branded. The most popular SUVs seem to be Toyota Landcruisers, Highlanders and RAV4s. Japanese/Korean cars are quite popular overall, a lot of Yarises - though I suspect most are tourist rentals. Toyota seems to dominate the rental market.

Proportionally, I'd say maybe 1/3 or 1/4 of the vehicles in Reykjavik were SUVs. The proportion of SUVs is higher outside of Reykjavik.

I say apparently North American because the car rental stock is different from what's usually available in the U.S. Most low end rentals offered appear to be manual transmission and no AC.

[astrid]

skibum,

I'll cover that a bit more in my next post, but here slightly shortened: We found Icelandic food to be excellent. High end food prices are actually quite okay, especially if you stick to lamb, seafood and game. We splurged at Seafood Cellar, located in the same building as the Reykjavik Visitor Center. Other places that we would liked to have tried but couldn't afford (they're on par with Seafood Cellar at $50-100/person excluding wine but including tip and VAT) or couldn't get into include Einar Ben, Karolina Restaurant and Frederick V. We also liked Tapas Barinn next to Seafood Cellar.

Groceries are quite expensive, we paid $5 for a loaf of bread and $3 for a small container of cream cheese. Ice cream bars were $2-3/each. We also didn't see any cereal growing, so I assume they import everything except fish, lamb, dairy, and game.

Restaurant food offers a better value, esp. on the high end. $100/person should be a special occasion meal, $30-50/person will get you a good filling meal, below $30/person and you're looking at fast food, set lunch buffets (usually quite good, but you're limited to one entree and a few salads), soups and sandwiches.

Exotics tried - whale kebab, puffin with brennivan and blueberry sauce, Myvatn's geothermally baked bread, dung smoked sheep and smoked char, guillemot, skyr, salt cod

Recommendation - the cod and lamb are delicious and offers the best value. Lobsters are delicious but quite expensive. Would not recommend whale (tastes like gamey beef). Puffin is good but odd tasting.

[astrid]

re: deCODE

We didn't run across anything specific, just a couple musuem exhibits explaining that Icelanders were 80+% Norse for male ancestry and 60+% British Isles for famle ancestry.