Iceland review - 2014, Síða 69

Van Hoeymissen, renovated the old general store and opened a
coffee house.
according to Registers iceland, the municipality with the high-
est proportion of foreign-born residents is—no, you couldn’t
have guessed—little-known eyja- and miklaholtshreppur on
Snæfellsnes peninsula in the west with 25 percent out of a total
population of 183. an increasing number of people are finding
that an icelandic farm is an ideal place to live.
acquainting the locals
But what would you do in iceland? everyone has the same story
to tell: in iceland, getting a new idea off the ground is easy.
Figuring out how to take it to the next level is the difficult part.
many directors of start-ups find that when they need outside
investors or partners it becomes necessary to move the opera-
tions abroad.
What about the natives? What are they like? a friend of
mine, who is an anthropologist by training and currently a
professor at the London School of economics, has a theory
about icelanders, which states that for every icelandic couple
you meet, there is a 90 percent chance that the woman is more
interesting than the man. this is called Wade’s Law, by the way.
apparently, according to my well-traveled friend, this makes
iceland unique among the world’s nations. Perhaps this is the
reason why 95 percent of iceland’s italian population consists of
italian men who have married icelandic women. italian women
seem to be fairly thin on the ground, having found the charms
of icelandic men entirely resistible.
Vanity Fair’s michael Lewis had a similar experience when
he wrote of his trip to iceland in the aftermath of the financial
crisis, describing a country where “men are men and the women
seem to have completely given up on them.”
it is, therefore, not surprising that corruption and nepotism
are more widespread here than in many other Western coun-
tries. the population of iceland is small, so everything and
everyone is closer to you and, therefore, more difficult to ignore.
then there are those other things, more difficult to put your
finger on, such as the former prime minister who, upon leaving
office, was appointed central Bank governor and subsequently
hired as the editor of what used to be the newspaper of record.
soldiering on
technology gives you the choice of ignoring these annoyances,
allowing you to read the New York Times or the Financial Times
instead of the local papers over breakfast. You also realize that,
unless you have a job tying you to a specific place, where you
choose to live doesn’t make a huge difference. You can lead a
boring life in London, or a very exciting one. the same goes
for iceland.
one of the things that gives life in iceland a certain amount
of energy and urgency is that nature sometimes reminds us that
this may not be the safest of places to make your home. iceland
is one of the youngest landmasses on earth, at only 18 million
years old. our next-door neighbor, greenland, is a majestic
4 billion years old. if greenland was formed 24 hours ago,
then iceland showed up in the last six minutes. in geological
terms, it has just arrived, and as the recent volcanic eruptions in
eyjafjallajökull and Bárðarbunga remind us, we cannot take any-
thing for granted. it’s possible that the activity in Bárðarbunga
will lead to a massive sub-glacial eruption, making life here dif-
ficult, at least in the short term. Until then, we soldier on and
welcome you to make a go of it with us. *