in praise of smoky bay

i feel a little guilty about what i said about rejkyavik, having not said much at all about it previously, and since i have some time on my hands i think i will elaborate more on my time in iceland, and iceland in general.
rekjavik means 'smoky bay' (corina and ginger, reyk sounds very similar to roken, no? totally dodelijic), for the fog and clouds that decend upon it and the steam that rises from the surrounding countryside, certainly not for the pollution (not that there would have been pollution in the viking times)...in fact, rejkyavik is practically pollution free. sitting as it does upon a volcanic and geothermal hotbed, houses get natural heat and hot water straight from the ground. you won't see a chimney on any of the new houses, unless the owner's wanted a fireplace strcitly for the aesthetic quality of having a fire burning in their home. rejkyavik is located in the southwest corner of the island of iceland (indeed, 'Island' in icelandic), and 75 percent or so of the population lives there. this area is more habitable than the rest because it is affected by the gulf stream. more factoids: by my calculations and those i have heard, there is one horse and one square kilometer for every icelander. people love golf; there are thirty some golf courses!! looking out the window of a bus, i saw a little blonde girl (there are also more little blonde chubby cheeked girls in pink clothes here than you could imagine!) of about four years old practicing her swing with her father. the roads outside of the city are treacherous, and their safety campaign is to mount real wrecked cars mounted on billboards in the countryside. talk about scare tactic!! soil erosion is the biggest natural disaster type problem (very few trees) and there is no military, nor has there ever been. the icelanders i spent time with all joked about what lousy criminals they have. church and state are not seperated, and iceland has the world's oldest parliament, though it is said the be the world's newest country, geographically speaking. they have trolls and hidden people and sagas and a strong literary and storytelling tradition. also, did i mention this?...the world's most amazing clouds. icelanders will tell you it is the most beautiful place on earth, and i might agree.
i am thinking back to what rejkyavik meant to me before i came here. it was one of those places that is just a name you knew all along, vaguely, but then you can remeber exactly when it burned itself into your consciousness, exactly when it began pulling you nearer...nearer...for me it was in prague, summer of 2005, the beginning of my month there. i remember a very specific street corner near old town square, and searching for a restaurant, perhaps there was also a restaurant called rejkyavic, but sean began talking aboutit, i don't remember what he said, probably something about fish...but it was spoken of at length and i became intrigued...later that month, another street corner, this time up on the hill, this time there was rain, and again with sean, waiting for a cab...he had meant to go to berlin to see sigur ros that weekend, but was sick. he made a bad joke...'i could have seen sigur ros, now i just feel sick and gross.' iceland and rejkyavik again. and now it has become something completely different. the idea of the city before you reach it and what it is in reality are two completely seperate cities, andboth can exist in your mind. i'll have to pull out some calvino quotes from 'invisible cities.'
ok. so, a quick list of things i did i have not already mentioned. my first day i saw the president and i spent twelve whole hours with my hreinn and his friends, eating, drinking, and at 11pm it was bright as day and when i walked home at 3am it was the light of dawn. i went on a tour of the golden circle, which eberyone does, and though it was a huge tour bus filled with people (and there were three buses doing the same tou!!), it was well worth it, even just for the scenery out my bus window for 8 hours. first we saw Geysir, the original geyser after which all other geysers are named. then Gullfoss, a magnificent waterfall. then Thingvellir national park. to quote my pamphlet, 'Thingvellir lies within a belt of volcanic activity and fissures which passes across iceland, a part of the mid atlantic ridge, the junction of the american and eurasian tectonic plates....over the past 10,000 years, the earth's crust has been subsiding and diverging here...moving east and westwards apart from each other at rate of 3mm annually (so that's 70 meters). ' so, i stood on the edge of the fissure of the american plate and looked out across that gap which has been filled by magma and then vegetation and pools at the long black wall of rock on the other side that is the eurasian plate. it is also the site where the parliament met for 900 years.
it is here you come not only to contemplate but to visualize the working of nature...of the drift of tectonic plates, of the earth spinning on its tilted axis around the sun..the midnight sun.