I would like to tell you about Iceland. If you look at a map of the world, it is this little duck like island down to the right under Greenland. There should be a change of name. Iceland is very green and Greenland is rather icy. When about 1000 years ago the first settlers arrived at Iceland from the east, as they came from Norway, the first thing they saw was the biggest glacier in Europe, the “Vatnajökull” and called it “Ice”land. They should just have waited with this name-giving around the next corner, there it gets green and lushy. Greenland on the other hand was one of the big advertisements in the old days. They wanted people to settle there in the time of the vikings and called it Greenland, thereby promising grass and meadows for the animals.

Iceland has a rather mild, oceanic climate, getting softnes from the “Golfstream”, a warm arm of ocean which streches all the way north fom the mexican golf. Fishes like this, so there is great fishing here and was the main industry for a long time and still is. In the last decades we got aluminium factories, precision fabrication, software production. And on a small scale whatever you ask for. We can look proudly of having produced two times the Miss World, the strongest man in the world and the singer Björk. We got a small filmindustrie, music groups which are famous around the world, the leader of the football team Chelsea in Great Britain. We got theater, opera, ballet, art exibitions. And all that out of a population of 284.000, the size of a nice suburb abroad.

We are one of the 5 richest country in the world. We got more cars per person than the americans. Everybody down to 10 years old has at least one handy. Computers are at most homes and often more than one. And so on.

Our speciality: hot water. Here we got these hot springs, springing up wherever you want (no, not really). Springing up in many places. When I was a kid I was terrified and fascinated to drive through Hveragerði. Then the roads were only mud tracks and in the middle of the road there would be these little hot springs bubbling and gurgeling. Some years ago they had to move out of a house there as there was suddenly a little geysir in the basement. Of course we also have some earthquakes and vulcano eruptions from time to time, that comes in the package.
So, most of the icelandic homes are heated by hot water. It is transported in pipelines and has the confortable temperature of about 70 degree C when it reaches the ofens. It is also used as tap water and has a slightly sulforic smell. Some of the energy of the hot water and steam is also used to produce electricity but mostly the huge amount of electricity we can consume is generated from rivers.

Half of the population of Iceland lives in and around the capital Reykjavík. In the north is a town, Akureyri and the rest live in fishing villages or as farmers around the cost. The middle of the land is wilderness: glaciers, stones, sands, waterfalls, more and more visited by tourists.