You must sit down to speak this language,
It is so heavy you can't be polite or chatter in it.
For once you have begun a sentence, the whole course of your life is laid out before you"
-quoted in "The Geography of Bliss ↗
When I was a teenager in Iceland people would throw rocks and shout abuse at me because they thought I was weird. I never got that in London no matter what I wore. ↗
I feel like the people from Iceland have a different relationship with their country than other places. Most Icelandic people are really proud to be from there, and we don't have embarrassments like World War II where we were cruel to other people. ↗
Genetic studies in Iceland have found that many of the women who were the founding stock of Iceland came from England and what is now France. Some were probably captured and carried off in Viking raids only 40 generations ago. ↗
Iceland, though it lies so far to the north that it is partly within the Arctic Circle, is, like Norway, Scotland, and Ireland, affected by the Gulf Stream, so that considerable portions of it are quite habitable. ↗