Iceland 2025

I just spent some time reading my previous blog entries on Iceland and realized how nice it is for ME to be able to remember our good times. So while I still remember what we did, I'll at least put up a list and hopefully get some pictures up, too.

We got off to a nasty start, as we were planning on flying out on Monday, March 10. Except the BER airport was closed down because of strikes that day. We spent a good bit of time on the Saturday getting seats nailed down for Tuesday. We had booked the flights ages ago when there was a sudden offer of 50 % off on Icelandair flights. We decided to use the discount and splurge on Saga Class (the business class). One could get used to this! Very short lines for baggage drop, you can take 2 suitcases each, you can spend time in the lounges with seats and food and drink, the seats are wider and you get a bottle of water the minute you plop into your seat. There is also a meal and alcoholic beverages served in Saga Class. We were quite pampered on each trip, we really enjoyed it! Okay, the fourth bag was the LAST one out at BER, despite having a "priority" tag, but hey, this is Berlin, okay?

I offered our friend, who is a professor at the University of Iceland, to give a talk on my favorite topic, plagiarism and AI detection. It was a quite well-attended talk with a very good Q&A session. It was brilliant weather, warm (okay, 6°C) and sunny. WiseMan took off to see the Edda manuscripts at the National Library, I enjoyed lunch in the cafeteria and browsed the bookstore afterwards. I feel so much at home at universities, one knows how they function and can get essentials sorted out.

We also had a visit another day with a former student of WiseMan who is now living in Iceland, and our old friends from Kiel came over for a fun night of food and talk and pictures and talk and talk and talk and talk!

We walked around Reykjavík a good bit, exploring the spooky old cemetary above the Tjórnin and walking around the embassy street. Just around the corner from the Russian embassy is a little park with a sculpture called "Support". The park has been renamed "Kyiv Square" (1 - 2):

"Support" in Kiev Square, Reykjavík

 

There were a surprising number of tourists in Reykjavík for it being March! Okay, we had great weather, only one day of pouring rain and snow on our last day, but unfortunately cloud cover every single evening. WiseMan lugged his cameras and tripod with him for nothing. 

We spent a day visiting the Art Museum with a good bit of very bizzare stuff and an Erró exhibition. Buying a ticket also gave you free entrance to the Ásmundur Sveinsson museum which was a good 3 kilometers away. It was nice weather, just a bit of rain, so we walked out and took the bus back. The guide at the entrace was happy to give us the introduction in German, as he was originally from Germany. This was the last place the artist lived with his family and worked. There are many sculptures and replicas both indoors and in the garden.

A woman making butter

Copy of a woman carrying water,
the sculpture itself is in downtown
and was used as an image
for the women's protests in 1974.

The big excitement was that we actually made it to Ísafjörður in the Westfjords! This time of year is always iffy, as landing a propellor plane on the landing strip at the base of the fjord takes a lot of experience! The wings almost seem to scrape the mountains as the land or take off. If there is too much wind, the plane doesn't fly. We had a wonderful time visiting old friends, walking in the wind the next fjord over, visiting the Dynjandi waterfalls (wonderful, no tourists except us!) and the birthplace of Jón Sigurðsson, the leader of the Icelandic Independence movement. The sun actually shined quite a bit, and we had some great lemon cake made from lemons grown in the greenhouse the friends have! One friend drove us around, the "highways" have lots of potholes, sharp stones that have rolled down the steep mountains, and patches of snow here and there. Not every street has a guardrail, I would not have wanted to do the driving!

We had to leave days before and after this adventure because of the uncertainity, so when we got back we spent a good bit of time in the local hot tubs. On our last day in Reykjavík I attended a doctoral defense at the university. The doctoral candidate was one of our friend's students. The university hoists a flag when a defense is happening, the main hall is used for the occasion. The dean and the two opponents were dressed in gowns, the candidate spoke for 30 minutes, then each opponent grilled the candidate for 30 minutes each. She passed! There was champagne in a special room after the candidate was given her certificate: In English, Icelandic, and Latin!

Since the flight back to Berlin was at 7:30 and we were to be at the airport at 5:00 (!), we spent the night in a hotel next to the airport. Expensive, but worth it to have a few more hours of sleep. Hotel Aurora is within walking distance of the airport, is comfortable and quiet, and you can get skyr or drinks at any hour.

It was another great trip to Iceland, now I want to speak Icelandic when shopping back here in Berlin!

Land og synir

I first saw this 1980 film by Ágúst Guðmundsson, Land og synir (Land and Sons), back when it came out at the Nordic Film Festival. My Icelandic was not that hot when I first saw it, but there is not that much speaking anyway and there were English subtitles. On the flight back from Iceland this year I managed to squeeze in this film as a second film. I skipped over some of the bits in the middle that I remembered as being quite brutal. There was a real horse shot in the film which caused quite a public stir.

This is a film about the harshness of living in the countryside of Iceland during the Depression days. You could work from dawn to dusk and still not have enough to eat and still owe the co-op money. When Einar's father dies, he decides to quit this life and move to town. He sells everything he can, either slaughters the animals or sells them, and asks the girl from the next farm over to elope with him. They are to meet at the hotel in the next village, but she doesn't come, so he boards the bus alone.

The landscapes in this film are fantastic, Iceland nominated it for the foreign film Oscar, but it was not in the final nominees. Many Icelandic habits, such as drinking coffee at all hours of the day, are portrayed. The hardness of a sheep roundup and the swearing and drinking that go on during this yearly happening are in sharp contrast to the dancing celebrations.

You want to put a sweater on because the film so aptly portrays the cold and rain people have to put up with. The topic of people moving to the cities is still an acute one. We saw some abandoned houses in the Westfjords of Iceland, people just finally giving up because they can't make a living off fish or sheep. Another film worth watching if it shows up on a streaming service - or on a flight with Icelandair. 

Mamma Gógó

Just got back from a wonderful visit to Iceland! On the flight over I saw one Icelandic film that was very boring, so no review. On the way back I managed to squeeze in two films, the first one was Mamma Gógó by Friðrik Þór Friðriksson. I am quite a fan of Friðrik Þór, having had the good luck to have met him at the Nordic Film Festival in Lübeck many years ago. I had seen his Children of Nature (Börn náttúrunnar) and was so impressed with it, I wrote an article for Nordeuropaforum in 1992 about Icelandic films in general. 

Anyway, Friðrik Þór has quite a sense of humor and includes lots of little jokes in his movies. In Mamma Gógó he starts out referring to Börn náttúrunnar and so you immediately see that the director in the film is none other than Friðrik Þór himself, with a bit of poetic license.

The story is mostly about the mother of the unnamed director (played by Hilmir Snær Guðnason), Gógó, who is succumbing to Alzheimer's disease. The mother is so wonderfully played by Kristbjörg Kjeld (isl) and I spent some time wondering how Friðrik Þór managed to find an actress to play Gógó as a young woman in the black-and-white flashbacks. Imagine my surprise to understand the joke when I started reading up on the film and participants when I got home: Kristbjörg herself played the role of Gógó in a 1962 film 79 af stöðinni (isl, film is on YouTube, english title is "The Girl Gogo"). And the actor playing Gógó's dead husband in the newer film, is none other than Gunnar Eyjólfsson, who played the taxi driver who falls in love with Gógó in that film (which also caused a bit of a kerfluffle in the USA about the way the US soldiers stationed at Keflavík were portrayed, but that is another story). No wonder there was such a similarity between the young actors and the elderly ones: they were played by the same people, just 47 years later!

There are other little jokes in the film, which was filmed in 2009, just after the kreppa, the world-wide economic crash. One has to do with deCode, an Icelandic company that sequenced genetic material for about 2/3 of the Icelandic population, then went bankrupt and sold the data to a company in the US. The director invests money he obtains from selling his mother's apartment in this company, losing his investment. Bank people are, shall we say, not portrayed in a good light :) Another is how Gógó manages to escape losing her licence for drunk driving, she has the director's son in the back seat, she is bringing him home from the hospital where she took him after she discovered that he had drunk a lot of alcohol. When she fails the breathalyzer test, she suggests it is broken and it should be tested on the boy. He, too, displays a high alcohol content, so the police figure that the device is broken and let her drive on home. And of course the final joke is that all of Friðrik Þór's films have to have pissing scenes in them. This time it is a woman, Gógó, getting her diaper changed by her son, a very touching scene.

It is a thought-provoking film about getting old and having to deal with a parent who has Alzheimer's. The film should have attracted much more attention than it did, even if some of the jokes escape a non-Icelandic audience. If you find it streamed somewhere: watch it!