by jared bibler

I stayed one Saturday overnight in a little cluster of summerhouses, owned by my employer. It's a little ways out of town, far enough so that no city lights interfere with the stars. Just now when I went to the car to get a pen, the size and brilliance of Orion in the southern sky was almost shocking. I can't imagine how a good hit of the norðurljós must look from out here.

It's cold outside, a few degrees under freezing, and there is crunchy snow on the ground. There are a few dozen little houses clustered here looking down on a frozen lake. Down the hill from me, someone has lit a cooking fire outside and I can hear the excited sounds of little Icelandic kids playing flashlight games in the dark.

Click to read more ...

by jared bibler

I met with NPR's Eric Weiner again last week after work, for a follow-up interview on happiness in the Land. He's not doing a radio bit on this, but he is coming out with a book on the happiest countries (and he wants you to buy it!).

The second conversation I had with him was much better as he seemed to have settled in to the laid-back ways of Reykjavík after some more days here. (If you missed it, take a look back at our first conversation.)

The Friday-after-work meeting was in sharp contrast to one I had the night before with an instructor I had helped bring in to teach an investment-related class here. Like many Americans I meet here (mostly hot-tub tourists) he asked why I liked it here

Click to read more ...

by Jared

It's just a shade before noon and out my office window I see the first direct evidence that there is, indeed, still a sun. It's lighting up the clouds over the mountain range to the southwest and casting a wan light over the smattering of snow and brown grass below and the Lego-block rooftops of Garðabær beyond.

Iceland in December is surely not for everyone, but the beauty is all still there if one only knows where to look.

by jared bibler 

Iceland has one of everything, and that includes a water polo club. Invited by a couple of friends, I went on Wednesday night to my first practice. It's held at the indoor pool at Laugardalslaug three times a week.

Normally, I'm told, the practice opens with swimming warmups and then a water polo game at the end.

Click to read more ...

by jared bibler 

The fall is definitely here, with clear sunny skies and a bit of a chill in the air. The clouds are high and have a certain sidelit pink-yellow light in the evenings. And last night the first windstorm came pounding on my windows, slamming the bedroom window shut with some authority as I was drifting off to sleep. The whistling wind continued all through the night and this morning there were whitecaps on the bay and the water was greenish and churned.

Click to read more ...

 

Click to read more ...

by jared bibler

25 minutes' drive out of town on the main road heading north, through and past a town called Mossfellsbær, the city of Reykjavík resumes dominion to pick up a distant settlement. Grundarhverfi (116 Reykjavík to the post-code-savvy) is as much Reykjavík as a West Bank outpost is Jerusalem.

A few streets' worth of houses cling together for survival in a barren windswept plain with a craggy appendage of Esja looming above. There is a one-pump gas station, a bus shelter filled with snow, a couple of school buildings, and solitary horses dotting the snowy fields that lead down to the sea.

Click to read more ...

by jared bibler 

Lucky visitors to Reykjavík and downtown-inclined natives know that, at 3 a.m. on a weekend night, the absolute best place to fill your greasy cravings is Iceland's sandwich mecca, Hlölla Bátar. (English translation is Hlölli's Boats, since the sub sandwiches purveyed there are referred to as "boats" in the local sub-shop parlance.)

Photo credit: Daquella Manera

Click to read more ...

An American in Reykjavik 

Second in our series of Shortcut blogger portraits is contributor/blogger Jared Bibler who covers the beat in Reykjavik. Jared arrived in Iceland from Boston in 2004 and since then has provided regular cultural, economic and gastronomical commentary from the hip nordic capital. Check out his blog, the popular Iceland Report.

 
How / Why did you start blogging?

Click to read more ...

by jared bibler 

Icelandic companies take pretty good care of their people, at least compared to some of the sweatshops I labored in in the good ole USA. In lieu of health insurance, which gets picked up by the Republic, companies provide a whole range of cool stuff here á klakanum:

24 days of vacation: the minimum by law, for full-time work. That's a day shy of 5 weeks, boys. And if the employer won't pay you for the time, they have to at least let you take it without pay. Things pretty well shut down in Iceland in July while the whole nation takes a bunch of contiguous weeks off.

................................
Photo credit: Hlynur

Click to read more ...

by jared bibler 

One of the most magical places in Iceland has to be the Laugaskarð swimming pool in Hveragerði. The colorful little town of Hveragerði is 40-minute hop over a mountain pass from Reykjavík, but always a different world. The weather, for example, is often completely different: sometimes in the summer it's drizzly and cold in Reykjavík but then balmy sunshine blankets Hveragerði.

The town takes its name from the hot springs ("hver") that steam and bubble right under the ground of the whole valley. In many places, such as at the sidewalk going into tourist trap Eden (Iceland's answer to Wall Drug, South Dakota) the hot water and steam just bubbles right up through cracks in the concrete. Unstoppable.

Click to read more ...

by jared bibler 

The other night we went to see the live taping of A Prairie Home Companion at Iceland's National Theater, a fortress of a deco building in downtown Reykjavík. The lobby inside was abuzz pre-show in a mix of American and Icelandic voices. I was playing a little game to myself of "guess who's American/Icelandic". Most of the time I was right on (dress is a big clue) but a couple people stumped me completely and I had to perk up my ears to discern a "já já" or a "ya shure". I couldn't help wondering which one I looked more like.

Click to read more ...

by jared bibler 

Last Friday my bro wanted to see some metal shows, and the Nordic lands love their heavy metal, so Iceland has plenty of it to go around. I did a little online research and talked to the proprietor of 12 Tónar, and decided that the best option for my brother's tastes was

Reykjavík's seminal Grand Rokk club. I threw on my "rock uniform": my cousin's classic 80s beat-to-hell stuffing-coming-out-the-sleeve leather jacket over a Katz's Delicatessen ("Send a salami to your boy in the army") T-shirt and jeans and we headed down Öldugata into town.

Click to read more ...

by jared bibler 

It's time for my first-annual biased-toward-the-advertisers wrapup of the best in Reykjavík-area swimming pools. Months in the making, the product of careful observation and measurement, and hours and hours of hot-tub soaking, these awards represent a new kind of metric for the curious capital-area swimmer. So without further ado, the awards...

Massaging hot tub, conventional: Breiðholtslaug's combination of spaciousness, unique oval shape, and alternating high-back and low-back jets clearly give it the lead in the conventional hot tub wars.

Click to read more ...