News

More macro loveliness from the heart of Reykjavik, this time of a flower medley in my parent's front yard ~.~

While cruising the interwebs today I ran across a link from the Bookworm Bookshop in Beijing highlighting the City of Reykjavik's first Reading Festival in October 2012, Sleipnir and the Joy of Reading. Reykjavik is a UNESCO City of Literature, which will be no surprise to my more literary readers (góðan daginn, Professor Batty!)

In other news, I promised to keep us all informed about the winner of the competition for the redesign of Ingólfstorg. They are the ASK architectural firm, and here is their winning design. Even though some people are righteously furious over everything that smacks of change, anything is better than the bad chi feng shui state of things in that downtown square. The city of Rvk has made a recent valiant attempt to draw more summertime life there, but when I drove past yesterday evening there were exactly 8 well-known town drunks (who usually hang out at Austurvellir) taking advantage of the new lounge chairs, two bikers, and lone skater petulantly sliding a measly wooden box. I'm beginning to think ancient Indian burial ground for that particular plot of land...

So though I try my best not to sleb gawk, ok, ok, yes Tom and Katie came into Valentína's ice cream store on the last official day of their pre-divorce papers marriage.  And as it seems that the final photo of them holding hands EVER displays the very same double vanilla latte that Katie politely ordered from Kristjána (the cute girl in the headband in the back row of this photo) while bodyguards waited outside and Tom flashed her his winning grin, I thought I'd go ahead and mention it.

Speaking of visitors, I mentioned cruise ships in the last post. The following photos are from June 18th, when four huge luxury liners docked here and spewed forth 10,000 curious humans which, combined with fold arriving by air, meant the highest number of visitors Iceland has ever had in one day.

One of the ships was the Costa Pacifica, sister ship to the ill-fated Costa Concordia (this last link is to a very compelling article in Vanity Fair about her last night afloat.)

These pics are however of the German AIDAmar, a 252-meter long Sphinx-class cruise ship with 1096 cabins and adorned with a smile, unlike her pensive residents in these shots, who I'm sure were just unwinding from a long day of Golden Circling and postcard buying and such. It seems that tourism is booming here on the Lava Rock, and with more arrivals and departures from Keflavik International than ever, as well as the increase in cruise liners, it seems things won't be settling back into any kind of "isolated republic in the North Atlantic" any time soon.

Have you tried Dynamic Viewing yet? Five new views in all. Use the blue tab at the top of the view page to check them all out : )

Country

This iconic image was taken two years ago at that wonderful small family farm in Mosfellsdalur that Óðinn has gone to with his (former) leikskóli for the past three years. While trying to find info for the farm (which you are more than welcome to visit - an especial treat for children!) I found this website, Nature.is, (or Náttúran.is) which promotes itself as "an eco-conscious network" and a Green Pages for all things environmentally-friendly here in Iceland.

As lots of you know, this is one of the main reasons I love blogging: I find something new and fascinating every time : )

(Speaking of fascinating, if you haven't already, do go read Bayard Taylor's 19th century travelogue Egypt and Iceland in the year 1874. The link takes you to a scanned copy of the original work via Archive.org that you can read online in e-book format. Skip to page 197 for Bayard's adventures in Iceland.)

Property

Another weird wonder we found just around the corner from our house, this gutted building at Frakkastígur 16, just below Kaffismiðja Íslands and the corner shop Drekinn and where the music and instruments store Rín* lived for forty years before moving to Brautarholt in 2004, has become a canvas for street artists while its future is being decided. You can play around with this interactive map of Reykjavik to find the streets mentioned in this post...

I found some interesting info on this location: the property just below it takes an L-shaped turn up to Njálsgata, and is where the Ölgerðin Egill Skallagrímson brewery used to be. I remember very well being able to smell the almost too-rich aroma of a new batch of Malt Extrakt being brewed there before they moved out to Grjótháls. In the corner crook created by the fairly new apartment complex built on the site of the old brewery (btw, the 1100 square meter site was bought by the City for a sweet 37 million krónur back in 2000...good god how times have changed! That amount might buy you an average three bedroom apartment a tenth that size today) sits the Drekinn house built in 1905, a blue cement building from 1943, and this now-rundown structure. It seems its owners have requested permission to tear down at least six times since 2006, though it looks like the local building preservation society has had a hand in making sure that didn't happen, and there seems to have been a co-owner of the lot that also refused to agree on demolition. Ultimately, I'm sure it was the bank crash that set any grand real estate intentions on ear, seeing as the last specific mention I could find was an August 2008 photo report of abandoned houses in the midtown area by the Prevention Department of the Capital District Fire and Rescue Service, when there was still enough money floating around to bitch and squabble over who would get what share of the prosperity pie. Sigh.

The picture below is one I took last fall of some nice visitors who stopped to snap a classic shot of the Drekinn shop.

And here below? Just some nuns, and just for fun : )

*Some of the links in this post are in Icelandic...sorry I wasn't able to find anything in English with the same info, but now you've got more material to practice your language learning with!