Of Feasts and Feats
January 6, 2010
I’ll have to cover a fair amount of ground in this post, as it’s been a couple months since the last. I’ll start by mentioning a very successful Thanksgiving celebration in Iceland.
With some fellow Americans at the dorm, we organized a full-fledged Thanksgiving meal and invited friends who had, tragically, never experienced the wonderful tradition. Guests’ were in attendance from a multitude of countries, including Iceland, China, New Zealand, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Germany—to name a few.
We served two turkeys (which cost roughly 70 dollars each for a medium sized bird), pumpkin pie (with some substitution of squash as the local pumpkin supplies were quite limited), mashed potatoes, and many other traditional dishes. My contribution was pumpkin bread, roasted red cabbage, strawberry pie, and gravy.
All in all, the meal was a success. I only hope that American Thanksgiving can come to colonize the world just as American Halloween already apparently has.
Nearing the end of fall semester, I managed to squeeze in a weekend trip to Heimaey, an island off Iceland’s southern coast, with a population of around 3,000 and a self-sufficient economy based on abundant fish resources. 
The town boasts Keiko the whale, who you may remember as the protagonist of Free Willy, as one of its own. Having barely escaped disaster in a 1968 volcanic eruption, the island’s residents live in one of the world’s most active volcanic zones. The town makes up for its dangerous location with the striking beauty of its landscape.
For an island which takes little over an hour to entirely cover by foot, there are several volcanoes and a surprising diversity of terrain. The natural beauty is a bit marred by the presence of an airport, which occupies about half the island, and an inexplicable number of roads. I suppose they’ve been built to serve the island’s residents, who all seem to prefer to drive everywhere rather than walk the eight minutes from one end of town to the other. In any case, the award for coolest aspect of the island goes to the ground at the top of Eldfell (which translates as “fire mountain”), which, merely one meter deep, can light paper on fire. One of my travel companions, Tor, brilliantly confirmed the fact with his return ticket for the ferry.
That was the last trip I was able to take before finals set in. Nothing too distressing there… I’ve found the academic rigor at the University of Iceland to be rather relaxed. Whether that’s related to my only taking classes taught in English, I cannot say. In any case, I’ll share a few pictures of the design proposal I created for the class, Town and Country Planning. The final project for that course overlapped with the project I had proposed for my Fulbright Scholarship. My group proposed the revitalization of an underutilized coastal-adjacent industrial area at the center of Reykjavik Capital Region. We attempted an “Urban Integration of Nature and Community,” interweaving ecologically-sensitive development with natural preservation in order to reframe the Reykjavik Metropolitan Area as a transit-oriented, walkable community. I took it upon myself to envision a 3D rendering of a public square that would characterize the new development’s core.
We presented the projects to a panel including a former Mayor of Reykjavik and the Vice Chair of Iceland’s Social Democratic Alliance, currently in power. Our proposal won first prize.
Coming next: my travels through Scandinavia where I saw Obama in Oslo and the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen. Also, New Years Eve in Reykjavik!
