Iceland

Iceland is the second largest island in Europe but relatively few people live there. The wilderness of the highlands is untouched and unspoiled nature. The Icelandic nation only counts 280.000 people and most of them (170,000) live in the capital Reykjavík and surrounding areas. Most tourists land at Keflavik International Airport and then drive for an hour through moss grown lava landscape to Reykjavík. Icelanders feel that this flat desert is barren and uninteresting but many foreigners get the feeling they have just landed on the moon.

Reykjavík has grown from a village to a city in this century. The suburbs are big, but the city centre is small and shows a rather mixed blend of architecture. The ruling style, however, is the old Icelandic balloon frame timber house, covered with corrugated iron and painted in all the colours of the rainbow. The roofs of Reykjavík are a festival of colours.

Icelanders use geothermal water to heat their houses and we get electricity from hydroelectric power plants  at big waterfalls in the highlands. This makes the air completely clean and Reykjavík is one of the cleanest cities in the world. For this same reason you get first class drinking water from the tab.

The weather is unstable but surprisingly mild; it never gets very hot and never very cold. But rain, snow, fog and sunshine can all happen in the same day. Iceland is in the high North but the Gulf stream from the Caribbean makes the winters warmer than in New York, and the summers are rather warm and wet. The length of the day in Iceland varies very much: December and January are the darkest months with only 4-5 hours of daylight but in June and July there is bright daylight all around the clock thanks to the midnight sun.

Nightlife in Reykjavík is amazing. Icelanders are rather trendy and fashionable and on weekends it seems that everybody is out on the town. Things start rather late - bars are crowded after ten and discos after midnight. They are open until three and in summer, at least, the streets in the city center may be full of people until morning. Some popular bars get very crowded and tourists should not take some pushing and shoving personally.

Icelanders are usually a very friendly people and rather willing to talk and give information to tourists. Younger people speak good English and often enjoy practicing their skills. Icelanders travel a lot and we like to think of us as open minded and modern in our way of thinking. In the last years tolerance towards gay men and lesbians has grown considerably and now we have very few examples of discrimination on basis of sexual orientation. Foreign guests are very welcome in the gay scene in Reykjavík.

The Icelandic gay society is small but very active and a 'gay scene' exists only in Reykjavík. There are lesbians and gay men all over Iceland but the only organized services for gay men and lesbians are in the capital and here they mix freely. A couple of bars and discos are 'gay friendly', open to straight people but chiefly catering to the gay crowd.

Some foreign gay men and the lesbians travelling to Iceland for the first time hardly know what to think of Reykjavík. One night you might feel you are in a busy gay club in Hamburg or Manchester but the next night you feel that you have landed in a small village in North-Dakota and you have lost your train-ticket! Reykjavík has many of the things you find in the metropolises of the world but as soon as the guest is starting to "feel at home" he or she is reminded that this is a small community, speaking the language their forefathers spoke thousand years ago, and in many ways like a big family of 280,000 people.