Forget everything you thought you knew about the Midnight Sun. There is no sun at midnight now. It would be lovely if there were. Daylight this time of year lasts only five hours, and it happens only between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. One can almost hear Icelanders cheering because daylight today is 4 minutes and 47 seconds longer than it was yesterday.
 |
| The very air is blue this time of year. |
The spare Nordic glass, metal, and wooden apartment buildings along the road to Reykjavik still glitter with multicolored Christmas lights and giant white stars, to hold the winter darkness at bay. People trudge through the snow, in the dark, to and from their jobs, to and from brightly lit supermarkets.
You might, like us, end up here simply because Iceland is a snowy stepping stone in the North Atlantic between Europe and the United States. But then the peculiarities of the place might draw you back, in spite of yourself.
Icelandair's ultracool inflight ad campaign is designed to help do this. It features such enticing snippets of information as "The most interesting thing about Iceland isn't that it has a 100% literacy rate, but that there are more sheep than people ... isn't that it has the largest glacier in Europe, but that Icelanders line up for ice cream, even in a blizzard." You can't get this stuff out of your head. And the sheep are brutally cute.
Its inflight video, which blends safety instructions with soothing New Age music, a Gwyneth Paltrow lookalike, and shots of stunning Icelandic scenery, is actually a pleasure to watch. What other inflight safety spiel could warn you to leave your belongings behind in an emergency by showing a lithe young backpacker dropping her sweater and scarf softly on the Icelandic tundra as she marches off into the distance? Icelandair's ad agency even managed to transform the panic-inducing "brace" position into a serene yoga pose. One can imagine them chortling with glee as they came up with these ideas around their blonde driftwood conference table. "Yeah! And we can show how to use the evac slide by having her jump off a waterfall! Cool!"
An old friend decided it would be fun to take his wife to Iceland for a New Year's Eve by flashlight. When I shared this information with our pal Siggy, the pale Icelandic youth whom we kept encountering in his new home of Kuta, Bali, he was very interested indeed.
"Do you know Quentin Tarantino?" he asked.
"Yes, Siggy, but not personally."
"Ha! Well, he is an insane party animal."
Insane is Siggy's favorite word, hands down. He applies it to the cost of everything in Iceland, holiday traffic in Kuta, Quentin Tarantino, the amount of beer Americans seem able to consume, the dismal quality of his Christmas roast beef dinner in Kuta, the low cost of street food in Kuta, and, as we would soon learn, New Year's Eve in Iceland.
He went on. "And Quentin Tarantino says that the most insane New Year's Eve in the world is in Iceland."
This is probably backlash from Iceland's peculiar relationship with alcohol. Beer was banned there, beginning along with the rest of the temperance-addled world, in 1915. But after Prohibition was repealed everywhere else, Iceland just kept on banning beer. Strong spirits were okay. In fact, Icelanders are famous for drinking themselves silly with the stuff. But strong beer, over 2.25% alcohol, was verboten--the rationale being that, because beer was cheaper, it could lead only to worse depravity. This particular insanity lasted until March 1, 1989--"Beer Day," a major cultural event in Icelandic history.
Beer is now Iceland's most popular alcoholic beverage. And, in mid-January, Iceland can probably claim the longest happy hour on earth.
No comments:
Post a Comment