Iceland in Pictures

thebeatenpath:

The Travel Book

Iceland is a country in the making, a vast volcanic laboratory where mighty forces shape the land and shrink you to an awestruck speck. See it in the gushing geysers, glooping mud pools and slow, grinding glaciers. Experience a fjord or crunching across a dazzling-white icecap….

nicelandic:

The real value of the economic crash, one young woman told me, was that “people are rethinking, Who am I as an Icelandic person?” A number of people suggested to me that the nation, as a whole, was going through a period of intense introspection and that the consensus seemed to be that Icelanders needed to return to their roots. “Everyone is knitting” is how Steinunn Knutsdottir, a drama teacher, put it. “People are also making jam.” I thought that Knutsdottir was joking, until one day I saw a woman standing directly across the street from my hotel, perched on a chair, yarn in hand, stitching some so-called “knit graffiti” into place around a tree.

“Knitting is the opposite of idolizing money,” Ragga Eiriksdottir explained. “Knitting embodies thriftiness and is something old that has been with the nation forever. In the 1800s, the state actually published documents that outlined how much citizens should knit. It was said, for example, that a child from the age of 8 should finish a pair of socks each week.”