Eldhús explores Icelandic food
Oh and of course you are invited for dinner. You can sign up for this as well as many other free events at the Inspired by Iceland list of invitations.
Remember back in October when Icelanders began inviting foreigners to their homes? Not only did the President of Iceland invite people over for waffles, Reykjavík’s mayor Jón Gnarr offer Sushi in Höfði, but people all over the country invited guests into their homes or daily activities.
Now a few months later, Rupert Murray has put together this film documenting some of the experiences. If you would like to get to know some Icelanders, you can still participate. Just click around the Iceland map with the invitations.
Eat waffles with The President of Iceland
Now this is a campaign only accomplishable in a tiny and friendly country such as Iceland. The President of Iceland launched the campaign with an address to the nation asking them to invite foreign guests into their homes or out for some play. Icelanders are supposed to go to the Inspired by Iceland website and register their invitations which visitors can then view and select.
Whether it is a private concert in your hotel room with one of my favorite singers Mugison, swimming in the sea with locals, learning to knit a lopapeysa, eat sushi with Jón Gnarr, milk some cows or go out for winter ice cream, I’m sure you’ll find someone to connect with.
The campaign was just launched today, so it will be interesting to watch the invitation list grow in the coming days. Wish I was home right now to make an invite.
Inspired by Iceland wins gold
A lot of tumblrs will have noticed the Inspired by Iceland campaign. It has a website, tumblr, facebook, vimeo channel and twitter and has made quite some impact on all of these mediums. This evening the campaign won gold at the Euro Effie award ceremony in Brussels. They also won gold for use of social media and the Grand-Prix for best campaign. I’m sure you’ve all seen the dancing people video.
A few Slovenians travelling around Iceland are inspired by Inspired by Iceland. Here’s what they wrote:
ICE(land) — a kitsch or a masterpiece?
To tell you the truth, it really looks almost kitschy. You drive half an hour and arrive to one planet. Then you drive another half an hour and suddenly you find yourself on a completely different planet. It’s all green at one time, then it’s all black, and in another part it’s all red, after an hour’s drive everything turns all yellow, further on you see a combination of all the above. You see columns of smoke rising from hills, massive glaciers, surrounded by endless black lava fields, the Atlantic Ocean, and millions of waterfalls which after a while you don’t even notice anymore, since there’s too many.
The only constant in Iceland is the ever changing weather condition :). As the old local Viking wisdom goes: “If you don’t like the weather now, wait five minutes — it’ll probably get worse.” Heh…
It gets pretty cold up there, but you easily forget about that (well, Eva would probably disagree with me…), since every couple of meters you run across a hot spring, a hot tub, or a whole hot river, in which you can freely soak in a pensioner way and let the time pass you by. Besides, it’s ICELAND! You cannot expect palm trees and +30⁰C there.
The nature is really crazy!!! “Waaaaauuuu” and “look at that” and “the best” and “yeeeey” are words, which you say around 100 times a day.
If you happen to be interested in how the end of the world looks like (in Iceland this means Látrabjarg or to put it better — a place on the far west at the back of beyond) — a huge steep cliff and beneath a kilometres-long orange-red sandy beach, wind blowing 150 km/h, the ocean and millions of different birds. Among them the sexiest are the clumsy Atlantic Puffins, which are some kind of gurus of this part of the earth. And then comes one these extremely likable two-legged feathery models… only half a meter away from me, while lying at the edge of the precipice… and says directly into my face — “You’re such a puffin!” :)
Iceland is completely out of mind! The colour palette is edgy and appears to be gaudy, but soon you realize that it’s more like a harmony of a wonderful Hundertwasser mosaic. Even though everything is in contrast, it is on the exact perfect place and exactly the way it is supposed to be. The spaciousness of untouched nature, the quietness, endlessness, freedom, that you can practically breathe - or feel boiling underneath your feet… boiling really intensely. You can almost feel wild rhythms of Orff’s Carmina Burana flowing through its veins. Iceland is elegant and wild at the same time. Iceland is rock’n’roll. Iceland is a balm for the soul!
To put it differently — if an almighty being really exists, whether it’s Allah or some kind of a purple osteoporotic worm, than Iceland must be his orgasm, his chef-d’œuvre, his Mona Lisa. Definitely a masterpiece!
Inspired by Iceland is a cool marketing campaign by the Icelandic travel industry. Check out this viral video with some great music as well.
