The video shows clips from the news. I spent a sleepless night out in the snow driving a super jeep from the rescue team pulling stuck cars and a helping out. The snow cover also made yesterday’s New Year’s Eve particularly nice. If you missed the Icelandic New Year’s Eve fireworks bonanza, the formerly live webcam is now showing a rerun of midnight.
Today is the last day of the year in Iceland as everywhere else. New Year’s Eve is an amazing time in Reykjavík. Icelanders fire up around 6-700 tonnes of fireworks on New Year’s Eve. That’s over 2 kg of explosives per inhabitant. Unlike in many places, we don’t have any organized fireworks shows. This is all blown up by people like you and me. It is mostly a result of neighbors competing for bragging rights in their street.
The greatest things about this madness, is that almost all of the fireworks are bought from the Icelandic volunteer search and rescue teams. The volunteer rescue teams are very busy all year in this volatile country, full of lost tourists, blizzards and volcanic eruptions. Since the teams are almost entirely funded by selling fireworks, they have to work like crazy for these few days a year when it is allowed to sell fireworks. That’s why I’ve been neglecting this site for a while. I’ve been selling fireworks and using all my off time to enjoy the benefits of a holiday in Iceland, ice climbing, skydiving etc.
Tonight will be a perfect night for fireworks. The weather is great and the ground in Reykjavík is covered with the greatest snow depth ever measured in December. I’ll have what can be described as the typical Icelandic New Year’s Eve celebration. It typically starts with a big family dinner with lots of relatives around 6 o’clock. After dinner, people go out for a walk to the nearest bonfire. There are many bonfires around Reykjavík where hundreds of people gather together to sing and meet their neighbors. After the bonfire, people walk back home for desert and to watch the annual Skaupið or Áramótaskaup. Skaupið is an hour long comedy sketch which summarizes the events of the year. It has watched by nearly 100% of the nation. It ends briefly before midnight and then everybody rushes out into the street to fill the sky with fireworks. Meanwhile the President is on TV in the empty house wishing the nation a happy new year. Sometime after kissing and congratulating, the younger generation leaves the family parties and heads downtown for more partying.
You can watch the fireworks on one of Míla’s web cameras: New Year’s Eve in Reykjavík web camera.
Happy New Year and I hope you make it extra happy by coming to Iceland in 2012.
New Year’s fireworks in Reykjavík. As i’ve said before Icelanders go quite crazy on New Years Eve and blow up the last of their money at midnight.
This video starts out a little slow but you can see how the fireworks display peaks just around midnight.
Halló, this is Iceland.
Here is what my Reykjavík looked like when the new year started. As you can see, my people like to shoot up very many and loud fire-works.
You can look at them here on your Inter-net, but if you visit me you can look at them with your eyes. (Many people prefer this.)
Bless bless,
- IcelandIceland is cooler than you’ll ever be.
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