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Published: October 29th 2012
There are certain times in life where you find religion. I have always been fascinated by religion but personally am not religious and lean more on the spiritual side (mind you there was that bad stint in my teens where I was a bit of a zealous born again). Needless to say there are times you reach out and give thanks to the powers that be and this I my time now….Dear Lord - thank you for the gift of GPS.
Icelandic is not an easy language, actually it’s one of the most difficult languages to learn. On top of that, Iceland is such an isolated country, with such few people, it is very difficult to even have a lot of exposure to it. I know my basics of the language, and obviously most signage in Iceland is in Icelandic. Now that alone makes things difficult, but to really screw with you, sometimes there are no signs at all. It would have been impossible for us to find our hotel if it was not for our GPS. With just a map it would have taken us hours! Asking for directions wouldn’t have helped either because you wouldn’t understand the street
Skoga Iceland
Icelandic landscape and sheepnames – they would have needed to write them down.
Reykjavik is a smaller than Victoria BC. With a population of maybe 200,000 (this is probably an overstatement) and I figured – how hard could it be to drive there. I should know better and when I visited the Iceland Culture House I learned that many of the street names in Reykjavik take after Icelandic Saga Characters (pretty cool) and the streets were actually built around the plot line of the saga! Does this give you a better picture? The roads are built around a freaking story and somewhere there is a Norse God laughing at me as I try to figure my way driving through town. I suppose my only solace right now is that I read that Icelanders also get frustrated with the lack of signage and Icelandic driving habits that include not using turn signals, parking anywhere they like, passing you on the shoulder and overall lack of following any rules on the road. However, any driving experience here is not comparable to other places in the world and overall Icelanders are very considerate drivers.
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