Topp of the world

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I am pretty certain we are the only people checking in at Moruya with a destination above the Arctic circle. But I may be wrong.

For 30 years I have wanted to visit Iceland. Don't ask me why, it's hard to explain. Icelanders are a unique, insular people, confined to a windswept, barren island in the north Atlantic. beholden to the very visible and obvious power of mother nature. But instead of giving up and returning to the (relative) warmth and easier life in Denmark or Norway, they made it work, and built a modern vibrant culture, right on the doorstep of the Arctic.

I think it started with a Desmond Bagley spy novel "Running Blind", which I would have read in the seventies. A non-native Icelandic speaker, does something cold war-esque in Iceland. I can't remember what he actually did, but he impressed the locals with his command of the language.

I have long had dreams of turning up at immigration at Keflavík airport, greeting the customs officer in Icelandic, and being welcomed "home".

Well at least I used to, until I started trying to learn the language. Let's just say a language that has multiple different forms of each noun, singular and plural, each in 4 cases (nominative, dative, accusative and genitive), with maybe 48 different forms for adjectives (masculine, feminine and neuter; strong or weak; nominative, dative, accusative and genitive) is not going to be the easiest to pick up. And let's face it, passing an Icelander in the street in Batemans Bay doesn't happen every day!

What the hell is a genitive you ask? It's a noun that is being acted upon, controlled or owned, by another noun. Let's face it, even I don't understand what that last sentence meant. (It may include genitals but that is not the point).

So the customs officer may get a greeting in Icelandic, which will probably be grammatically incorrect, and possibly moritfyingly embarassing to both of us. No doubt he will reply in perfect English, and I'll be lucky to get a passport stamp.

Anyway, depending upon which way you look at it, we are about to undergo an intensive pharmacy practice conference, looking at the impact of pharmacy deregulation in highly regulated, socialised market places, with a gruelling program of continuing education relevant to the issues faced in Australian pharmacy today.

Either that, or we found a junket!

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