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fluent in German. He spends summers in Iceland seeing family and working
in the tourist industry.
He turned out to be an excellent and delightful guide, with a comprehensive
knowledge of his country’s history, its customs, government, literature,
geology and sociology. He definitely enriched this introduction to a new
country. He started out to familiarize us with Icelandic personality traits and
said the most obvious important one is a love of irony. It evidently pervades
their whole approach to life and defines their sense of humor. So we
definitely watched for it in Oskar and all the other Icelanders we met.
Once all the details of loading us on board with all our gear and getting the
rather inadequate introductions to one another over, we headed out for a
45 minute ride to Thingvellir, the site of the Icelandic Parliament, founded
1000 years ago by the Viking immigrants. This government was the first
democratic parliament in the world. The settlers elected delegates to the
parliament who attended the session for two weeks every year. A leader (or
Law-Speaker) was elected for a three year term and one of his most
important duties was to recite one-third of the law each session so that by
the end of his term the entire law had been reiterated.
THINGVELLIR HIKING
As it happens, Thingvellir is a very active volcanic site with regular
earthquakes. As a matter of fact, there had been two 5.2 quakes on June 17
and 21 of this year. These quakes started some dormant geysers up again,
including the Great Geyser. The European and American plates meet in
Iceland and in this place, you can actually stand with one foot in America
and one in Europe by straddling the fault line. These plates are pulling apart
about 2 centimeters a year and then volcanic activity fills in the resulting
cracks, so Iceland is truly growing larger. That’s another reason why it’s
quite accurate to call this country a “new land.”
Our first hike started here when we took off for about 2 hours through the
lovely valley. Because Iceland truly is a “new land” born only 20 million
