Twelve years ago, Reykjavík’s “Little Christmas Shop” (Litla Jólabúðin) opened up in Anne Helen Lindsay’s garage. Hers was the house with the Christmas lights up year round and the painted Santa Claus footsteps marking a path through her garden. She had been importing token goods like puffin dolls and magnets for tourist shops in the city, but business was slow in the wintertime when those stores were just trying to sell back stock that hadn’t been picked up by summer visitors. Anne started importing Christmas items to entice the stores to set up Christmas sections and keep things fresh in the wintertime. Due to large demand, her Christmas imports spilled into her garage and suddenly, Christmas became a year-round celebration there.

[Read more...]

As it is for many hobbyists and collectors, it was inevitably a love of Star Wars that spurred Þröstur Höskuldsson to act on an ad in a local newspaper for a broken pinball machine. He bought it about six years ago while he was studying electrical engineering at Reykjavík University and thought it would make a nice home decoration.

[Read more...]

Everyone should have a place to exist outside of his or her own mind, which is probably why some people have kids, some write books, some make music and 28-year-old Frosti Gnarr created Grotta (“Cave”) Zine. He publishes the 30-something-page zine under the guise of ‘A forum for Icelandic artists,’ but each issue is sent out into the world as, first and foremost, the tangible manifestation of what goes on in his head when he sees art. 

[Read more...]

Fifty kilometres north of Iceland’s Þingvellir National Park, a drop of water melts from the glacier Lángjökull, liberated from the 1,000-year-old frozen mass. The drop falls into porous, volcanic rock where it spends 30 to 100 years being filtered through the ground until it emerges into the cracks and fissures that skirt Þingvellir lake. By the time it reaches these fissures and this lake, it is some of the most pristine water in the world.

The most notable fissure to be found along Þingvellir lake is the Silfra fissure, a rift in the earth’s crust between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates. When you step into the near-freezing water of the Silfra fissure as a diver or snorkeler, you are literally stepping between two continents. This is a dark, cold and spectacular place.

[Read more...]

The novelty of a reindeer tour in the Icelandic countryside is the novelty of almost all `tours’ that take place in the Icelandic countryside: being in those pockets of remote beauty and getting the fuck out of Reykjavík for awhile.

[Read more...]

The very centre of the Marz Seafood headquar ters in Stykkishólmur is pillared by a tall shelf, stacked with books by female writers, Annie Leibowitz’s photography collection “Women” and a big tablet of female body paintings titled “The Nude.”It is a bright and totally open space save for one private office, and even that door is left open. It belongs to Erla Björg Guðrúnardóttir, who started Marz Seafood in 2003. Over the last ten years it has become the only entirely female-run seafood exporting company in Iceland and one of the most successful in an industry dominated four to one by men.

[Read more...]