Every once in awhile when you’re trying desperately to learn a new language, you have moments of brilliance, when all the nonsense syllables you hear and read (or at least some of them) suddenly make sense. I had such a moment at church yesterday, when I was fumbling along in the final hymn, holding the hymnal about five inches from my nose as though seeing the Icelandic words closer up would make them easier to pronounce—and suddenly, I realized I knew what I was singing. Not every word, but enough to know what the song was about. That’s the first time it’s happened to me here, and I was elated. Of course, I am still incapable of ordering a hot dog in Icelandic, but we take what we can get.
I have joined the University Choir (Háskólakorinn) this semester; they encouraged non-Icelandic speakers to audition by promising Beethoven’s 9th Symphony as the performance piece (what choral singer doesn’t know how to sing German, after all?). Then, once they had us in their clutches, they added a second performance consisting of about a dozen Icelandic songs (to be sung from memory)…and one piece by John Lennon. I am one of maybe four or five singers who can’t converse in Icelandic (the others are German, Finnish, and Spanish—all fluent in English), and the choir director has this idea that if he keeps speaking to us in Icelandic, we’ll suddenly be able to understand him. I will say that we’re getting very good at numerals (he’s constantly calling out measure numbers), but when he announces what we’re singing next, I have the greatest difficulty distinguishing the names of the songs from the rest of the sentence!
But the choir gave me an opportunity this past weekend to see a part of the country I might not have seen…mostly because there’s nothing to go to see. As many big choirs do, this one has a semiannual “choir camp/retreat” in an out-of-the-way old boarding house down south near a coastal town called Þorlákshöfn. The boarding house itself is a few miles away from the town, surrounded by lava fields and farmland. Spending the weekend there, I got to know some interesting cultural quirks—like the insistence on removing shoes upon entering a building no matter how dang cold the floors are on bare feet, and the strange proclivity to leave windows open even when it is below freezing outside.
I think the Icelanders have an unfair reputation for quaintness, though: the choir members I’ve met are as much like any other population of young people you might meet in the US or continental Europe: energetic, political, humorously cynical, and always ready for a party especially if there is beer involved. Having seen, as if from the outside, European stereotypes of Americans (loud, pushy, materialistic, and fanatical), I truly do resist lumping all Icelanders into one little box; I only mention these generalizations to counter what the guidebooks insist on telling you about the Icelanders who still believe in elves.
We had to drive over the low southern mountains to get to Þorlákshöfn, and it had just snowed. (Another cultural anecdote: college-age Icelandic drivers are just as aggressive as college-age American drivers.) It was too dark and stormy to see much on the way there, but on the way back, it was just after sunset and the sky was this amazing cobalt blue, and the hills reflected the sky and the full moon.
I include these pictures not so much for their quality as for the overall effect: combine the image in the one with the color in the other, add the moon, and you can imagine what it was like. This place continues to take my breath away.
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