Icelanders' Way of Being

Iceland isn’t a common place people tend to travel to. It is rather cold even in the summer, especially for someone from Southern California. Their atmosphere is quite different than that in the U.S. People from the U.S. tend to be very friendly and are always smiling. In Iceland, people tend to walk around with stern, serious faces and avoid eye contact. Dogs are very much like their owners and follow along obediently next to them. They aren’t as openly petted there as we tend to do so here. However, cats can be found all around the city and petted. Although the inhabitants of Iceland aren’t so openly welcoming, they are very kind. They support one another and are very accepting. 

I was able to learn more about how community driven they are when we went to Heimaey (one of the Western Islands). It was evacuated but some of the men took turns trying to re-direct the lava flow in order to leave the harbor in good condition for it to be inhabitable. Man won in the fight vs. nature and it was all through teamwork.       

They are really nice and caring to visitors as well. A few of us went to a nearby town with our bus passes and found an old wrecked boat. A man let us know that we should watch out for the tide, because if the tide rose then we wouldn’t be able to cross back across the path we had walked on. He reminded us of the emergency number because he figured out we weren’t from there. It was a good thing he warned us about it because the signs leading up to it were all in Icelandic, I suppose not many tourists venture out into that town. 

By: Guadalupe Refugio