How do Icelanders feel about their government?

The Icelandic government dissolves on Monday, our last night in Reykjavik. On Friday, we saw a small band of ardent protestors outside of the Alþingi, their parliament. Apparently they’ve started demonstrating daily since its come back in session. On Saturday, the square was a madhouse of angry citizens bearing signs proclaiming “New Republic” and chanting, or at least what it sounds like to foreign ears, “No my stinky toe!” (Some Iocals translated it as, “The government is ineffectual.”)

protests

Elections have been called for May, so what they are protesting for exactly, I’m not sure, nor were some other locals.

Could the government really have done anything to avoid the crash? I ask my Swedish riding instructor, who’s been living in Iceland for a few years.

Icelandic horses are small, stout creatures, having survived for centuries eating nothing more than the tough grass, one of the few things that will grow here. (An Icelandic cookbook prints a recipe for “moss soup,” made out of moss, sugar, and milk.)

Maybe not, she explained, it was more that they didn’t accept responsibility for the crash. It’s that they haven’t been assuring the people they’ll take care of it.

A lot of people have lost their savings, and with the tumbling currency, it’s much harder to go abroad.

On the car ride back to Reykjavik, my driver said that crime rates have been rising – it used to be that people would leave cars unlocked and keys in the ignition, but now, “People are getting desperate,” she said.

The unemployment rate, by US standards, has gone from nearly nonexistent to excellent – it’s currently around 3-4%.

Friday night, Marco and I met a member of the Icelandic symphony at a swanky hotel bar.

The bar/lounge at 101 Hotel

“This is very before the crash,” he said, gesturing to the sleek, opulent lounge. Mojitos cost 1450 ISK, about 12 USD now, but about 20 in better days.

And you can only imagine how incestuous the dating pool here with only 300,000 people – at best, a small US city. “All my exes have dated my exes,” lamented the symphony player, who suffered an even smaller selection by being gay.

But it must not be so bad if your limited dating pool consists of such attractive people. Last night at Vegamot, whose thumping bass and shouts can be heard across the street  from our hotel, the floor was packed with Iceland’s most beautiful. Every woman was blonde and stunning and every man was smartly dressed in a kind of metro-lite – skinny collared shirts, one fingerless glove, sculpted locks. One club even had hair straighteners in the bathroom.

After a night out, a stop at Bjaerin’s Bestu (City’s Best) is a must. Marco and I went three nights in a row. There, we ran into some other rowdy hot-dog lovers who I immediately quizzed on the economy. “Do you think it’s the government’s fault or just something out of their control?” I asked one guy in a green knit hat.

He shrugged. “A little bit of both. I actually don’t really care,” he said. He was a university student. Marco and I bought our hot dogs with everything and frantically consumed them like they were about to be snatched from us. They put some kind of crunchy fried onion on them that is absolutely heavenly.

I told somebody we went to Harvard. “Really?” he said, as if I had told joke an outrageous joke. “Do you really?” I nodded. “Is it hard?”

But the “crash” might be a misleading term in some ways. Marco and I meet an expat Spanish teacher named Elias in a coffee shop. He had chin length brown hair, tucked behind his ears, and a boyish enthusiasm barely contained by his lanky body.

Elias

He, along with my horseback riding instructor, both mention the same thing – that since many Icelanders opted to stay home rather than go abroad for the holiday season, the country benefited from its home-grown consumerism. He says shops and stores are still full of locals, which Marco and I have noticed as well.

“So there is no crisis,” he says, laughing, half-joking. “Sorry.”