< PREVIOUS ] [ 1993 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Our older daughter, 18-year-old Columbine, left Colorado the day that the Pope and president arrived in August, bound for a year as a Rotary exchange student in Saudarkrokur, Iceland.
Given that I've just been reading my favorite
non-best-seller, Men who Hang out with the Tree
Sloths,
I'll put her to work today as a foreign
correspondent, and pass on some of what she's told us about
Iceland.
It's not a big place, about 40,000 square miles of
volcanic mountains and glaciers, with hardly any trees.
If you filled Colorado with water up to 11,000 feet,
she reports, it would look something like Iceland,
though it's much wetter here -- waterfalls everywhere --
and Colorado doesn't have geysers or bubbling fields of hot
mud.
Thanks to the volcanic activity, steam and hot water are
abundant natural resources which are put to work heating
houses and the like. Columbine has a 15-year-old sister
here, and one at her host family. They asked me what my
sister and I argued about at home, and I said we often
fought because someone had just taken a long shower and
used all the hot water. No matter how much I explained,
they couldn't imagine ever running out of hot water. In an
Icelandic house, you'd run out of air before you ran out of
hot water.
She attends Saudarkroker College, where she has four classes: English literature, German, trig and Icelandic.
The 300,000 people of Iceland are the only people on
earth who speak Icelandic, a language which has changed
little from the Old Norse spoken in 900 A.D. when the
Vikings landed. It's very inflected and it has three
genders. I'm getting to where I can understand people if
they speak slowly, but I don't know if I'll ever be able to
speak it well. People are very polite, but it's obvious
that I'm not even close on the grammar and syntax even when
I know what nouns and verbs to use.
Trig isn't so bad, since she took it here and I know
what's going on, even if I don't understand a word in the
book. Numbers are numbers.
Taking a German class
taught in Icelandic is about as impossible as anything
could be.
On the bright side, The English class is all in
English, so I'm doing pretty well there. But the students
and the teacher were all much better read in English lit
than I was. They really push English hard in the academic
program because their best students will go to the
University, where they'll have to use English textbooks
because there are no Icelandic texts in advanced courses --
the population of Iceland is just too small to support
specialized texts and research materials.
She noted that she had to explain Columbus Day because
they'd never heard of him. As far as they're concerned,
Leif Ericsson discovered America, and they're very proud of
him.
Diversity is not a strong point of Iceland, which has
one of the most homogeneous populations on earth, almost
entirely Nordic. I look like most people here,
she
said, except for one thing. This is a little town that
doesn't get many tourists. So little kids come up to me and
stare because they've never seen anyone with brown eyes
before.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1993 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >