marshmallow lessons
I was one of the fortunate invitees to a rather spectacular dinner on Saturday night, at the now famous blue house. One of the temporary house residents A, a restaurant owner from Germany, had been in Iceland for the autumn lamb slaughter season, learning about where exactly the food's coming from. He'd also started producing a new lamb sausage, a perfect marriage between the texture and

not mourning the departure
After our first attempt to hail the departure of McDonalds failed, S was determined to try again, so we went again a few days later and braved the line for a final "góðborgari" for me and a McFish for him. As always, the food tasted exactly like the McDonalds in France or Canada or America (the only locations I've tried it) and came in the exact same packaging as always. Nothing special there

two ways
Last Saturday I met one of the very few traffic engineers in Iceland, and we spent some time discussing how they're in the process of overhauling the timing of all the lights in town so that certain corridors have the "green wave" where you can hit greens all the way along. This was happy news, since only a few months ago I'd been having a conversation about how the number and timing of the

Iceland escape
So, the reason I was in Norway a few weeks ago was to start the next phase of the Norwegian project in Trondheim. My colleague had told me that I'd like the place, and my Norwegian friend K had lived there for three years, coming away with many good things to say. After my time in Oslo I was starting to think that Norway was a rather uncolourful and serious place, but my time in Trondheim has

oh, the tragedy
yes, the news reports on MSN and.. pretty much everywhere are true. Iceland is losing its McDonalds as of the first of November. The import costs what with the brave new exchange rate could no longer be justified, since they would have required a Big Mac to cost the equivalent of a rather decent meal downtown. Bargain meal no more.Since neither S nor I had ever tried McDonalds here in Iceland we