My Icelandic Mini-Saga

Just a quick update from the road!

I just checked out of my Reykjavik hotel and have a couple of hours to kill in the lobby, so I thought I toss out a few observations about Iceland, from what little I’ve seen of it in, what, just over 72 hours.

So that we’re clear, I’m someone who has at some point thought, while exploring in roughly 90% of the places I’ve traveled in my adult life, “I could totally live here.” This happened pretty quickly here in Reykjavik. I’m definitely a glass-half-full guy and tend to index much more on positive experiences than on (in this case, practically non-existent) negative ones.

I know the winter can be brutal, and at, what, 64º N latitude, winter nights come early and last a long-ass time. It’s windy, yeah. These things I can deal with.

And yes, the people I’ve met in the last 72 hours were certainly atypical, and many were not multigenerational native Icelanders. They were people with a keen interest in and extensive knowledge of China; they were highly-educated professionals — trained in law, or history, or diplomacy, senior businesspeople or civil servants.

So with that all out of the way, the fact remains that the seafood is just outstanding. I ate fresh fish, prepared in ways that allowed the natural flavors to shine through, at every non-breakfast meal save for one. Arctic char, monkfish, and, of course, cod. Glorious.

Downtown Reykjavik is utterly charming: highly walkable, not too overrun with souvenir shops and the like, with what appeared to be an excellent array of culinary offerings from around the world and relatively free of the bland, globe-spanning chain retail that is the blight of most European cities. I took in the National Museum (which I highly recommend),lots of architecture, and a lovely sculpture garden. I didn’t get out of the city to see the usual sites but I’ll save those for my next trip, with my wife I hope, who will appreciate me having waited.

The politics here, I’ve been assured, are unobtrusive and relatively mild: even the populist party is mainly concerned with things like pensions than with immigration or preservation of some notionally endangered cultural heritage. People are friendly and, unsurprisingly, uniformly polyglot. Just about everyone I met speaks four or more languages with some fluency. The nine-year-old son of a couple whose home I dined in last night already speaks Icelandic, Spanish, English, Portuguese, and Chinese. (His parents are a deep-rooted Icelander of sturdy potato-farming stock, a diplomat-turned-academic, and a brilliant Cuban telecoms professional by day, capoeira instructor by night — lovely people and wonderful conversationalists who spent many years in Beijing, with whom I have some friends in common from that city).

I wrote a Twitter thread about the Chinese ambassador to Iceland, He Rulong, who spoke at the event I keynoted. He amazed me with his ease, and the way he didn’t glance at the prepared speech he brought up to the podium with him and instead spoke entirely extemporaneously, abjuring cliches. That was such a refreshing change from what you usually get at such events. He assured me that he’s just another run-of-the-mill diplomat from a Foreign Ministry full of such people, but I found him to be quite exceptional.

Of course, he faces very little real pressure here, as there isn’t anything close to the level of securitzation of the relationship with China that we see in either North America or Europe. Betweenness seems to be the Icelandic condition. With what, 390,000 people and no standing army, they’re just not the type to pick fights.

My own talk was very well-received, and though I did butt heads (gently) with an elderly diplomat-cum-historian who had some bizarrely essentialist ideas about China as an intrinsically peaceful civilization and about its supposed steppe-sown hybrid essence, in all it was just a terrific little seminar where I made some friends and learned a lot about what the geopolitics of fracturing American hegemony look like from a small country.

Now home to Chapel Hill for just a couple of days before heading to Dubai for the World Economic Forum.