Introduction
Iceland is an amazing country. With a population of slightly less than 300,000 (60% of whom live in the capital, Reykjavik), it has its own airline, its own movie industry, some of the best goldsmiths on the planet, and the world's oldest functioning legislative assembly, the Althing, established in the year 930. Homes in Reykjavik (at least) are heated with hot water from geothermal vents, and I'm told it's common for business meetings to take place in the hot tubs at the open-air municipal swimming pool, snow or no snow.
I've stayed with a man in Keflavik who told me that until World War II, the typical household economy in Iceland consisted of two cows and a small boat. His grandmother, as a teen-ager, used to walk every summer from the barren Reykjanes Peninsula to work on the farms in eastern Iceland.
Nowadays fishing still accounts for 70% of the economy, but tourism is becoming more and more important. Europeans love the open spaces and the vistas here.
