Reykjavík

There's something about the grandeur, the isolation and the simplicity of Iceland that reminds me of things I saw in New Zealand. The outdoors is the lifestyle, perhaps. Or maybe the tin rooves are common.

There's also something ironic about having your heating on and the windows open - is it because geothermal energy is so cheap? And water conservation isn't high on the priority list either.

We went to the Perlan revolving restaurant on a water tank but the revolving restaurant was closed because the geothermal hot water storage tank is being upgraded to include a museum. This is a practical nation, people who are finding novel ways to entertain the tourists who outnumber them by 4 or maybe 5:1. And it must have been such pragmatism that guided them to build the bejewelled Harpan Concert Hall during the worst of the 2008 recession.

Overheard at breakfast, an Irish contender for Private Eve's Pseuds Corner - "O'Donnovan Rossa was bourgeois."

Not puffin or minke or foal but tomato juice, carrot juice, double espresso, miso soup, pickled herring and a boiled egg - breakfast buffets are fun, especially after a 6 km sunrise walk on Reykjavik's icy Saebraut seafront pathways, in April snow flurries. I was happy to see a large flock of Eider down on the sea below me and a pair of Whooping Swans flew past, birds I don't normally encounter.

People had placed inukshuks along the coast and the snowy mountains on the other side of the bay dominated the view, just being there, like this sentence. 

"Independent People": how excited and proud were Icelanders when Halldor Laxness won the 1955 Nobel prize for literature, just eleven years after independence from Denmark? Sixty years on, it seems that beating both England and Ireland in soccer have assumed more importance to their daily lives.

PS Here's a tip for managing the expense of Iceland - budget for a seven day trip and stay only three.