How is Iceland?

A question I get very often now on my MSN Messenger. And folks, I have hundreds of people officially registered as a buddy of Profke (a.k.a me J), and they keep me company during my lonely periods. Don't mind that at all to be honest. I definitely like the diversity in my buddy list. One minute I am chatting with people from Australia, than there are buddies from the States, SharePoint questions from India, friendly greetings from the Middle-East and lots more. Very entertaining! And yes, my wife has priority J

Now back to Iceland. I understand that I am extremely lucky to get a full week of sunshine in Reykjavik (more than 20° C every day). We are actually sweating in our classroom. Something Icelandic people are not really used to. This country does not really know what airco is since they basically have no need for it 99.99% of the time. Sitting here at 10 PM in my room, the sun is still shining with all its power on my laptop screen. And it will continue for at least 4 hours doing so. Very weird but quite an experience! I got this table from Wikipedia and it shows that I am really lucky. Does this have anything to do with global warming? Actually we made jokes about it today in the classroom. Somebody mentioned he was going to start planting palm trees in his garden. Good idea. I have one in my garden in Belgium and it is doing really good J (seriously!).

Mean daily maximum and minimum temperatures (°C) (1961–1990)[5]

Location 

Jan 

Feb 

Mar 

Apr 

May 

Jun 

Jul 

Aug 

Sep 

Oct 

Nov 

Dec 

 

All 

Reykjavík[6]

1.9 

2.8 

3.2 

5.7 

9.4 

11.7 

13.3 

13.0 

10.1 

6.8 

3.4 

2.2 

High 

7.0 

-3.0 

-2.1 

-2.0 

0.4 

3.6 

6.7 

8.3 

7.9 

5.0 

2.2 

-1.3 

-2.8 

Low 

1.9 

 

About 300.000 live on this island. I like Nordic people. They are friendly, reserved and a bit shy but when you connect to them, you really connect J! Tomorrow we'll have a small beer fest in the evening. Beer is the main theme in my courses and I have tasted a couple of the local ones and they are worth mentioning. I actually have added a couple of them to my database. But boy… beer is quite expensive here! Did you know that beer was banned until 1989 here in Iceland? Can't imagine that they would ban beer in Belgium! Maybe that's why you pay for a beer as many as a decent steak in the US. Anyway, that's not going to stop us J

Well, back to work. I have a couple of how-to's to do (keeping Joanna and Erika happy J). I'll let you know how the night-out with the Vikings went tomorrow.