New York, day one

(I wont spend much time online here, just consider this a short note-taking diary – I might fill it in properly later if I feel compelled to. Or not.)

Airport: Guy tells me that the US is a whole different country after 9/11. Another guy gives me a schnaps. Eat the worst hamburger in the world.

Airplane: Plan world domination. Get cold feet (literally, the floor is freezing). Everybody else is watching Batman.

New York itself: I live on Duke Ellington boulevard. How cool is that? And why doesn’t Reykjavik have street names like that? Haukur Morthens boulevard has a nice ring to it …

People I meet:

The quirky girl at the desk,

The German psychology major-to-be,

The Austrian nurse who loved Momo and Herman Hesse,

Dane, the Minnesota dude who is the local god of cards,

A British night-guard who’s writing stuff for medical publications and opposes the EU.

And Liliana, the Brazilian master of cards.

And then I listened to a a guy with a funny hat play Springsteen. Good times.

Welcome to the Revolution!

Greetings all my foreign friends. We’re living in     interesting times these days and what you call a credit crunch we call the fall, the kreppa, the biggest crisis in the nations history since it’s independence. And the day the Obama gave the rest of the world hope our parliment finally decided to end their month-long christmas holiday.

The nation showed up and protested, once again, but this time it was serious, this time it lasted from noon well into the night. There was pepperspray and broken limbs but also hope and togetherness, togetherness of doing something once and for all about this can of worms that new sins keep crawling out of. I didn’t arrive until midnight but things were still going strong then. People had lit a bonfire by the house of parliment, fuelled by the Oslo christmas tree and we drummed our beat to drums, pots and pans while the police stood quietly in the background. There was dancing and singing, we burned down christmas, put flames to the past. A girl raced towards me and embraced me with the words “Welcome to the Revelution!”

And when the fire finally went out there was another one, in front of the original liberation hero of Iceland, Jon Sigurdsson, and there were a couple of policeman surrounded by people vainly trying to stop the fire. Then they’re colleagues arrived but then left again, the fire was lit, they came back after a while, then left – the fire, lit on benches and newspapers, went on and off, and people ran back and forth. And there were still a few people when I left. Still got a job to wake up to, that will become rarer and rarer, because a few people, less then a hundred, became greedy and burned down the prosperity of formlerly one of the most prosperous countries of the world. Tonight we burned down the last threads of their authority, but they still cling to power. But we danced while they travelled through tunnels.

Their power is vaning, their illusions are fading. We are slowly bringing down the old Iceland, but we’re behind schedule to establish the new one. Watch this space … the times most certainly are a-changin’ …

Sesame Street – I’m an aardvark(origional version)

Cox + Combes’ Washington

somewhere over the rainbow

Mika Brzezinski of MNSBC rips Paris report

Forgetfulness – Billy Collins Animated Poetry

Gertie the Dinosaur

Tunak Tunak Tun (Best Copy)

Forgetfulness – Billy Collins Animated Poetry