Nostalgia in the air and airport Icelandic
July 25, 2002 ~ 3:20 a.m.
BOSTON, MA�Even after 30 years of having lived in the metro Boston area, I never realized just how much green space there is here. As we flew in over the Boston Harbor islands and circled past Squantum, overlooking Dorchester, Milton, Quincy and other close-by city communities, I looked around in fascination at the massive swathes of green that composed the landscape. One area of green I instantly recognized as the Blue Hills Reservation, a state park. However, that accounted for just a small percentage. From the ground, Bostonians like myself look around and think the city and its suburbs are encroaching on wilderness and driving it back, back, ever steadily back. But from what I saw during the holding pattern that had us traversing a considerable stretch of metro Boston as we awaited our turn to land at Logan Airport, I will no longer think such folly. In fact, I reckon that we�ve preserved nature in and around the city quite well.
When we had the all-clear to land, I noticed the Boston Gas tower and instantly recognized Dorchester Bay. We flew directly past the Columbia Point peninsula where the University of Massachusetts, my old school, was located. While attending that university for studies and work over the course of six years (1990-1996), I saw many planes fly in rather close and wondered just how they saw the school and the bay from the air. Now I know. I saw the shoreline curve around Pleasure Bay in South Boston toward Castle Island, the route for many a run that I took during my school years, and then past Black Falcon Pier, site of my former workplace, a company I joined immediately after my time at UMass-Boston. In the space of only 5 minutes, it was Nostalgia Central for me. Then we touched down on the runway at Logan Airport, with the Boston skyline looming teasingly in the distance.
After clearing customs, I met the folks in reception and walked out into the Boston air. The heat that had cooked the city only a day before my arrival had ended and it was now a dry, breezy 64 degrees. I sighed despondently. It felt no different from what I have experienced in London since May. An unseasonable cool spell has cloaked the area, just in time for my arrival no less, and is due to last several days. I have heard of Murphy�s Law, but this is heartbreakingly ridiculous.
Here�s the ironic thing: On Tuesday, while taking lunch in a caf� just down the street from where I live, I ate my sardines on toast while the radio played a �70s song I�d never heard before, but the refrain went: �Everywhere you go, always take the weather with you.�
It would appear that I did exactly that.
But I can say this much, London and Boston alike are leagues ahead of Iceland. Arriving from London at Keflavik Airport, 20 miles south of the capital Reykjavik, it was a misty 52 degrees. I could feel the chill coming through the portable walkway exiting the plane.
This airport seemed to have changed considerably since I had last seen it in March 1999. It has undergone both a refurbishment and extension since then. I couldn�t find the shop where I had bought an Iceland t-shirt and coffee mug three years ago. But I did find the duty free shop and purchased three shot-bottles of scotch for $6.75 (American dollars are the preferred form of currency at Keflav�k Airport, and this is due to the large amount of Americans, such as myself, who pass through the airport for connecting flights.)
I also bought a coffee and sipped that leisurely in the waiting lounge. Then I decided to have a look around the airport. I walked up to passport control and then back down and around by Gates 31-36, then forward to Gate 29, where my flight to Boston was boarding.
As I was unsuccessful at locating a shop where I could get another Iceland t-shirt, I amused myself by glancing at all the signs. My curiosity with foreign languages is insatiable and I considered this a worthy way to kill the remaining five minutes until I boarded my plane. And so I learned some Icelandic words. Here�s a little lesson, should any of you find yourselves passing through Keflav�k Airport someday:
Uppl�singar � information
Veitingar � cafeteria
Hli� � gate
Verslanir � shopping
Brottfarir � departures
Fr�h�fn � duty-free
�slandica � Best of Iceland (whatever that is; unfortunately, time didn�t allow for me to find out.)
Being a Germanic language, it naturally follows that Icelandic would have some truly jaw-crunching words:
Gjaldeyrir � money exchange
Vegabr�f�ftirlit � passport control
�j�nustubor� � service desk
Komufar�egar � arrivals
Bi�sv��i � waiting area
By far, the easiest Icelandic word I encountered was:
Banki � bank
Modern Icelandic is an almost direct descendent of the Viking language of Leif Eriksson and the original founding members of Iceland�s first (and still current) parliament, the Althing, in 930 A.D. The language takes two runic letters into its alphabet: � (capital: �), and � (capital: �). The first looks like a warped letter �d,� and the second looks remarkably similar to a �p,� but they both stand for the two forms of the �th� sound that we have in English. Yet here�s the remarkable thing: Old English possessed these same runic characters, and if we�d seen fit to keep them, we could very well be spelling that as �at, and thin as �in.
Spoken Icelandic is even stranger than its written form, for all its runic letters, accent marks and improbable letter combinations. It is a wonderfully mellifluous sounding language that flows in a sing-song beat so characteristic of Scandinavian languages. However, it doesn�t sound anything like a language that is distantly related to German, Swedish, Dutch or English�it comes off sounding like Portuguese or some soft Latinate tongue. How this is, I cannot say. But you could put me in a room with an anonymous person speaking Icelandic, and I could listen to him or her all day and never figure out that I was hearing a language that originated well north of the Iberian peninsula.
We took off from Keflav�k in a steady rain, and before we headed into the thick clouds, I could see the town, looking very much like the sort of town that you�d expect to see so close to the Arctic circle � narrow roads meandering through houses constructed from imported timber and fields of barely green grass with the odd poplar or spruce tree. I recalled seeing a more impressive town from the air back in 1999. But maybe just like its airport, Keflav�k itself had changed too.
� M.E.M.
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Copyright � 2001-2007 by M.E. Manning. All material is written by me, unless explicitly stated otherwise by use of footnotes or bylines. Do not copy or redistribute without my permission.
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