egp09acc
Introduction
I joined expat.com on 06 September 2011.
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egp09accposted on the thread Essentials to live in Iceland
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egp09accposted on the thread Hello, new guy here.
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egp09accadded the blog The Dog-Days Queen to the Iceland blog directory
Expat experience
I began my life in Iceland with a year as an au-pair with a lovely five-child family in 101 Reykjavík, honing my shaky Icelandic skills, making friends and helping children with various items of clothing (amongst other things). Then followed a short period of unemployment before I bagged a dream job in an Icelandic shopping mall. The current life project is to take an MA in Translation Studies at Háskóli Íslands (starting September 2012), and then realise my goal of becoming a literary translator.
Most everything. The people, the tiny city, the cafés, the climate (no really), the glorious summer brightness, the winter snow, the birds.
Quite often it is too windy. A lot of the architecture is rather uninspiring. Gin is too expensive for me to be able to justify drinking it at the rate that I did when a student. In the winter it is upsettingly dark.
My first goal was to survive childhood. This I duly managed, before leaving the parental home for Sheffield to deepen my knowledge of Shakespearean sonnets and epistolary novels, and also consume an unhealthy amount of gin. I obtained two degrees in the field of reading and writing, which have served me well.
I wouldn't describe it as a destination, since I did little travelling to arrive here, other than out of my mother's womb. After that journey, I very much liked the country that I found myself in. It has nice birds and plants, people are generally polite and kind, and the cider is excellent. As a comfortable Western European country where liberal views prevail in general, there aren't really many better places to be born.
There's not really that much that I don't like about my country. I didn't leave it because I don't like it - I left because I thought I might like Iceland better. Which in some ways I do, but in many ways I don't. Of course England has its problems just like any other country, but I find it hard to get too worked up about the political stuff. I don't like university tuition fees, there you go.
