Went to a wonderful fondue dinner party last night. The host was my Swiss-almost-turned-Icelandic friend Úrsúla. Her American boyfriend was there, then there were the Icelandic-Dutch couple Birna and Ino (I think I got his name right...) and their son Darri, three year old. He is a gorgeous kid. His name means "warrior" and he certainly lives up to his name, taking everything that remotely resembles a sword (gift wrappings rolled up etc.) into his hands and swinging it around. When he started attacking Úrsúla´s hanging plants we all cried with laughter. Well, they were almost dead anyway :)

Since it was such a multi-national party we couldn´t help discussing foreigners in Iceland. To our amazement we realized that foreigners living here have no means of keeping up-to-date on Icelandic news unless they speak good enough Icelandic. Sure, they can watch CNN and SKY and loads of other international news, but finding out what´s going on in Iceland is really a challenge. Úrsúla took an example of this guy working at deCODE genetics (where a load of foreigners work and the primary language spoken is English, as far as I know). A few weeks ago the company made more than a hundred employees redundant. Not being one of them, this guy barely knew why half of the people working next door to him had suddenly disappeared, but he would know exactly what the new regime in China was like or how often Arafat had been to the toilet in the last few days.

Now isn´t this strange? I would have thought that the ex-pat society here in Iceland was big enough to support at least a weekly resumé-newspaper in English about Icelandic internal matters. Correct me if I´m wrong...