So here is the story. I’ve been a student in Iceland since September 2007. Since then I’ve been working part time in the bank and earning barely enough for rent and food, nothing extra. I have an Icelandic citizenship but I have no family here. I don’t have the luxury of eating at my parents place, or living with them. I have to pay rent every month, buy food, and attend the university. Needless to say its not easy and any help that I can get I take.
In Iceland they offer you money assistance for renting. What this means is that they give you a certain percent of the rent back into your bank account. So being poor and being a student I apply for this “Rent Help”. However, the rules in Iceland (and possibly everywhere else) count only the income I earned the previous year. So they are not interested in the fact that for the last 8 months I’ve been literally living on noodle soup and hot dogs, barely making my rent and bills. They are only interested in the money I earned in 2007, and since I worked a full time job until September 2007 they, quite simply, don’t give a fuck about me or my troubles until its been at least a year that I’ve been in a shitty situation.
What this tells me is that in Iceland being a bum is encouraged. On the other hand, if you pay taxes regularly and contribute to the society, don’t count on the government giving you any help until you have at least been starving and homeless for a year.
Needless to say, I’m fucking pissed. Maybe its just me but this law doesn’t make any sense. Its retarded, simple as that. And Icelanders are retarded for not being bothered by it. Their whole society is constructed around family members being able to help their kids. Thats why I couldn’t get a job for a very long time even though I was better qualified than most of the Icelanders that got it instead. They got it simply because their father, cousin, older brother or some family member chose them instead. Thats why I find it harder to be a student here than most other students who are simply not bothered by these kind of laws because they live with their parents, eat at their house and if they have a job they keep most of the money for their own good time. Perhaps I sound bitter and jealous but I am an Icelandic citizen with all the rights that every other Icelander has. Something is fucked up when I, as an Icelander, can’t get the same rights other Icelanders get. I’m not asking for an apartment, I’m not asking for a lot of money, I’m asking for a fraction of what a regular, unemployed bum gets every month from the government because, poor bum, he can’t take care of himself.
I get very disappointed by this whole society when I see how things like this don’t bother noone because noone ever needs it. What about Icelanders without any family? Are there any? If I was a bum I could get the help without problems, if I’m a student who isn’t working and is living with his parents, I can get help from the government. BUT if I’m a student who has previously worked a full time job, paid taxes and lived on his own, well fuck me because I obviously don’t need any help. Lets give to the bums and students who use it on alcohol and traveling.
I know I’m bitter but I’m fucking pissed when I talk to these government workers and they act like what I’m saying doesn’t make any sense. I’m not crazy, YOU’RE fucking crazy. Your law is fucking retarded. When I ask them about what I’m suppose to do until February 2009 they don’t know what to tell me. I guess I should just go live at my parent’s extra apartment in downtown Reykjavik and have them send me money for the rest of my student days. Oh yeah, I CAN’T!
I hate the government workers because all they want to do is finish their 9-16 work day while doing as little work as possible. I get these short answers that assume I know what the fuck they are talking about. Like I’m a lawyer or an accountant and fluent in bullshit. It will be the day when I meet a government worker that is actually helpful. Who doesn’t sigh when I ask them follow up questions to their bullshit answers. BITCH, I’M PAYING YOU! STOP SIGHING AND DO YOUR FUCKING JOB! You are there to help me and when I ask you to explain something better don’t treat me like I’m wasting your time.
I’m writing this because there is nothing else I can do. Because if I didn’t I think I’d turn into a Balkan monster that is sleeping deep within me. My dear Icelanders, you better hope I don’t go Balkan on your ass. We’re famous for more than just music. Just keep fucking with me, keep treating me like a second class citizen, I’ll show you how we deal with it back from where I come from.
So, should I be a bum? Is that what I’m suppose to be? Why do I even pay taxes here? I don’t get anything back from it. Unless you count water and air. The next bum that asks me for some change is gonna get a fistful of “GET A JOB!” from me.
I love a sound of a steel slide sliding across the neck of an acoustic guitar. And as the sound pours out of the guitar it takes control of your senses and keeps you captivated in its harmony. I am talking about blues. I have a great love for blues. It has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. It is such wonderful music, coming from such unfortunate and often tragic background. Simple and complex, talking about ordinary lives in an extraordinary way.
Today, you aren’t likely to hear it on radio stations or TV so fans have to put an extra effort to get to it. However, there is a young man, a friend of mine, who brings it to us like we’re back on a Mississippi farm, picking cotton. ET Tumason to me is hope, hope that Delta Blues is still alive. Alive not only in vintage record shops and fan minds but also in practice. Attached with this post I left you Ellidi’s cover of “Wished I Was In Heaven Sittin’ Down” by Fred McDowell. He sent me this as a demo and even though he has better quality versions by now I always liked this one a lot because it reminds me of the days when I was first discovering great blues artists, all in lousy quality because the original LPs were either lost or deteriorated.
What more can I say? I am quite proud to know him. I remember still when he picked up a guitar at my place and tried to get a decent sound out of it for hours without success. He wasn’t discouraged though. Even though I was going crazy listening to him play the same Metallica riffs over and over, he eventually got better, and switched to blues. Now all he has to do is perfect an art he already knows very well, in the meantime I’ll be waiting, listening and enjoying his music. Lookout, he is just getting started.
You should check out more of Ellidi on his site. There you can get more songs and see him live. Also do a search on YouTube for “ET Tumason” and you’ll get some videos that aren’t on his site.
I don’t have anything smart to post about right now but I read this “news” and I found it funny.
“NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) – Violence depicted on television, in films and video games raises the risk of aggressive behavior in adults and young viewers and poses a serious threat to public health, according to a new study.”Read the whole article
In the article they compare video games and television to smoking. I want to study people conducting these kind of studies. Every now and then some pseudoscientist comes out with a study that clearly shows the dangers of TV, cinema, video games, music, or any other source of entertainment that we or our kids might enjoy. It is so convenient to point the finger of blame into every other direction but yourself. I think it was Chris Rock who said, “I wonder what was in Hitler’s CD collection.”
I don’t want to go into the science of all this because who knows, maybe there is some scientific proof to support these claims. But all this science is useless when compared to the realities of life. We might as well cover all our senses and live a peaceful life in ignorance and bliss. If your child grows up into an aggressive and violent adult you can only blame parenting, psychological disorders and/or the society in which a person is raised. Video games, movies and music are the last of my worries when I’m walking in a bad neighborhood.
Due to server troubles I nearly lost everything I had on this site but thanks to archive.org I managed to get most of my posts and comments back.
I guess this is a chance to start over. And as I go through the process of returning all my previous posts I’ll leave you with a few lessons from the king himself. Pay attention now.
The day after Elliði’s culinary experiment we were mostly just recovering from the night before, only to start drinking again that evening. After playing a few games of cards and drinking some beers we went to a cool club where we drank again and talked to random strangers sitting around us. The conversations usually started with or included the line “I’m from Iceland…” somewhere in between. That line is the Visa of drunken conversations. People love Icelanders, nature’s clowns. They can be drunk, wild and stupid but no one will really care if people know they are Icelandic. It’s amazing what they can get away with but that’s another story for another time.
The time flew by as we bottomed one beer after another. When closing time finally arrived we spent the next hour talking to strangers and eating Danish hotdogs while slowly strolling towards Christiania. We managed to get stuck with some half-breed Icelander (half Danish half Icelandic) who talked and talked until his voice became headache inducing. Since it was technically Elliði’s fault he was with us he had to take the difficult task of actually listening.
It was about 6 in the morning when we arrived to Christiania. I didn’t know what to expect at that hour but the half-breed seemed to know where we were going. It was still dark but dawn had begun to slowly creep up. The place was covered in what looked like blue snow under that transitioning sky and there were no streetlights to ruin the effect. It seemed completely deserted out there at first but then a small dark figure emerged from the alley. It was a drunken middle-aged Greenlandic woman. She didn’t say much, in fact, I’m not sure she said anything at all but she decided to hang out with us and we didn’t mind. She was a clinging-on type of gal. I think she tried clinging onto each one of us at one point but finally found her home with the half-breed who she seemed to have liked the most. Perhaps it was because he couldn’t stop talking. So, with her under his shoulder we continued walking down the alley. All of a sudden, another figure pops out and this time it was a middle-aged man. He approached us and seemed very interested to chat. It was a Frenchman who kept insisting he isn’t French but rather from Normandy. I didn’t get the logic of that but hell if I was going to argue with him, I’m all too familiar with people and sensitive national issues. If he wants to be Normandy’s I’m not going to stop him. This guy seemed weird straight away but as we were in good spirits we didn’t mind talking to him. He had a very thick French accent and one couldn’t help but wonder what he was doing there alone at dawn.
By that time the half-breed had established himself as the biggest attention seeker I have ever met. I wonder what was going on in his life that he had to be the centre of attention all the time. He was the kind of person that if you told a fishing story and a 1 meter fish you caught he would tell you his fishing story and a 2 meter fish he caught. He was better at everything than anyone else. Now, he was sure that the French guy was an undercover cop. And pretty much everyone that passed us from that point on was an undercover cop according to him. Elliði and Smári also believed him at first but with good reasons. If you want to think someone is an undercover cop you can always find some “proof” to support that theory. The point is, you can never know for sure. I didn’t believe there were any cops there. Not that I had a feeling or anything like that, I just didn’t think they would waste a squad of undercover cops, at 6 in the morning, on Sunday, to catch 4 drunken idiots trying to buy a joint. I mean, according to the half-breed there were more cops there than there were people to arrest. Since I was going to pay for the stuff anyway I didn’t want to go. If I was wrong and there were undercover cops there I’d be the only one to pay for it. So we stayed and chatted with the French guy. We gathered around a fire in a barrel which was irresistible. We couldn’t leave. It was so warm around that barrel that we just stayed there and waited for the morning.
By this time it was obvious that the French guy wasn’t an undercover cop but rather a mental patient who escaped from some asylum. It was interesting to observe his behaviour. He didn’t seem to live there but yet he took the shovel and cleared snow here and there. He walked around picking trash and putting it in the trash bins. Not so bad you might think, and it wouldn’t be but the way he behaved made it clear he missed a few screws up there. Every now and then he would join us around the barrel where he would begin a conversation but it didn’t take much to make him angry (not scary angry, more French angry). You could simply be answering some question and he would walk away shouting and talking to himself. 5 minutes later after some snow shovelling and garbage picking he would join us again like nothing happened. This was going on for awhile until he became too rude and impolite to put up with it anymore. He left us alone after I told him to piss off. I guess my words had more meaning to him since he seemed to have liked me and didn’t respect Elliði and Smári much. He didn’t even believe they were Icelandic. I think it’s because they actually tried talking to him while I was just listening and looking around for any Rastafarian out there.
Soon after we were on the metro and on our way home. Half-breed was still stuck with us and again, I blame Elliði. But it’s ok because Elliði took one for the team and bravely engaged in any conversation that the half-breed would start up. We’ve lost the Greenlandic woman somewhere in Christiania awhile ago. No doubt she found someone else to cling to or maybe she just sobered up and realised who she was clinging to in the first place. When we got home we got comfortable and put on a movie to which I fell asleep pretty much straight away.
I woke up around 9 in the evening. Everyone was still asleep and to my delight the half-breed was gone. We had about 3 hours to clean up the place before Elliði’s parents returned from their trip. Luckily we kept the place more or less clean so there wasn’t much to do. The rest of the evening was spent listening to music and playing cards. None of us drank anymore; I think we all had enough. The next morning Smári and me took the train to the airport and returned back to Reykjavik taking with us some weird and fun memories.
As I said before, there were some irritating moments during our visit but without them I doubt I’d remember as much. I spent a shitload of money but at least I got to see my friend, see Copenhagen and have great fun.
P.S.
These photos aren’t mine. Since I lacked more photos from Denmark I decided to post a few random ones from Christiania
A few months ago I went to this lovely town with Smári for the first time to visit our friend Elliði. On the last day before I returned to Reykjavik I wrote a post about my experience there but I never published it, it just remained crumpled together with the rest of my drafts. I don’t know why I didn’t post it but reading it now I see that at the moment of writing I still had too much partying in my system, plus a hangover if I remember right.
So let’s do this again.
Copenhagen. All in all I will remember my 5 days in Copenhagen as great fun. But no fun trip can go without some annoyances. In the end you usually remember the good times because you remember the bad times. Ying and yang baby.
I didn’t go to Copenhagen to do sightseeing. The only place we actively sought out was Christiania. It was pretty much a dump now but I had to check it out. The biggest problem with my time there was the extreme cold. At the time Europe was struck with a cold-wave from Siberia, earth’s refrigerator.
It being cold, wet and windy outside made us, on a few occasions, call a taxi. I have yet to see a taxi in Denmark. The taxi service wasn’t just bad, it was nonexistent. You couldn’t get a taxi even if you were paying with gold bricks. The phone operators would randomly hang-up and when a taxi was actually sent to our place, it never arrived. Fine, at least their metro system is good. I guess I have been spoiled by Iceland. You’d think Denmark is very similar to Iceland but you’d be wrong. Ok, maybe not, but for someone who is staying only for 5 days the difference seemed pretty big. Internet in Iceland is light years ahead of Denmark. I barely found some bad map of Copenhagen online and it proved useless. I could get better info about Copenhagen on “foreign” WebPages than on Danish ones. Ordering a pizza was also a 1 hour struggle. The only place that was obvious to call was Domino’s Pizza. But that place makes bad pizzas. Finding another place proved hopeless. Nothing with home delivery. Finally, the only other place we could find that would deliver… was online! So it’s a city with crap taxi service, crap pizza and crap internet except when you want to order a pizza.
So this concludes the crap section of this post.
As I mentioned before, the metro system is pretty good. So even though it was cold and taxis were running away from us, we still got around with ease. Drinking o’plenty started pretty much as soon as Smári and I arrived to our first duty free. Our “inside the house” time in Copenhagen was spent drinking, smoking, talking and listening to music. On our second night we went to an all you can eat/drink Chinese restaurant. 4 Icelanders and myself. All you can drink sounds better than sex with Angelina Jolie to an Icelander. We finished some 5 or so pitchers of beer and I guess just as many pitchers of wine, I don’t remember the count exactly. As I was paying the tiny Chinese waitress it was clear to me they wanted us out. The night was still young but cold as a bitch though. We all went to Elliði’s place where the real drinking started. There were plenty of beers and cocktails around for everybody including a joint or two purchased at Christiania earlier that evening. As it was getting late and I already had more than enough I wasn’t going anywhere else that night but for an experienced party animal like Elliði the night was still just starting. So, this is what I heard happened to Elliði next. I doubt he knows it much better. He went to some clubs, danced around like an idiot no doubt, managed to get thrown out of some 7/11 store as he was asking for directions, scared some poor girls waiting for the metro, woke me up by calling me to tell me he is on his way and should be home soon, he probably fell asleep on the train since he came home hour and a half later. As he got home I heard some noise in the kitchen and then silence. Smári woke up first around noon and found Elliði dead asleep sitting at the kitchen table, his head leaning on the wall and in front of him was what can only be called a pepper-tortilla. You see, the night before we made tortillas for dinner and we had some leftovers. As my munchies kicked in I finished the leftovers but there were still a few tortilla breads left. So Elliði must have gotten home, saw the tortilla breads, found no meat and just used the next best thing, pepper. That bread was covered in pepper, as was the kitchen table and the kitchen floor. If he managed to take a bite out of that bad boy before falling asleep his throat would have exploded. I wish I found Elliði in the morning so I could take a picture with my phone but luck didn’t have it that way. All I got is his pepper-tortilla dish with most of the pepper ending up on the table.
And here is your chef, Elliði.
Sorry, but that was as close as I could get to the actual scene.
The next day we had more drinking, partying and just as bizarre experiences as the nights before, if not more. I’ll write more about that next time. I’m like Quentin Tarantino cutting Kill Bill into 2 parts except my Kill Bill doesn’t suck.
Life can be strange. It certainly proved that to me. I knew the threat was there and that it was coming for a long time before it actually came. Finally, on 27th of February at 11:44 AM, it arrived. Sofie Alma Hajek. A new predecessor to the throne.
She has managed to get through the traps, barbwire and nails carefully set by me in my mom’s cervix prior to my arrival. Kudos to her on that one. A lone child of 21 years and it has come to an end such as this. A new era is upon me. A Little Sister era.
I have thought about what this era brings to my life. Its hard to imagine that I’m a brother now. 21 years as the only child does that to a man. I thought about how things would look as we get older, who she will become and who I’ll be. Will we be able to talk about interesting things and have fun when she gets older or will I have to slap her no good boyfriends around and feed her babies. Maybe she’ll slap me around and feed me for all I know. Perhaps I’m thinking too much about the future. I tend not to think about the future awfully much. I tend to stay in the present. Not that thinking about future is bad, one should certainly think about making things better for the future but I like to take most things as they come. Little Sister, however, has made me think about the future in a way I never thought before. Future will reveal it’s secrets in time though so nothing else to do but embrace the present.
