Welcome to Iceland Guest - Your Online Travel Guide.

Iceland Guest is an information website for your travel to Iceland. On this site you can get all the tourist information you need for your vacation in Iceland. We hope that you will find this online travel guide useful in planning your holidays in Iceland.

About Iceland
Iceland is a refreshingly unconventional travel destination. The Icelandic nature is unspoilt, exotic and mystical with its spouting geysers, active volcanoes, tumbling waterfalls, towering mountains, vast lava plains and magical lakes. Iceland’s fjords, glaciers and highland plains present visitors with some of the most beautiful and enchanting places they will ever see, as well as a rare feeling of utter tranquillity.

For travelers on a quest for action, Iceland’s pristine nature offers great potential for outdoor activities such as snowmobiling, horse riding, cave exploring, hiking, swimming, skiing, river rafting, kayaking and mountain safaris on modified four-wheel drives, to name but a few. Iceland supports a surprisingly diverse Nordic flora and fauna and is an ideal place for ornithology enthusiasts, while also offering some of the world’s best whale watching destinations.

About Reykjavik
Reykjavík sometimes feels like a cosmopolitan capital and a tiny seaside village - all wrapped up in one. But Reykjavík has the best of both worlds; the qualities of a modern, forward-looking society complemented by a close connection to Iceland‚s beautiful and unspoilt nature.

Reykjavík’s legendary nightlife is bolstered by plentiful cultural and social happenings in addition to an abundance of first-class restaurants. The size of Reykjavik city centre is also limited enough to allow for easy navigation by foot. Reykjavík has been described as a young and daring city that is characterized by strong contrasts. Conveniently small, clean and safe, it is more or less free from the major problems that haunt many other capitals. Big city events are frequent, the winter lights festival finished recently with thousands of participants and more tourist at this time of the year than we are used to.

in Focus

19.4.2007

Today is the First Day of Summer

Today is the First Day of Summer Today is the first day of Harpa, the summer month in the old Icelandic calendar, which is also officially the first day of summer. The holiday always falls upon the first Thursday after April 18 and has been a bank holiday since 1921.

The First Day of Summer is one of 11 legal flag days in Iceland.

According to the website of the University of Iceland, the first day of summer was also considered the first day of the year, which is why people used to count their age, and their animals’ age, in winters rather than years.

It was common to distribute summer gifts on the First Day of Summer in Iceland, four centuries before Christmas presents became tradition. People celebrated with a feast, often finer than on Christmas Eve.

Farmers took a break from their hard work and children were allowed to play with their friends from the neighboring farms. The day was dedicated to children (and is also known as Children’s Day) and to young women. On this day young men would often reveal whom they fancied.

Another tradition on the First Day of Summer, called húslestur, involved people getting together and listening to readings from the Icelandic sagas, poems or other literature.

It the weather was summery, farmers would let their cattle and rams out, to allow the animals to greet summer and to entertain themselves by watching the animals play.

People used to go to mass on the first day of summer until the mid 18th century when inspectors of Danish church authorities discovered that mass was being held on this heathen day and banned the practice.

According to legend, people considered it a good sign if summer and winter “froze together” (if there was frost on the last night before summer).

People would put a bowl filled with water outside to check whether it had frozen in the early hours of the next morning, before the morning sun could melt it. If the water had frozen, the summer would be a good one.

Source: Iceland Review (www.icelandreview.com).

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