It took me a while to get used to the fact that in Iceland, ice cream is not a seasonal food. The ice cream shops are just as packed in February as July, and people walk down the street licking cones held in mittened hands. While I don’t find myself craving a winter scoop, I now have a similarly unseasonable thought: when the snow starts falling, it makes me want to go to the outdoor pool. In fact, at this point, I think of pools as primarily a cold-weather activity.
After trying all the pools in central Reykjavík, I’ve decided that my favorite is Vesturbæjarlaug. The saunas were recently rebuilt, the locker room is spacious, and the open layout of the hot tubs makes for good sky-watching while you soak. A drone photo of that pool is in the collage above, part of a series by Bragi Þór Jósefsson that celebrates Icelandic pool culture and shows off the diversity of pool layouts throughout the country.
I arrived at the pool today in the middle of a snow squall, which promptly turned into blue skies, and then ten minutes later started snowing again. There’s something extra special about soaking in 44°C water in winter. The contrast in temperature between water and air means you’re enveloped in a cloud of steam, and snowflakes linger long enough to give everyone a dusting of white in their hair. As I sat at the edge of the pool, near the glass perimeter wall that overlooks a hill, a dichotomous scene played out around me. To my left, kids in bathing suits jockeyed for position to go down a waterslide into the geothermal water; to my right, kids bundled up in snowsuits threw snowballs and sledded face first down the hill. It made me think that Iceland would be a fun place to be a kid.
Remember Flickr? I mean, it’s still around, but remember before Instagram when everyone used Flickr and you could see each other’s photos without having them mixed in with wierd scammy ads, AI-generated slop, and unwanted “suggested content”? You could tag them with informative labels that helped people find them, and associate them with a Creative Commons license that proactively let people know it was okay to use in non-commercial projects. Something tells me the AI foundation model scrapers didn’t stop to look at the license I chose as they hoovered it all up without consent. But I digress.
I think that time period when Flickr was at its peak was my favorite era of the Internet. I get reminded of it every once in a while when someone contacts me about one of my old Flickr photos. About a year and a half ago, I heard from Giovanni Marmont, who wanted to use one of my photos in a book he was writing, which has now been published.
The photo features various robots designed by Dunne and Raby, as featured in the 2008 Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition at MoMA. Along with Flickr, it can now also be found on page 125 of A Studious Use. Designing from the Undercommons, available to purchase in print or online for free.
Noted & Done
- To those of you in the U.S., I’m now one hour closer in time, since Iceland doesn’t observe daylights savings time.
- I am officially old enough that “kids these days” use words I don’t necessarily understand. Well, check out this story in which every few paragraphs the author switches to write in English as it was spoken 100 years earlier, starting with 2000 and ending with the truly unintelligible 1000. I started struggling around 1500.
- Every once in a while I see project that makes me say “why didn’t I think of that!?” because it’s so simple, and perfect, and up my alley. This week, that project was Payphone Go, a game in which you collect points by calling from any of California’s 2,203 remaining payphones.