Stephen Weir articles, editorials and popular social media weir postings

  Iceland's famous 24-hour hot dog stand    Never mind the rat. Bad things come in tiny bites By Stephen Weir Since this is the end of the term and you will have long forgot this 4-page story (oops) by January, I can shamelessly tell you about my bad habit of eating street food. No, I don’t mean an Island Patty from the food truck at the corner, I am talking about protein that has tumbled from someone’s mouth onto the road or a pet drenched lawn. I can’t help myself. I am always hungry and what tastes better than free food, even when you get it from the gutter? With me the 5-second rule is my life’s mantra. Haven’t heard of it? Author  Mel Robins  (The 5-Second Rule) describes it thusly. “Almost everyone has dropped some food on the floor and still wanted to eat it. If someone saw you drop it, she might have yelled, "5-second rule!" This so-called rule says food is OK to eat if you pick it up in 5-seconds or less.” To be honest, after a near death experience in Iceland I

FM Belfast Teaches Canadians How To Run Around Iceland In Our Underwear When It Is 20 Below.  Singer Lóa Hjálmtýsdottir in a mound of ribbons By Stephen Weir written for my Huffington Post blog Published in the Travel Section Caribbean Camera newspaper May 2018 Two men in front tried the impossible, putting on their pants while stumbling to the exit. There was    an urgency – it was 2 am and we were being herded out the concert doors into a normal Icelandic night. Black. Windy. Sub-Zero temperature. It didn’t take a detective to figure out that the laundry droppers were Canadians – the Roots labels gave ‘em away.    Not that anyone in the crowded Reykjavik art gallery cared about their lack of  trous . Blame the lack of clothes on the band that 600 of us had just seen. It was FM Belfast, one of Canada’s most favoured Icelandic bands. The veteran electro-pop group closed out the Airwaves music festival concert with a group participation song called Underwear.   Lóa

Huffington Post Story by Stephen Weir. December 12, 2016 http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/stephen-weir/icelandic-reggae-amabadama_b_13533242.html   AmabAdamA  strut their way through the longest night of the year  On December 21 st – Day One of Winter – sunlight in Reykjavik is just a 4 hour 7 minute low-in-the-sky rumour. The dim sol stays lit long enough for Icelanders to shop, grab an espresso, gas the car and suck up what little light the gods offer that day. Busy. Busy. But oh so brief. What do Icelanders do for the other 20 hours of a winter day? For   Gnúsi Yones,  Salka Sól Eyfel and Steinunn Jónsdóttir, the three singing stars of   AmabAdamA   the seemingly never-ending night is time for perfecting the Jamaica strut,   singing and writing reggae music -- all in Icelandic of course!   Next spring when the sun comes back, AmabAdamA will have a new album for their growing world fan base. I celand Crowd Goes Wild When Band Took The Stage There wasn’t much ligh

FISSURE FREEZING DIVING INLAND IN ICELAND Stephen Weir on the steps of Reykjavik's Sport Divers Club A cold clear rift river in the Thingvellir National Park It is cold. There is snow on the nearby mountain tops and  most days the moon is up longer than the sun.  It is late fall in Iceland and the fresh water dive season is still going strong! There are at least three dive operators  this time of year in Iceland offering guided scuba fresh water tours to rift valley river  in the Thingvellir National Park.  One shop offers a second safari to a geothermic lake near the capital city of Reykjavik.  There are ocean dives offered as well but are very much weather and sea condition dependent. Thingvellir Park is the most visited site in Iceland for three reasons.  It is a region where two tectonic plates  - the North American and Eurasian Plates all but  touch. It's a place where the continental plates have meet and are now drifting  apart at a rate of about 2cm per year.