"the island"

Here's a good way to really piss off both Icelanders and me: refer to Iceland as an "island". Sorry, boys, that's a no-go. For one thing, Iceland is a nation all its own, with an 1100-year history, a unique language, and home to the world's oldest Parliament and Europe's oldest prose: a place that's certainly deserving of the moniker "country". But for another, Iceland is just plain big. I had some friends come up last fall and they had charted out an early itinerary that would have them bouncing around the country like a crazy ball: taking a 10-hour drive into the West Fjords the first day before lunch before dashing 8 hours over to Akureyri for dinner. Clearly they hadn't figured on the size of the place: it's an 832-mile drive around the Ring Road of Iceland, for example, and that doesn't even take in the remote West Fjords.

One of E's friends keeps bringing up the fact that we live on a "tiny island", as though we're stranded on a north-sea version of Martha's Vineyard. I don't think she really gets it. In reality, Iceland is around 20% bigger than Ireland (a place I've never heard called an island) and unlike Ireland, with its placid horse-grazing green interior, Iceland's vast interior packs a wallop: uninhabited and uninhabitable, crossable only with plenty of supplies and planning, and only two months in the year. Throw in some towering craggy mountains capped with glaciers, endless plains of lava, hundreds of miles of black sand beaches, and lonely fjords stretching up to the Arctic Circle, and you have a place best referred to as the Land.