My plan for this and several posts to follow was to include some pictures from my trip so far, but despite living in an ever‐increasingly interconnected world I’m having trouble getting the little collection of technology I brought with me—an iPad, a digital camera, a mobile phone, and a wireless adapter—to talk to each other in a way my blog will understand. It’s stressing me out, and stress is baggage you’re not meant to pack on holiday.
One of the images I was able to transfer over is this one particular street sign from downtown Reykjavik. When I look at English and most French words I’m immediately struck by the meaning of the characters, but with Icelandic, in its otherness, the graphic nature of the type stands out first, and there was something immensely pleasing about the balance of these characters together.
This runs in stark contrast to the at times relentless flow of letters making up German words. They have a different otherness to them, a different weight and form for the letters as they are piled up beside each other. When I was in Italy there was enough sameness sneaking through from French I didn’t have the same experience of being a foreigner in my own alphabet—I’m delighted by the surreality of how quickly such familiar symbols become so unintelligible with only subtle changes in their configuration.
I love words and language, and this holiday away from Canada I knew would also be a holiday away from English—and I’m finding I love just as much being surrounded by shapes and sounds I don’t know.
I’m also finding out just how much French I actually know—a pleasant surprise, although not all together useful when I default to it when German is spoken.