Eliza Reid moved to Iceland 20 years ago for love and now she's the First Lady. Here are her favourite ways to enjoy a "chill" Icelandic weekend, from public pools to Icelandic literature. It isn't often that someone moves abroad and ends up helping to shape the nation.
But that's what happened after Eliza Reid , a Canadian graduate student at Oxford University, won a raffle for a date with a fellow student – future Icelandic President Guðni Jóhannesson. Subsequent visits to the spellbindingly beautiful island – and an engagement – led to a permanent move in 2003. Since then, First Lady Reid has worked to highlight the rugged beauty and unique culture of Iceland to the outside world via prose – her own, as a writer for Icelandic travel publications, and through promoting Icelandic literature overseas.
"The country has changed a lot in the last 20 years," says Reid, who served as a UN Special Ambassador for Tourism and speaks Icelandic fluently. "When I first started visiting [in 1999], it was considered much more distant..
. but we've seen an increase in tourists from Spain, Italy and places like that because when you're taking a summer break in August, you'd probably like to come to Iceland where there might be a drizzly rain and it's 9C." Iceland is cool, literally and figuratively – with summer highs averaging at 13C and a Viking past, lush with sagas and myths.
Reykjavík, the capital, is home to two-thirds of the island's population, excellent cultural event.
