kvennafrídagur

Today is the 30th celebration of Kvennafrídagur (women's free day), and there is going to be a re-enactment downtown this afternoon.

In 1975, all the women in the city got up from their desks and left their jobs in the early afternoon, to indicate the difference in salaries for men and women. Their reasoning was they were being paid only a percentage of what the men were earning, so they should only work for that percentage of the day. I found a website that lists the activities of the original day, complete with speech transcripts. I am told that today there will be 30-50 thousand women downtown, and just like the original day, there will be song singing, a parade, and speeches. Kind of like sautján júni (independence day) in scale, but only women.

This website has an English explanation of the event, as well as more photos of the size of the crowd at the first one (for those of you that have not seen the scale of this place, this kind of crowd is a Big Deal). They've covered the bases linguistically- there's even an Arabic version, the first time I've seen that for an Icelandic website.

Ship sighting: Yesterday as we were eating breakfast, we saw the Pride of Iceland, Engey RE-1 (still not in skipaskra) sailing out to sea for her 40 days. I also spent the entire length of the choral movement of Beethoven's 9th watching boats, birds, and cloud patterns on Saturday morning. It's a great combination.