Last week I went with my colleague Guðrún Gísladóttir and a great group of students from geography and tourism on a five-day field course. Such a trip is made every year, with students in their third undergraduate year, but this time the group was unusually large, or 58 students in all. They collected data for various projects they had self designed in accordance with their own interests. This time the district of Austur-Húnavatnssýsla in the north of Iceland was the destination of our trip. Geography students' projects ranged from vegetation in the Skagi peninsula to environmental management in local companies, and those of tourism students included opportunities for birdwatching in the northwest of Iceland, and the image of the two towns in the area, Skagaströnd and Blönduós, to name but a few.

The town of Skagaströnd was our base. And I think I should acknowledge that my own image of that place was rather limited before this trip. Yes, I remembered that Iceland's first freezing trawler had been based in Skagaströnd in the 1980s - the harbinger of great changes for the fishing towns. And of course I associated Skagaströnd with country legend Hallbjörn Hjartarson and his music, as probably most Icelanders do.

But the image changed. In Skagaströnd we found a very interesting and in many ways progressive little place, where people have initiated some incredibly original projects in order to strengthen the town. The marine biotecnology centre BioPol is one such project. No less original is the Nes Artist Residency, where artists from all over the world stay and work on their own art projects. In fact, while there we contributed to a sound art project of the Italian Dario Lazzaretto, about Iceland as a country of recurrent emergency situations... And in this village of 500 inhabitants, the University of Iceland has set up one of its one of its research centres, for the western part of North Iceland. The centre specialises in history and other humanities research. So, Skagaströnd is after all a particularly interesting place.