"Say hi to/kick/strangle/make sweet love to BJORK while you're in Iceland!"
To start the story, I will quote...myself. I know that's kinda arrogant, but it's easier this way. People ask why I wanted to to go to Iceland of all places. Here's why:
We go back to the hotel room for a bit, and chill on the patio (which is directly above the entrance to the hotel). After one of these tequila beer thingers (and the 2 margaritas he had at the hotel bar), he is...well, drunk. He starts telling the world how he has a laptop worth 3 grand and a camera worth 1500 in our room, and he doesn't care if anyone steals it, cuz it's INSURED, BITCHES! And we plan a trip to Iceland, and the moon! Shut up, it was funny at the time.
Seriously, a drunken conversation in Cabo is how this all came about. We're still working on the moon part of things.
So, bitch decided he was going to Europe for 2 weeks in the summer, and his first stop was going to be Iceland. He's a rat bastard, planning this trip right after I booked my NZ trip so I couldn't go along...it was his secret way of trying to catch up in our travel contest that I'm totally dominating him in. Anyway, I figured out the logistics and talked to my boss...and voila, I was able to go to Iceland for 6 days. Shazaam!
First step - train to Seattle. Since I had 2 hours to kill before the train departure, I decided to hit up the Ivanhoe for some hungover-curing beers. That place is always a gongshow, and it was in fine form on this day as well. As soon as I got there, a guy came in and sat down across from me with a pie in a box, one of those Safeway ones. He tried to cut it up into pieces with a plastic knife, but failed horribly. By the time he was done, it was just a pile o' pie, no individual pieces at all. That didn't stop him from scooping up a bunch with his hands into 4 different napkins and going around trying to sell pie to the other customers! It was damn tasty too.
I kid, I kid. About the tasty part, anyway. The rest of the story is true.
Train, hotel, sleep, blah blah. Departure day!
Eventually it was go time. I was seated in the exit row right before the entrance to business class, which was curtained off as usual. I guess the flight attendant got the booze cart wheel stuck on the last row of business class seats, and the cart just flipped right the fuck over. The cart, and many bottles of liquor, just took out the curtain and landed right in front of us. A couple of bottles whizzed right past us, a few rows down. Frankly, it scared the shit out of all of us in the exit row at first, because we certainly weren't expecting anything like that. But we certainly made the best of it.
About 2 seconds after the cart fell over, the old guy across the row from me sprung into action like an elderly spiderman. He whipped his seat belt off and pounced on a champagne bottle on the floor. Just as quickly, he whipped around and asked all of us "Champagne, anyone?" Hell yeah! He manged to fill up 4 of our glasses before the flight attendant LOST HER SHIT and started berating the guy in Icelandic. That made it even funnier, because Icelandic might be the funniest angry language in the world. After her tirade was over, he took a huge swig out of the bottle, smiled, and handed it to her. And she lost her shit again. Classic stuff. And for the record, business class champagne isn't half bad.
So, after all that, I arrived in Keflavik Airport. After another baggage screening (?) was immigration. The only question was "Where are you going?" "Uh...here?" The guy just gave me a strange look and waved me through. Odd.
So, now I'm in the main terminal. Due to my superior research skills, I know that buying booze at the airport duty free is up to 50% cheaper than in Reykjavik itself. How do I know this? A gigantic sign next to the baggage carousels that said "BUY DUTY FREE ALCOHOL HERE! IT IS UP TO 50% CHEAPER THAN IN THE CITY!"
I told you I was smart, folks.
My major problem was that I had only brought my daypack for the trip, and had no room to store much alcohol. Carrying a boatload of booze in a bag on a public bus is something I don't really enjoy, so I just bought a 6 pack of tallies for 880 kroner (7.75 or so), and went on my merry way. Until I came across another customs lineup. And an awesome conversation.
Customs guy - "You have duty free?"
Me: "Yes, a 6 pack of beer."
Him: "How long you here?"
Me: "6 days?"
Him: "1 beer a day does not sound fun."
Me: "Huh?"
Him: "You're allowed to buy as much beer as you want. Only 6? Only 6 is a waste!"
Me: *laughing* "I agree, I just don't want to carry 48 on the bus. It'll look strange. I can just buy more in town".
Him: "This is Iceland! Alcohol on the bus is okay! You better find a bank before you go to beer store in town. Very expensive."
Me: "How bad can it be?"
Him: "Have fun being not drunk!"
After that guy, I had to have my bag screened AGAIN for some reason, then I was finally free and clear. Finally, officially in Iceland. The absolute first woman I see after clearing all that was the chick who sold me my bus ticket into town, and she was unbelievably gorgeous (and not hairy). I wish I could have somehow taken a picture, because she was beyond words. Straight up supermodel. Selling bus tickets. I officially loved Iceland 30 seconds after I officially get there.
The busride in was...interesting. Most people would probably say that the landscape was ugly as hell. I didn't think it was ugly, just very odd. Barren, rocky...it looked like someone had taken a backhoe to the entire countryside. Apparently Iceland is the closest approximation to the moon's surface that you'll find on earth. Now I know why. Every so often there was steam rising from a small hill or mountain, which was a product of the geothermal activity Iceland is full of. Eventually the road gets to the coastline, which makes it even more odd. One side is brightly-coloured waterfront houses along a very cool rocky coastline...and the other side of the street is complete desolation and molten rock. Certainly a unique introduction, completely unlike anything I had ever seen before.
After changing buses and making it to the hotel, it was about 9am Icelandic time, or 2am Vancouver time. I was super excited to go exploring, so I did just that. I quickly realized something though - there were no people. Anywhere. I walked all over the damn place for 2 hours, and I saw a grand total of 2 people. No stores were open. No cars were on the road. Nothing. I was starving, and couldn't find anywhere open to get food. Not one store open, anywhere. So I went back to the hotel to ask some serious questions about why Iceland was fucking abandoned.
Turns out I got there on the tail end of Verslunarmannahelgi. Yes, that's actually a word. It means something close to "Labor Day Weekend". Apparently the entire country shuts down and everyone goes camping in "the islands" and they party. EVERYONE. The hotel lady (not hot, not hairy either though) told me everything would be back to normal in 2 days. But she said for those 2 days, I was basically fucked in terms of close restaurants and such. Greaaaaat.
At least I knew what was going on now. I went back to my room and brought up a (not-so) trusty google map. I realized then that I had severely underestimated Reykjavik. This hotel was a little further out than I had anticipated, and a combination of Reykjavik's circular streets and my terrible sense of direction meant that finding downtown was going to be pretty tough for me.
I asked about the bus, but she said it was running on a severely limited schedule. Plus, just look at that word for labor day weekend. Words that long are the norm for Icelandic. Trying to figure ANYTHING out was fucking difficult, especially bus signs. I was actually taking pictures of street signs so I could refer back to them if/when I got lost, because they were impossible to remember. I'm an Icelandic failure, what can I say?
I was also a sweaty pig from all this walking, so it was shower time. Right away, I could tell something was off about the shower. At first I thought it was me, but it turns out that the water smells like ass. If any of you have ever been to a hot spring (or Rotorua, New Zealand), you know that hot spring water smells like rotten eggs. Well, Icelandic water is all natural spring water, so...you do the math. Yes, all the water, including the tap water you brush your teeth with, smells like ass. Always enjoyable.
After getting clean but not feeling clean, I decided that I was going to go to the Kringlan. It's a huge mall about 3km from my hotel. It was also across the street from the hotel Jess and I had booked for the 4 days following, so scouting the neighbourhood seemed smart. Plus, it was a mall. It had to have something open, right?
Wrong. The entire mall was deserted. Every store between my hotel and the mall was deserted. And there were no people. Quite the introduction to Iceland. On top of that, I couldn't find our new hotel, even though google maps clearly identified where it was. Weird.
On the way back, I decided to just cut through the residential area and hopefully run into someone who could direct me to the gas station that hotel lady told me about. I was going to get lost anyway, so why not try? It actually worked out, and a nice lady directed me to the first meal I had eaten in a loooong time. Gas station sandwiches and pringles never tasted so good. They also sold beer, so I grabbed a few to compliment my 6 at the hotel, and went back there a happy man. For a while, anyway.
I did make the usual European shopping mistakes though. I learned this from my first trip in 2004, but it had been a while, and I epically failed on both counts:
Rule 1 - Sandwich packaging lies about ingredients. It will list 2 or 3, and leave out the other 9 that are actually on the sandwich. One of these unlisted ingredients is always some sort of disgusting sauce. All sandwiches taste bad in Europe, so don't buy them. Never forget this.
Rule 2 - Carbonated water. For some reason, Europeans loooove carbonated water, and they're terrible about labeling which bottles are carbonated and which aren't. I fucking hate carbonated water. Guess which one I bought.
My hotel room was really nice. Spacious, cool furnishings, comfy bed, etc. I was worn out, so I figured a couple beers and some Icelandic TV sounded interesting. As I said in my NZ blogs, I'm a sucker for foreign TV for some reason. It almost always sucks, but it's interesting to see how badly they rip off American TV. In Iceland's case, it...was stranger than I expected. BBC News, 4 channels in english with Icelandic subtitles, and the strangest music channel I've ever seen. Here's a pic of the screen that displayed all the time:
All that comfort turned out to be a bad idea though, because around 4pm, I passed the fuck out. And woke up around 10:30pm. It was still light out, so I went for a walk to attempt to watch the sunset. Cloudy. No dice. It got dark around midnight, so I went back and vegged. Drank my remaining duty free beers and started on the gas station ones. These new ones tasted pretty bland, but whatever, they were cheap. I was chuckling to myself about how wrong/stupid the customs guy was about the "expensive beer in town", when I read the can and realized how wrong/stupid I was.
2.3 percent. Low-alky beer. Blah.
Turns out they can sell this shit anywhere and it's super-cheap because it's pretty much impossible to get drunk off of. So, now not only was I very bored in an abandoned city, I was also drinking the equivalent of O'Douls unknowingly. FML. After mindlessly playing on the net for a while, I noticed it starting to get light again around 3:30am. So it was light out for 20.5 hours a day and dark for 3.5 in August in Reykjavik. Very cool. Sleep came again not long after that, and day 2 in Iceland was about to begin.
Jess wasn't arriving until 1am, so I had the whole day to myself. My goal was to check into the new hotel and head downtown somehow. As stated above, I knew where the new hotel was because google maps told me. About 3km from the current hotel. I started walking around 10am. It was 8 degrees outside and sunny, which is perfect weather to me (I'm weird). I cut through the suburbs again, and didn't see a single person. Eventually I arrived at where the hotel should be. There were 5 identical apartment buildings there, so I figured one had to be the hotel, right? Nope. I wandered aimlessly around them, and up and down the side streets for a while, trying to find the hotel. No dice.
At this point, I was a little shaken. How can the hotel I pre-paid for no longer exist? Was this some huge Icelandic scam? I would have asked someone for directions, but it should be pretty obvious by now that people were hard to come by. The mall across the street had tumbleweeds rolling through the parking lot. (Well, not really, but it's a fitting description). The only solution I could think of was to walk back to my original hotel and use the internet again.
3km later, and I'm back. And tired of walking. Go to google maps. Hotel is where I just was. What the fuck? You'd think after 2 trips there I'd stop fucking trusting google maps and actually go to the hotel's website, but noooo. Timmy not that smart. I go ask hotel lady. She tells me it's down by the water. Water? What water? I hadn't even seen the water since I got there. Finally, I tell her my story and give her the address, and she laughs and tells me that the street (Borgatun) is nowhere near the Kringlan, and heartily laughs at my story about walking there twice to find it.
Whore.
She draws directions on an actual paper map (something I probably should have considered buying, I dunno, right when I fucking arrived there!), and I head out. For the third time. In the other direction. And guess what? I found the fucking hotel down by the fucking water. It only took 3 hours and 8.5km of walking. Iceland 5, Tim 0.
So, this new hotel has many pros and many cons. The room key was huge and metal, and the door opens towards you, not into the room. The room was fucking tiny, easily 1/3 of the size of my last room. 2 single beds, a small table between them, and a tiny bathroom. But, the hotel had a bar and buffet restaurant, and was across the street from a subway and gas station, 3 doors away from a liquor store, and half a block from the water. I'll take location over comfort any day.
After a nap, I walked along the seabraut (the road along the water) in the direction of downtown, but bailed before I got there. Why? The biggest rainstorm of all time drenched me, that's why. I was repeatedly warned about how crazy Icelandic weather was, but it was the summer! How bad could it be? I didn't want to pack much, so I ignored all good sense and brought a grand total of one hoody and no jacket.
Bad idea, Tim.
My hoody was so wet, it didn't dry for over a day. Yeah. Cold weather + no dryer = wet Tim. You ever had the discomfort of slipping on a soaking-wet hoody whenever you wanted to go anywhere, because it was either that or freeze your balls off in a T-shirt? Welcome to my world. Tim Burke, world traveler extraordinaire.
So far, Iceland had humbled me. Basically, it had kicked the shit out of me. Luckily, things could only go uphill from here, because Jess was due to arrive soon. Looking at his ugly face for a few days certainly wasn't enticing, but at least Iceland would have someone new to beat the tar out of and it might leave me alone. It turned out that was at least partially true. You can tune in for part 2 to hear about our drunken misadventures. Peace out.
