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| The plugs... were different. The doughnuts... were long and braided. The natives... had a slight accent when they spoke English. Beards... were common. I survived... on cafe lattes and fresh, inexpensive gravlax. |
I left Toronto at 9:30PM on Friday. There were no babies on the plane, but I was wedged in the middle of a row between two large men. I hadn't been able to book a seat on the Icelandair web site. I hadn't even been able to get it to acknowledge that I had a reservation. I was relieved when the woman at the airport checked me in at all, too relieved to think anything of it when a look of horror passed over her face and she muttered "maybe I can switch you... no, that won't work." I drank a tiny bottle of scotch, and tried to sleep by slumping over the fold-out tray.
I'd booked a shuttle from the airport to my hotel. These shuttles are timed to meet arriving flights, but I passed a quiet-looking coffee counter, and decided to stop. I would wait for the next shuttle. When I was finished, I walked over to the arrivals board to see how long it would be. The next flight was arriving four hours later. The clerk at the shuttle company counter exchanged my voucher for a ticket, and explained that it would actually be about 4 hours and 45 minutes, as the shuttles didn't leave right away.
There was a taxi queue, for some reason -- I guess the drivers were resigned to things being pretty quiet for a few hours -- and I got into the first, a huge, 8-seat van, and took the $100 ride into the city. The countryside was mostly jagged black rock thinly covered with grass, with the cones of a volcano or two in the distance.
I dropped my bag at the hotel, and went to find another cafe. It was 8 in the morning on a Saturday, and the street I was on was covered in cigarette butts and broken glass. As I sat at the window, orange sweeper trucks passed, a large one on the road and a small one on the sidewalk, and a work crew appeared and sprayed the area with hoses. When I walked out again, the street was immaculate. This is how Reykjavik can be famous for both its drinking and its cleanliness. It's like half the city is covering up the drinking problem of the other half. How it can be famous for both its drinking and its high alcohol prices is still not clear.
It is cheaper than it was. The currency collapsed dramatically in 2008, and since then Iceland has gone from being insanely to merely quite expensive. For a few years before 2008, it was booming. The major banks borrowed heavily to expand, without much actual money in hand beyond the deposits of the tiny Icelandic population. When the credit crisis began, their basic wobbliness was found out, they collapsed, and the entire national economy came to earth like a skydiving manatee that couldn't find the ripcord. At least, this is my understanding; I'm not an expert on financial economics, physics, or manatees, but I think that's basically right.
This is one reason I came to Iceland. Vulture tourism. An economy, other than Canada's, collapses, and I swoop in.
Reykjavik has no old buildings, is mostly concrete and corrugated iron -- some of it rusting -- has more cars per capita than any other city in the world, and has gone through the kind of recession that would have been in the Book of Revelation if St. John had been an economist. But even before you take any of that into account, it's safe, pretty, interesting, and a generally pleasant to be.
I arrived at 2:30AM Toronto time, so I set aside much of the first day to sit quietly with my mouth hanging open and my eyes half-closed. I did visit the Hallgrimskirkja, an enormous concrete church. The Hallgrimskirkja looks oddly like a crumbling Soviet megaproject, maybe one designed by an architect who only got the job because Stalin had had the imaginative ones shot. Appropriately, there was a scandal a while back (or so I read; I don't really follow scandals in Icelandic architecture as closely as I pretend) because it was discovered that low-quality materials had been used in its construction. I took the elevator to the top of the bell tower, and it was hard not to reflect on that during the slow, juddering ride up.
It is, though, a well-camoflauged building: The sky has been almost exactly the same shade of conrete gray since I arrived.
