Day One

You will notice I just posted a test post.  That was me testing whether Picasa and Blogger can be friends, and it turns out they can.  So I have now posted an album of pictures I took on the way from the airport to my hotel in Reykjavik.  I may add captions to them, but they are mostly pretty boring.  This is not the fault of the landscape, and it is not really the fault of me either; it is the fault of poor lighting conditions (although, quite good lighting for 1 in the morning) and a moving vehicle.  However I figure if I set a precedent of only posting interesting photos, I will (1) lose the backing-up benefit, and (2) spend so much time editing my albums that they don't get posted.  I am trying to keep a trip journal here, and if I waste too much time making it polished I will just fall asleep and not do it.

So here I am in Reykjavik.  Comments:

• Of course I got to the airport hours and hours too early.  This is better than getting to the airport late, which seems to be the only other option.
• I bought jerky, which I had never had before.  This turns out to be mighty filling and takes forever to eat, which is good since it is all I had for lunch and dinner aside from a couple granola bars.
• There were movies on the plane.  Yay.
• From my (extremely cursory) observations of people from Iceland, i.e. the stewardesses, people in the airport, and people on the bus from the airport, they tend to be highly assertive.  Not aggressive like New Yorkers are.  They do not cut in front of you in line because they think their time is more valuable than yours; they do it because you are more than 1.5 inches away from the person in front of you and less than six and a half feet tall, so they either don't see you or don't notice you are in line (at least this is my impression).  This is also the motive for them leaving you behind at a mostly-deserted bus station in the middle of the night.  Fortunately, it seems like they are all very nice.
• Also loud.  Reykjavik is apparently a big party city, and my hotel, which is in the middle of the historic sightseeing district, is also in the middle of the party district.  It is nearly 3 a.m. here and they are still at it.  They wear a lot of metallics here; it looks odd, perhaps because it's both cold and semi-light.  It's also weird to see the party scene and the narrow-European-street scene juxtaposed, but that's because I'm not used to Europe.
• The quality of the light is very weird.  I am guessing it will be quite bright during the day.  When I got here at midnight it was dreary, like a winter afternoon at 4:30 p.m.  Now it seems to be getting light again.  I think the sun will come up soon.
• I took lots of pictures on the bus; most of them don't look like much.  The landscape was quite variable even over the 30 or so miles covered on the trip.  No trees that I can recall; different varieties of grass and scrubs.  A couple of villages and towns; a couple of factories.  One... well, settlement.  We were near the water the whole time, which I guess is where the civilization is in this country.  It was hard to get a sense of scale; I'd think I was looking at a grassy pond and then see a house, tiny, and realize I was looking at a whole landscape and multiple lakes.  Landmarks in the distance approached closer than I expected.  I wonder if that's because I'm not used to seeing so little in the way of trees or, well, anything, or if it's a trick of the light.  Also, there were these weird stone things, towers a bit away from the road or just lies of stones near the road (although maybe my perspective was off again and they were lines of towers).  I don't know if they were naturally occurring or artificial, and if the latter how old they were.

I think I will not have to worry about jet lag tomorrow so much as plain old tiredness.  With one thing and another I got about five hours of sleep last night, and tonight I will go to bed fairly soon (local time here is 2:50; at home it's not quite 11).  I'm not sure how much the noise will bother me, but I certainly feel tired enough to sleep if it weren't for that.  I'll try to wake up at 9 tomorrow so I can get on a normal schedule and also get the hotel's breakfast (i.e. non-granola-bar food).  Four hours of jet lag is way less than 2/3 as annoying as 6 hours, I think, so this is a good way to break up the trip to Europe.

Random shrieks.  Good to know the drunken-idiot gene transcends continents.


Oh, postscript:  I'm sure I'll have much more to say about the architecture later, but so far I have noticed several distinct styles.  There's the sort of European-apartment style (flatter and more terracey than the equivalently rundown American version), the steeply-pitched roof style that looks like it could been in the Alps, the long-and-low style that looks like, well, longhouses, and then the sort of modern Scandinavian style.  Obviously it is normal to see multiple styles of architecture in the same city, but it catches the attention when they are multiple styles one isn't used to.


Oh, also, another postscript - I have already met a couple of interesting people.  On the plane I sat next to a couple who looked like brother and sister but were actually married; she is Scandinavian and he is American. They were on their way to Stockholm.  Perhaps she is hard of hearing, because they seemed to do a significant amount of communication in what looked like sign language.  They were hipster bohemian vegetarians who carried reusable grocery bags from Whole Foods instead of luggage, and the man used his iphone to send emails - in flagrant violation of many, may rules - throughout the flight.  Also, another passenger on the plane was an American from California; he told me a good chunk of his life story while we were waiting to go through security after landing (they confiscated our liquids, but didn't even require us to go through customs or ask any questions at passport control).  He dropped out of med school to study theater and has since then spent much of his life travelling.  In the 1980's he hitchhiked around the West Coast (he volunteered his age as 51); he made references to the Grateful Dead, LSD, and friends dying of AIDS.  Now he is on his way to Amsterdam, where he will rent a bike and travel until his money runs out.  It seems like there is a class of perpetual travelers that I tend to meet wherever I go.