Iceland

So I have had a bit of a hiccup here, namely that due to inadequate planning, lack of energy, and the peculiarities of solo travel, I have run out of things to do in Reykjavik.  Fortunately, there is a bookstore near my hotel with a cafe, so I am having Iceland Bookstore Cafe Experience, which turns out to be different from New York City Cafe Experience in the following (rather revealing, I think) ways:

1. The cafe has better, or at least more attractive, food, and people are eating more of it.  The food is very expensive, like at a restaurant. I totally fail to understand how Americans are supposedly the fattest people on planet when we have far and away the worst food on the planet.
2. It is basically silent.  There are six other people here, filling about 40% of the tables.  Each of them is alone, reading a book or books and sipping a beverage or nibbling a dessert.  There was a pair of women, but they left.  A couple has just arrived; they are reading together, which you never see in American bookstore cafes, probably because so few Americans read that the likelihood of two of them mating is basically zero.  There are no children (I have seen very few children in Reykjavik).  There is no line for tables.  I have no idea what time this place closes, but I can probably sit here until then without anybody disturbing me. 
3. I was given a cup and saucer.  I was not asked if I want my coffee to go.  I do not think they have "to go" here.
4. The bookstore in general is different.  Like all the bookstores that are not used-bookstores here, it is more of a college-style bookstore, meaning the basement (it is typically the basement) has non-literary items - things you'd find in a Barnes & Noble like stationary, but also a few souvenirs, postcards, toys, a few housewares.
5. Perhaps the sharpest contrast with American cafes is the barrista seemed totally without resentment at having to serve coffee to an American. 

Anyway, that is enough snide commentary about America, which after all I do belong to.

So yesterday, my first day in Reykjavik, I availed myself of the breakfast at the hotel and then began to explore the city.  Since it was a Sunday, everything was completely closed-up at first.  But I saw lots of interesting architecture (and took pictures of most of it) and looked in the windows of galleries and shops.  I went to an art museum and took a long walk to the other side of the city to visit the botanical gardens.  Then, after a short rest, I embarked on the Golden Circle Evening Tour, a 5-hour bus tour of the basic natural wonders in the vicinity of Reykjavik.  Unfortunately, I was very tired on this tour, and could not buy any coffee before we set out because of the absence of takeaway cups in this city and also the fact that I had been unable to obtain the local currency - ATMs were behind the locked doors or screens of banks, and money-changing places were either closed or uninterested in my sad American dollars.

Since I was out and about for about thirteen hours yesterday (from 10:30 a.m. until 1:30 a.m. with a two-hour break) it is unsurprising that when the extremely bright light and various noises woke me up this morning shortly after 8, I was not exactly raring to go explore.  There are many museums I still had not and have not seen, i.e. the National Museum, etc., but it seemed like too much work to (a) plan how to get to them, and (b) sustain interest in them.  Also, the art gallery I went to yesterday was supposed to be among the biggest and best in the city and, while interesting, it was neither large nor impressive, so I was feeling like museums were not a strength of the city.

So, I wandered around.  I went to the wharf, which I missed yesterday, and shopped a bit.  I concluded that there is no "real downtown"; the half-mile strip of bars and souvenir shops and galleries (which is the word they use for upscale souvenir shops selling wool clothes, art, and jewelry at prices that would be high in New York) with a block of banks at one end is basically it.  This wasn't too surprising once I figured it out since it's a city of only 200,000 and tourism is one of its primary industries.  I went into the public library, in which the books were in unexpectedly good condition.  I stumbled upon the museum I had been most interested in, the Settlement Museum, which is an archeological excavation of a longhouse.  It was very well done; I'm also partial to excavation museums because unlike other history museums they have something you find in a book.

I went into a few bookstores and other shops.  I saw a couple that had come in on the same flight as me and who I also saw yesterday, and the mother and daughter of an American family from the trip last night (they are also going to Paris, judging from the fact that the mother was reading a Paris guidebook - one of the admittedly many I have brought along but not read - on the tour, so maybe I will see them there as well... maybe I will also run into the two French women, who seemed more like the type of people I would want to run into).  I was cold - I'd been cold the entire time I was here, especially on the bus trip, because I was trying to pack light and planning mostly for the weather in Paris - but didn't want to spend $100 on a beautiful but stiff wool scarf.  I went into a store called Tiger, which turned out to be a Danish discount store, and walked out with a pretty lavendar scarf, dead sea foot lotion, Danish hand lotion (although I have infinite sunscreen, I brought only hotel-size moisturizing lotions due to not having travel-appropriate bottles and figuring I'd find something interesting on the trip, which I now have), and hard candies with coffee on the inside for a total of $16.

Feeling tired, I went back to the hotel, where I had a short nap and finished the book I'd been reading.  I found Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name on the discount table at Barnes & Noble; it's a fast, good read although not a terribly likeable protagonist.  I chose it because it takes place in Lapland in winter, which I thought was a nice counterpoint to Iceland in summer.  I had wanted to finish it today because (a) it is the end of my stay in Iceland, and (b) I had seen a couple of used-book stores and figured one of them would take it off my hands.  In fact, the first store I went into was literally overflowing with books; they were stacked to shoulder height on every available surface, including the floor, in both English and Icelandic (and possibly some other languages), and without any apparent organizing principle.  The second store was a little more sedate; after some confusion, the owner took my book and gave me a new one for half price, which turned out to be 100 kroners.

Money is weird here.  Judging from my ATM withdrawal, 100 kroners is almost exactly 75 cents, which means the full price for a used trade paperback is $1.50.  The cup of coffee I just bought, on the other hand, was the equivalent of around $2.70.  Groceries are cheap, at least in comparison to New York (fruits and vegetables on the other hand, seem to be basically nonexistent), the discount store was cheap, but postcards are 70 kroners each and other touristy merchandise is even more inflated.  Perhaps it is cheap to live here and expensive to be a tourist.

After trading in my book, I wondered around a bit more.  There wasn't really time to go to another museum before they all closed.  I want back to the Hallgrimskirkja, the modern church I took pictures of yesterday.  Since it wasn't Sunday, I was able to go inside; I also heard the organist practicing.  I walked beyond the church, into the residential area.  It seemed deserted.  I bought a hot dog - supposedly a local delicacy, it contains lamb and has at least three different sauces and two different kinds of onions.  I watched people at an outdoor cafe.  I had already done everything I could remember reading about in Reykjavik.  So I went back to the hotel, got my netbook, and here I am.

It would perhaps have been better to have booked a second bus trip for today, or to have slept more yesterday so I would have been more alert for the first trip, but I didn't really realize that the point of coming to Reykjavik was to take excursions, because coming here at all was an afterthought.  A really lucky afterthought, actually, and although I don't know that I would come back here again - I've seen the most accessible things already - I now realize how super-cool this part of the world is, and perhaps someday I will take a properly planned trip to somewhere else in Northern Europe.


Addendum:  The other thing I did not do was go to the Blue Lagoon (basically, because I decided it was only interesting enough to do if I ran out of other stuff, and then when I ran out of other stuff I forgot about the Blue Lagoon until just now, which shows you how enthusiastic I was), which as far as I can tell is a massively overhyped and overpriced tourist attraction catering to old people and rich people and large groups and very bad for someone like me, although the concept of a hot spring does sound nice.  Oh, well.

Second addendum: The other thing couple seem to like to do in coffee shops here - I've seen it several times - is just sit over a cup of coffee.  Just sit, without talking.  Smoking, maybe, if they're outside.  But mostly staring off into space.  Thinking their own private thoughts, I guess, and being European.