Travel to Iceland
First Time Visiting Iceland
The four of us were visiting Iceland for the first time. We arrive in the capital Reykjavik, Iceland, the morning after a night of plane slumbering. No one could say for sure how long we had slept. Two hours? I guessed. But I tend to be liberal in such assumptions. When the bus from the airport took us to a taxi, our brains were functioning at the level of day four of a five-day music festival. I hurried to complete freelance work on my laptop using the bus’s WIFI and fell asleep right after clicking the send button. The taxi from the bus station took us to an Air BnB that Candice had rented, a bungalow style room in the back yard of a building a street below the Dómkirkjan Cathedral.
My dream of sleep was pervading, but the reality in front of my prompted me to fetch my camera and take a picture of it. The prospect of Instragram makes us do laborious things.
The bungalow was cozy. We had a small victory early on in discovering how the couch turned into a pullout bed. The blankets were warm and some now forgotten small chat was exchanged before the four of us drifted into luxurious sleep.
We awoke and ate peanut butter on tortillas, necessary packing food for the tortillas flatness and for the peanut butter’s deliciousness. Our bodies’ clocks suspected our sleep had come at the wrong time, but we arose with resolve and prodded out into the town. We did not visit iceland to sleep. At our first stop we tried and failed to like fermented shark meat at Café Loki across from the cathedral. It tastes like something you never want to taste again. Try it once and we can both nod in agreement about that.
In town we situated ourselves and planned a trip to the Penis Museum (officially known as the Icelandic Phallological Museum) the next day. Ladies selling beads in the street directed us to a grocery store. Inside the grocery store we marveled at how expensive everything was.
Carrying our groceries back to the bungalow, we all agreed to be productive and accomplish many things the next day. Simultaneously, we plotted against that by planning on being bacchanalian that evening — our timeless tango between sun and moon. We had come prepared, armed with duty-free alcohol, since a bottle of beer in Iceland costs as much as a baby goat in Kenya.
I had rum and whiskey. Shawn had rum. Candice and Steffe had wine. Drinking songs were sung. The guitar was invited out that night. Writing about this, now a few months after the fact, I cannot be relied upon to give a completely accurate description of the night. I do know that in the beginning, I stood on one leg and played “Rambling Rover” in the street.
Our first bar was The Celtic Cross, which would become a reliable home base for the rest of my stay in Iceland. Within a short time of walking in, we were ordered a round of Brennan liquor, the kind they eat with sharks. Three men were admitted into the wolf pack. Admittance into the wolf pack is arbitrary. I roll on any given night ten Guatemalan friendship bracelets deep, and I give them to people and say, “You’re in the Wolf Pack.”
Sometimes, as it was at the Celtic Cross, this is taken very seriously. The man who had ordered us the shots was very upset when I gave one of the other men later on a Wolf Pack bracelet. “You cannot just let anyone into the Wolf Pack,” he told me with elan.
Later I would find myself playing guitar with a blind man who could strum like a Maestro. His father was there to cheer us both on with nodding support and elbow prodding encouragement.
From The Cross we followed an Icelandic man, Snuff, whom we had just met, who offered to guide us around to different bars. The Danish Pub was mentioned a lot so I believe we were there. There was also talk of The English Pub. There was talk of many pubs and Bar 11.
“We have a saying in Iceland,” Snuff would say. “Let’s get drunk.”
Snuff would command us to hold out our hands so he could put a dabble of his mint snuff on our hand. Then he would say as dramatic as he had delivered it the last time, “We have a saying in Iceland.”
The snuff cleared my nasals, then, blocked them. “Let’s get drunk!” He said, so we did. The night continued on until the frog puppet I carried in my man-bag emerged. In the basement of Bar 11 the frog puppet I had purchased on the streets of Nairobi, was dancing to the music. Two dreadlocked men with Heavy Metal T-shirts who told me they played in a heavy metal band cheered the frog puppet on.
They put Green Frog on their hands and said things in Icelandic in a frog voice. Then they tore the frog’s eyes out, tossed him aside, and started making out.
Iceland was truly a world onto itself. People will be mad if I use the term “Fairy Tale Kingdom” to describe anything, so I will not. Elves are real here. And we met the night Green Frog lost his eyes. He took the keys and locked us out of the apartment. The night weaved on various directions. It ended for me in a cab. There was hope that perhaps Steffe or Shawn had arrived before and figured out the “we are locked out of the bungalow” situation. Praise Lucky Charms, Steffe was schooled in the art of breaking into an open window and for the weekend last one had to climb out the window to come and go, just like elves comes and go.
