[Day 1] I am incredibly jetlagged and the sun never sets.
Google says it sets at midnight, and rises at 3am.
My eyes say otherwise.

[General Thoughts]
ICELAND IS INCREDIBLE. IT’S LIKE THE DISNEYLAND OF ROADTRIPS.
If you’ve ever driven the petrified forest in in Arizona, it’s like that, but so much more massive.

Iceland is not a party country. Reykjavik is the best you get, and they’ve got some great bars (open til 1 on school nights, 3 on weekends, and during the summer when the sun never sets, people keep going), but you’re going to run up such a tab drinking 16 dollar beers, it’s just not worth it. As for us nerdy ecotourists who want to see geological marvels and charismastic puffins, this place has it all.

Upon landing at the international airport, first built by the Americans during WW2, one gets the sense that one has landed on the moon, if the moon had just a little bit more grass. It’s spring, so there are tons of yellow and purple wildflowers, but mostly we are looking at a flat landscape of volcanic rock, scraped away by receding glaciers from 10k years ago. Geologically speaking, the Ice-island is only a couple tens of millions years old, a produce of recent volcanic activity and massive pleistocene glacial forces. The people here, responsible for our romanticized stories of Viking adventures (mostly recorded in the 14th century), give the false sense of a vibrant mythical christian age of heros and great families at war, when in reality what we really have is a sparsely populated land of farmers who experienced a chiliastic conversion to Christianity at 1000 AD, and subsequently wrote some very exciting stories about the feuds between their families.

In Iceland, everyone can trace their family history back to these farmer-settlers of the 10th century using the database at “Iceland Book” –> https://www.islendingabok.is/

Downtown Reykjavik has been streamlined for tourism. One cannot walk a block without being informed of the country’s mascot: the handsome toddling puffin. Other stores attempt to make a claim on the polar bear, but there are no polar bears indigenous to Iceland, except for an occasional visitor hitchhiking (somehow – incredibly) from the soon-to-be 51st state of America, Greenland. Nothing in any restaurant costs less than 8 dollars, and most dinner items cost about 40 dollars, a lesson harshly learned at the airport before I looked up currency conversion rates (my food budget is $65 per diem, so roughy 8,000 krona). Except for eating a few local specialties (a lamb soup, a seafood chowder, and a fermented shark), I intend to limit most my meals to the local marts.

Like all people in these Nordic countries: everyone is super cute. One unfortunate (yet understandable) tendency is the over-reliance on massive amounts of bronzer to effect the illusion of being tan, an unexpectedly Trumpian trend in aesthetics. Still, it is not nearly as off-putting as the trend in Asia to wear fake colored contacts, which are super creepy.

Thoughts on Sagas: considered one of the highest examples of western literature, the Islandic sagas are voluminous and the source of much, much inspiration. When one thinks of how much was built upon the foundation of the sagas (Game of Thrones, in part), it is easy to forget that these epic tales of violence, power, intrigue, law, honor, etc., etc., etc., were all written about a very, very small population of shitkicking farmers alone on an island with nothing to do except hate one another and, centuries later, write about it. These guys lived subsistence-farming lives, unenviable bland diets without seasoning, or just rotten stuff. They were probably slightly less filthy because of all the readily available hot springs. They lived in mud-floor huts, sharing a fire with their families, their slaves, and their animals, all in one long room. The fished in insanely undercrafted boats with clothes that were hardly waterproof in seas that (having seen them myself) would drown strong swimmers. The idea these people managed to forge metal into weapons, spears, swords and whatnot is an incredible feat, and no doubt established the bearer is a big man in this society, which is exactly the sort of stuff we hear about in this Sagas. The sagas, mind you, were written by the winners of course, so it does one well to keep in mind that the voice of the narrator is always the antagonist, who also lives in a mud hut with a grass roof in a land that is frozen yearround and dark half the year: they hero they’d have you imagine never existed. That wonderful gap between what we historically, anthropologically, and archaeologically know about the 9th-13th century Icelanders, and the stories they tell about themselves is, for me, the real delight of hearing the sagas. They’re wonderful imaginative stories full of deception, magic, and and intrigue, sure, but better yet, these stories are told by the most unreliable narrators.

GEOLOGY HOLY GEOLOGY: Iceland is a geological masterpiece, if you’re into new rock. Everywhere you go there’s another volcano. Floodplain after floodplain has been plastered over by a meters-thick lava flow, preventing the growth of any rooting plant (just small shrubs and lichen grow in strange, goopy, bubbly formations, we presume, for the next 100,000 years until they do their part in breaking down the rock into loam suitable for the ventures of deeper-rooted plants. Other areas, the lava flow has broken into sharp, jagged edges, and sheep roam the grottos eating the shallow rooted grass. It is strange to remember that Iceland is a young island, surfacing just 18 million years ago, spewed up from volcanos erupting from the diverging plates of North America and Europe. All this stuff that looks so prehistoric, so perfect for all things Jurassic Park is in fact much, much younger. No dinosaur ever roamed what seems to be this ideal place (they’d been dead for 40+ million years), and–stranger still–this island was devoid of human beings until a thousand years ago. On a geological scale: a baby island; on a human scale: a baby civilization; on a modern scale: a tiny country; on a capitalist scale: a tiny economy; on an anthropocene scale: pretty sustainable; on an evolutionary scale: 20 million years of life has led us to this land of seals and whales and puffins.

Trolls. Hot Dogs. Puffins. Rock Piles. Fairies. Sagas. Volcanos. Whales. Seals. Glaciers. Midnight sun. Fjords. Hatred of Norwegians. Corrugated aluminum. Windy. Turf homes.

Volcanoes are chaos. You don’t get that much mobility of that much immobile stuff in such a short period of time and have predicable outcomes. You only have incredible outcomes. Lava churches, etc.

TV Show about Iceland from 2015

The EARTH is thin here. Thin and young. The water is heated by lava. The mud, sulfurous, probably radioactive, is considered healthful. Hot lakes so blue they seem to be self-illuminated, emanating blue.

Glaciers are 10 to a few 100 thousand years old in scale. These are the landscrapers of iceland. The receding glaciers of the pleistocene did not simply melt away. They did not recede gently. As they receded they ripped, clawed, tore, pulverized, gouged the landscape, humbling mountains and dragging gigatosn of rock kilometers into the sea, leaving mountains fully torn up, wounded, raw, bleeding bright mineral strata into the valleys below.

The GOOD and the BAD.
The Bad.
The food prices are terrible. It’s like you’re eating every meal at the airport, or at the baseball stadium. A coke is 8 dollars. A beer is 16 dollars. A hotdog is 10 dollars. A square meal is 40 dollars. It’s not much better in the supermarkets either, where fresh vegetables cost an arm and a leg.
Worst of all, the quality of the food you purchase at these prices is also about as good as an airport, or a baseball stadium.

The good news is no one comes here for the food. Not even Anthony Bourdain went to Iceland. Nevermind! He did (No Reservations). OK but you could really miss me with Icelandic food. They tout their soup, which is soup. Their fermented shark, which is so tasty it is meant to be served with a strong spirit to chase. And they are oddly very proud of their hot dogs, which tend towards sweeter and less flavorful than the version that is the National Food of America. We rock them at the hot dog.