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

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, descending squarely into the uncanny valley of androids aesthetics.