‘Why Iceland?’
It’s been four years since I lived on Bergþórugata, in the timber apartment in the red building. I would take sulfur scented showers before hosting potluck dinners for my fellow exchange students, sometimes drinking one too many Egils Pilsners and burning the rice. 101 Reykjavík saw me through perpetual darkness and relentless light, but I still haven’t worked out a satisfying answer to that most common question: ‘Why Iceland?’
Well… let me put it like this. We were walking down Skólavörðustígur one cold November day, when we stumbled across John Grant singing in a hair salon. He was belting out tunes from atop a flight of stairs, while a young woman ladled out hot chocolate from a silver vat. We sipped our drinks, enjoyed the sounds, then left to buy onions from across the road. That night, we went to a house party. By midnight we were on the roof, feet dangling off the edge, facing a dilapidated sex shop, craning our necks to watch the northern lights dance.
The other night I was feeling nostalgic, so I took a walk around town using Google Maps. I started at my old front door, and, as I was hungry, I headed straight for Vitabar, a simple pub up the road. The dimly lit, diner-esque space has the potential to make us feel like one of Hopper’s women (and I once performed the Nighthawks’ female part as groundwork for role play), but I always had company – their burgers were that good. We would swap the change in our pockets for no nonsense service and a blue cheese burger, with fries drenched in Thousand Island dressing.
After idling in front of Vitabar, I clicked my way to the best New York cheesecake. Café Babalú was my go-to for desserts, board games and red wine. With an exterior painted the colour of a ripe persimmon, and cartoonish drawings all over, it’s hard to miss this one. I used to hog one of their mismatched seats for hours, working on assignments with creeping deadlines, while discoloured maps and kitschy wall art stared down on my sleepy face. I remember one of the waitresses, an ex Erasmus student, who still wore her logoed exchange student apparel. She just ended up staying. I used to think, ‘Fair enough.’
From here, it’s just another quick walk to the most deserving coffee house, so I click click click my way to Baldursgata 26. I first heard of Puffin Coffee when my friend rushed into our room and announced FREE COFFEE! like a fundraiser banner. Basically, it’s a house, and there’s a low window, and there’s an altruistic cyclist who will hand you free coffee through that low window. In exchange for lovingly made coffee, he asks that you donate however much you’d like to a charity called Ambitious about Autism – his best friend’s son is autistic.
I was beginning to cross the line into over-sentimentality, so I made one last visit on Maps before exiting the browser. 12 Tónar, the record shop that is also a record label, was one of my favourite spots to mong out in after a big night. It holds a quiet basement downstairs, equipped with couches, archaic CD players and paper cups of coffee. We would try out albums on these machines, closing our eyes, backs sliding down. This is the place that let me hide a liberty bonds box from 1918 behind their counter. I chose 12 Tonar as the ‘X’ of the treasure hunt because of the many hours we had spent in its basement, discovering great bands like Samaris and My Summer as a Salvation Soldier. Iceland spits out artists like watermelon seeds.
Looking back, I remember that despite its colourful, toy-like houses, and its hip creative hubs, eventually Reykjavík became just another city. I loved it, but I got used to it – it became my home. Of course there were the winter nights in the beachside hot tub, where we’d soak up the heat before running out to sea, bare feet stinging in the snow and ice, jumping into the 5 degree water. There was the night we sat on the floor in an intimate art gallery, listening to Amiina create music with a saw. Skinny dipping off a wharf, cutting my hands on the rusty ladder, on a high from the summer’s midnight sun, and skimming through Bókin, the used book store, only to come across nothing I could understand.
There were times like those, when everything felt so new and exciting, but after a few months, my holiday became my life. I grew annoyed at the streets lathered in ice, making the walk to campus a hazardous undertaking. Classes were confusing, especially ‘How Language Works 1: Sound and Word’, and after class I went to work in a bistro, getting confused between coq au vin and boeuf bourguignon, even though one was chicken and the latter beef. I felt lonely and drank more wine, I washed our sheets and hung them across the chairs to dry, my boyfriend and I fell apart, I scrubbed the toilet with bleach.
When we got bored or wanted to leave the familiar, we skipped classes and rented cars. Iceland is pretty simple to explore – it has just one main road, the Ring Road, which circles the entire island. Within half an hour of buckling your seat belts you’ll be thrown out in the wild, driving past mountains that look like they’ve been sketched with blue biro pens, and lumpy lava fields camouflaged in green moss. We searched for Grjótagjá, the fissure hiding an otherworldly, geothermally heated spring, and left with lobster coloured legs. We followed our instinct (and maps) and found ice caves, hot rivers, private waterfalls and wolf tracks.
This one time we made it to Jökulsárlón, the glacial lake, after sundown. I was initially disappointed by the lack of light, but we ran down the hill until the water lapped at our boots, and we stared at the ice, translucent grey and blue, and I knew I would never see anything like it again. It was, as the Icelandic philosopher Páll Skúlason would have said, a sublime moment. Not being a thinker of any kind, I said ‘Hoooly shiiit’ – but it was a gorgeous experience all the same. At night we parked behind a small hill, ate canned corn, and made out to keep warm.
So. Why Iceland? But you get it now. If not, I’ll have to go back – back to the penpal I had as a kid; the man with no face. I’ll need to tell you about the boy I fell in love with, the boy who showed me film photographs, and my cousin, the pilates instructor, who hula hooped on black sand, by basalt columns, many years ago.
But no, you get it.
