| After a short stop in Minneapolis/St. Paul, I am facing a mind-numbing eight-hour flight delay in Baltimore because of extreme wind and weather warnings in Keflavík, Iceland.
While it’s hard to understand why I’m spending so much time in the Baltimore airport, it’s just as mind-boggling to determine why I’m heading to Reykjavík for the third week in November. The extreme weather and wind warnings suggest to me that if this isn’t the dead of winter, then it’s certainly the coma of winter for a country on the Arctic Circle.
I’m not sure what to expect when met at the airport by my host Eiríkur Örn Nor_dahl, but the drive to Iceland’s capital (and largest city, boasting 200,000 of Iceland’s 280,000 residents) shattered all of my preconceptions.
Southern Iceland is a black, volcanic plain bordered by the slate-grey of the North Atlantic, and interrupted by lime-green lichen (where Nor_dahl ominously states is the perfect place to dump a dead body) and the robin’s-egg blue of geo-thermal hot pools.
Reykjavík’s style is a mix of St. John’s, Newfoundland and an Ikea showroom — stark, modernist design mixed with bright colours, tin-sheet roofs and narrow streets.
Starving after the seven-hour flight from Balitimore, I was eager to investigate local cuisine, and while I was unable to afford the fabled Puffin dishes, Bædarins Beztu provided what I would consider the best p_lsur (hot-dogs) in the Northern Hemisphere — and strangely affordable in Iceland’s incredibly expensive culture.
A few days after my arrival, I was treated to a trip to the Bláa Lóni_ (the Blue Lagoon) a geo-thermal hot pool about 40 minutes from Reykjavík. The Bláa Lóni_ – surrounded by the Svartsengi geothermal power plant – rises out of the black rock like a mirage from the set of Blade Runner. The milky-blue water vents from the plant at 40 degrees Celsius. It’s an incredibly relaxing, if slightly sulphur-smelling, side-trip from culturally rich Reykjavík. |
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