Back To Life, Back To Reality

We returned home to the Netherlands today.

It was a rude awakening; literally. Icelandair have this repugnant policy of making their Amsterdam flights — all of them — take off at 07:50. There’s simply no other option.

Keflavík airport is a good long way from Reykjavík and would be prohibitively expensive by taxi, so that necessitates taking the bus. It’s never that simple, of course. One is first picked up at one’s hotel by a minibus, which takes you to the BSI bus terminal. From there, you and your luggage are offloaded onto a coach, which makes the trip to Keflavík via Hafnarfjöður.

The upshot of all of this is a 04:30 wake-up call for a 05:00 minibus pick-up. You can only imagine how much fun this is, especially with a dozy toddler who — like the rest of us — wants nothing better than to keep sleeping.

Seriously, if there were a reason to boycott Iceland, the national airline’s inhumane timetable is a compelling one.

But enough of that.

Our last day in Reykjavík was spent very lazily. The weather was lovely, more of the clarity and sunshine we’d enjoyed on Sunday. I can’t believe how little rain we had on this trip. It all came on the first two days in the capital at the very start of the trip.

After breakfast in the deserted nightclub ambience of Café Oliver, we completed the considerable bureaucracy of filling in our tax refund forms and collecting the monies due to us.

The rest of the day is already somewhat of a blur. Sarah and Eloïse went back to the hotel at one point and I went on a whistle-stop tour of my favourite 101 areas to take some photographs.

After picking the girls up at the hotel, we went to Kaffitár for coffee and cake and ended up killing a lot of time there. I’ve been a bit mean about Kaffitár recently, calling it a bit like Starbucks, but the coffee is 1000% better. Their Da Vinci and Jöklakaffi coffees are especially good and the cakes are tasty, too, but not as good as at Mokka.

We then spent some time at the hotel before enjoying a simple dinner at Hressó. Afterwards, I went to buy a final couple of CDs, plus a photography book by Sigurgeir Sigurjónsson, an Icelandic photographer whose work I really admire.

Sarah had done most of the packing, so there wasn’t much else left to do except try to get a few hours of sleep before the dreaded early morning haul back to Amsterdam.

We made it back to the house around 13:00, with just enough time to dump the bags and get Eloïse ready for peuterspeelzaal. Amsterdam is a balmy 12° and feels very warm after Reykjavík.

It’s nice to be home, in the sense that we have a lovely home and it’s full of familiar things. However, transport that same home to Reykjavík and I’d have been happy to stay. With its vibrant music and café scene, absence of crowding, beautiful women and beautiful nature just beyond one’s doorstep, it’s a uniquely appealing place.

I really must dig in and learn some Icelandic. I can understand more written Icelandic after every trip, but decoding the verbal language is still a non-starter. I watch acrobats and contortionists with the same admiration I have for native speakers of the Icelandic language. They make sounds with their mouth that just don’t sound possible for a normal human-being.

It’s intriguing to ponder what might have happened if I’d been able to afford a trip to Iceland back in my early twenties, instead of a trip to Amsterdam. I might easily have ended up falling in love with the country, staying, finding a job, meeting a girl, etc. One small decision that I might easily have made would have sent my life down a completely different path to the one I actually took.

It’s disconcerting to realise how much of one’s life is due to chance. Most of everything I hold dear today is the result of mostly arbitrary decisions with far-reaching, but unforeseen consequences. It makes one stop to ponder the infinite number of alternate scenarios one could so easily, yet equally unwittingly, have set in motion.

Given that knowledge, that life could have had a million different faces, how can one ever know that the path one chose was the right one? Belief in such a concept is flawed, of course. Just as I am today unaware of other blissful or agonising futures that I could have catalysed, transposed into those futures, I would be equally ignorant of the things I hold dear to me in the life I lead today.

The freedom to ponder such things is perhaps what sets apart my generation and those after mine from those of our predecessors. Not so long ago, most people didn’t question the purpose or destination of their life; they simply fell in line with what was mapped out for them by their family, environment, social status, etc.

Today, however, we have more freedom than ever before to create the life we want for ourselves. From my perspective, it just takes imagination, courage, a sense of romance (with life as well as people), a certain amount of recklessness, an appreciation of the poetry and beauty in things, the absence of a close family and circle of friends, and — perhaps most importantly — the inability to attain a lasting sense of purpose.

Given those ingredients, drifting and dreaming is a natural state of existence. It makes for an interesting life, though at times an anything but enviable one. Sometimes I envy the boys and girls from the village who went to school, became postmen and shop assistants, married each other, bought a house in the village and had children that they sent to the village school.

Clarity of purpose is an enviable quality for one who has rarely sensed any, though in some ways I am perhaps now closer than at any other point in the last 20 years.

Still, it continues to prickle my senses to fantasise about just one of my other lives in those innumerable parallel universes, where I speak fluent Icelandic to my Icelandic children, girlfriend and friends, play in a couple of bands, write for the local newspaper, pen fiction for a hobby, etc.

It could have happened, I tell you.