Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

The alarm went off at 07:30 this morning, not the kind of time I usually like to get up, but we had a ten hour excursion planned for today, so time was of the essence. We couldn’t have picked a better day, since Reykjavík dies a death on Sunday.

Eloïse slept for most of the first phase of the journey, as we headed out of the capital and down along the south coast.

In addition to the sites I mentioned yesterday, our driver was cool enough to take us to the Sólheimajökull glacier, which this particular tour usually only stops at during the summer months. We’d been there before, but it was great to go back and compare it in the winter.

The light on the snow-capped mountains down there was very eery, first with a blueish tint and then a faint orange hue before sunset. The sun barely made a visible appearance, crawling just to a shallow angle above the horizon.

I won’t go into detail on the trip here, so suffice it to say that it was a great day out and Eloïse was a trooper throughout.

Back at the hotel at just after 19:00, there was scarcely time to make dinner reservations and head out the door. Dinner tonight was at Þrír Frakkar, which means Three Frenchmen, named after the former owners. Yet again, it was a fabulous restaurant, serving a wide variety of fish dinners in a homely atmosphere. It also serves up puffin breast starters and gigantic whale peppersteaks, neither of which I can (hypocritically) bring myself to eat, but I’m sure they’re delicious.

We were considering another excursion for tomorrow, but Sarah’s pretty knackered, so I think we’ll just lounge around and try to get into the frame of mind that we live here, and try to accurately sense what that would be like. I think we’re actually getting pretty good at that now, with this, our third trip to Iceland.

Incidentally, Iceland is full of Russians at the moment, most of them apparently members of the Russian Orthodox Church. Quite an effort is made by Iceland to attract them for their church’s Christmas, which actually falls on 7th January. This effort has evidently been hugely successful.

You’ve problem heard of the global issue of street children, right?

Well, Iceland has them, too. However, these are not helpless, wee bairns left to fend for themselves in the harsh sub-Arctic climate by their parents; rather, they are quite deliberately left outside the city’s many cafés and shops whilst their parents eat, drink and shop around inside.

You see, here it’s still 1900. Not in the sense that one has to go without any mod cons here: quite the contrary. No, I mean that Iceland apparently has no nutters, no disenfranchised, dispossessed fruitcakes with a need to vent their spleen on the society that (admittedly) created them.

Icelanders enjoy such a high standard of living, that there is seemlingly (perhaps even factually) no serious crime here; and there is certainly no crime involving the kidnapping of children. A host of Icelanders have confirmed this to us.

As a consequence, parents feel quite at ease as they park their prams outside the city’s various establishments, mostly invisible from view inside, and then enter to go about their errand or recreation. Perhaps they still leave their front doors unlocked here, too. What about car doors? I haven’t tried one.

Anyway, “When in Rome…”, as they say, so we’ve also taken to the habit of parking our little girl outside each of the places that we visit. The rucksack and the camera are removed from the pram’s base, because somone might steal them, but a human child? No commercial value, I guess. Try searching eBay for “Icelandic baby”: you won’t find any real ones.

It’s a shame it’s not safe to do this anywhere else in the western world, but that’s the fact of the matter. It just goes to show how civilised this country is, whereas most others are either stuck at barbarism or have already passed civilisation and descended squarely into decadence.

Given the lack of crime, the lack of an army (which means that Iceland has made few enemies abroad), the lack of problems stemming from rampant non-western immigration, and the lack of pollution, one is left pondering the mystery of why one hasn’t yet sold up shop and moved here post haste.

I’m sure there’s a downside, too, but it’s not readily apparent. Time to start reading in detail about Icelandic society, I think.

Eloïse still has diarrhoea, but it doesn’t seem to be affecting her spirits. As a precaution, though, we spent another lazy day in Reykjavík.

Tomorrow, though, we’re off on the South Shore Adventure excursion. We could’ve hired a car and done it solo, but this seems easier this time around, all things considered. Otherwise, we’d have to deal with picking the car up, bringing it back, getting the baby seat installed, etc.

So, it’s an early start tomorrow and a long day ahead, as we take in the Seljalandsfoss and Skógafoss waterfalls, the Reynisdrangar and Dyrhólaey rock formations, and the village of Vík. We’ve been to all of these places before, but are eager to see them again in the midst of the untamed Icelandic winter.

Speaking of winter, it snowed for a good part of the day today. How appropriate for a country with ice in the name. The city took on a new dimension, which only added to its charm. It’s not difficult to tell that I have a great fondness for Reykjavík, is it? If you’ve been here, though, you’ll understand that that fondness is not misplaced and why.

Dinner tonight was at the superlative Tveir Fiskar. It’s a famous Icelandic restaurant, down by the harbour, and the food was quite frankly a gastronomic orgasm. Seriously, I think I’ve just eaten the finest meal I have ever had in Europe. In fact, only Mama’s Fish House on Maui even comes close, but that meal was too long ago to judge objectively against this evening’s. It’s just possible, however, that I’ve just eaten the best meal of my life.

The night sky is ablaze with fireworks as I write this. It’s been a week since the New Year was welcomed in, but not everyone seems to have exhausted their supply of fireworks on that occasion. Having seen photos of the celebrations of New Years gone by, I can only continue to hope that we will one day make it out here in time for New Year, which seems to go off in inimitable style.

Time to get some rest ahead of tomorrow’s early start.

There are far too few places in this world where one can enjoy a candlelit breakfast, whilst watching the sun rise at 11:15. Who the hell needs daylight, anyway?

I bought two albums by Ragnheiður Gröndal today, after listening to them in the very relaxed surroundings of the 12 Tonar record shop on Skólavördustígur. They let you sit down on these big couches, pour you a cup of fabulous espresso, and give you a personal CD player to listen to anything in the shop for as long as you like. If more towns had old-school record shops and service like this, we wouldn’t all be buying on-line at Amazon these days. I just wish I had more time to hang out there, but with a little girl in tow…

We spent a king’s ransom at 66° North today, but Eloïse now has a very nice jumpsuit as a result. The shop has moved since the last time we were here, and is now located on Laugavegur.

No plan for tomorrow yet. Eloïse is a bit under the weather again, so we’ll have to wait and see.

We made it to Reykjavík early this morning, after a surprisingly short 4h 40m flight from Boston. Eloïse shocked us by sleeping all the way there; then by not grumbling when she had to walk off the plane, through passport control and down to baggage reclamation; then once again when we boarded a coach from Keflavík to Reykjavík and she simply sat on Sarah’s lap and mumbled not a word; then one final time when we had to change to a small minibus at the BSI bus terminal. All the way to the hotel, there wasn’t a peep out of her. Amazing. That girl travels so well.

Happily, our room was already available, even though it was only 08:00, so we checked in, drew the curtains, stripped off and crashed.

Unfortunately, we slept exactly as if we were on EST, so we didn’t awake again until 14:00 (the bells chiming 2 o’clock on Austurvöllur woke me up). A rapid shower ensued, clothing was tugged on and we dashed outside, eager to enjoy the dying embers of Iceland’s short daylight.

Ninety minutes later, it was all over, and we were plunged once again into darkness.

Reykjavík has even more charm in the winter than in the summer, if that’s possible. Every café and restaurant positively beckons to you, with its soft lighting, condensation-drenched windows and relaxed clientele, to come in from the cold and enjoy a sandwich and a cup of some of the finest coffee I’ve sampled anywhere in the world. So, that’s exactly what we did.

An amble around a couple of shops, especially 66° North, was about the only other thing we felt like doing today. Eloïse wouldn’t have had much patience for more activity than that, so we took it really easy. She’d had a long day and had been on her best behaviour, after all.

Dinner was at the wonderfully cosy Galileo, an Italian restaurant we’d eaten at on a previous trip.

The meal was fabulous, but prices around here continue to reflect the amazingly high standard of living to which Icelanders are accustomed. I think tonight’s meal is the most expensive we’ve ever eaten, and you have to believe me when I say that this was a great restaurant, but definitely not an extraordinarily expensive establishment.

No matter. As I said, the food was outstanding, so we were more than happy to pay a just reward for it.

Outside, it was now raining, cold and pitch black. Somehow, it only adds to this city’s irresistible charm. We stopped to buy skyr on the way back to the hotel.

Time for me to go back upstairs, before Sarah gets the hump with me for being gone for too long.