First Night in Reykjavik

Tonight Cara and I walked along volcanic rock on the edge of the Atlantic harbor of Reykjavik, and she shivered under her layers and talked of dressing more warmly tomorrow. It's not as cold as Svalbard here, but it sure is plenty cold. The hour long bus ride in from the airport gave us an excellent showcase of barren lava fields covered with naught but scrub in a symphony of purple, green, and every shade of black. The kids were back in the hotel room watching TV and relaxing after an evening of travel. Icelandic is not so hard to read if you know a Scandinavian language, but I sure can't understand it spoken. I taught the kids the letters eth and thorn and told them about how Anglo-Saxon had once used them before 1066. Conquest was a terrible and beautiful thing for the English language.

I started work earlier than usual today because I knew we'd be traveling this evening, and now that we're back I'm sitting in the hotel bar enjoying an Icelandic porter (meh) while reviewing pull requests. Iceland's timezone is two hours earlier than Bergen's and it's still fully light out, so I'm still pretty wired even though it's 11 PM. Reykjavik definitely has a vibrancy to it!

After Cara and I did a little junk shopping, we went to do her truly favorite activity: visit the local grocery store. Icelandic krona are worth roughly one American penny which makes the math super easy. I thought Norway was expensive! And whereas Norwegian grocery stores can only sell beers up to 4.7% alcohol, here in Iceland the limit's 2.25%. But I can pay at the hotel bar in botcoin if I want, showing Iceland's still at the forefront of currency speculation.

Walking around tonight Cara & I passed a restaurant with puffin on the menu. Arctic fucking puffin! We saw some in Svalbard including on who couldn't get his fast ass up out of the water to get away from our boat so he did this wild flappy thing across the surface instead. I'm excited to eat one, but Cara just wants to see more of them. Meanwhile Zara's aiming to not have to leave the hotel tomorrow. Not sure that'll work out for you, nugget.