Things I noticed or liked about Iceland:

There are automatic doors everywhere! They look more like giant windows than doors, and aren't painfully obvious that they're automatic like ours are in the US. You also have to stand closer to them for them to open than ours.

The cashiers usually only said a few things. "Good day", the cost of whatever you were buying, and "Thanks". If I bought soda in a glass bottle, they asked me if I wanted it opened. If I bought postcards they asked me if I wanted stamps. It was nice, because in the US the cashiers will ask you how you are, if you found everything alright, and all sorts of random questions.

You bagged your own groceries, instead of the cashier doing it for you.

I didn't notice a single person, even wandering around the mall, that had heavy perfume. Stores didn't have heavy perfume (except once, I think) either. I didn't notice music playing in the stores, but it's possible I just forgot about it. All the packaging was a lot simpler and it was really easy to tell what you were buying, usually, even if you couldn't read the language.

The commercials on television were shorter than ours in the US, and the overall commercial breaks were fewer and shorter too. The commercials themselves were more to the point.

Sometimes there were stores that just had blank shopping bags, instead of having a brand name on them.

The tourists from the US were some of the most annoying ones. A few of them didn't know anything about Iceland, and one couple took a long time chatting with a waitress and asking her all sorts of questions, and once some took pictures of some waitresses at the café during a super busy time, things like that. Americans went everywhere without knowing how to pronounce any Icelandic at all, so if Icelanders didn't know English then they would have been completely helpless. The tourists from the other Nordic countries were generally better, in my opinion.

The food seemed healthier, even the pizza from a pizza delivery place, and french fries, and hamburgers. Some things had different flavours or were called different names - "paprika" was a common flavour for chips, and while it tasted similar to some flavour I've had before, I don't eat chips often at all so I have no idea what it was like. Upon researching it, it seems we don't sell paprika flavoured chips here.

The ice cream tasted a lot better than what we have in the US. Hot dog meat was also better than ours, and the hot dogs were a little thinner and longer than what we get. You could actually tell that it was meat instead of whatever our hot dogs are made of.

I saw a package of ham slices that had designs on the back of them. They also sold things like sheep's head, blood and liver sausage, et cetera in the regular grocery store. They had a lot of licorice or licorice-flavoured things.

If you want to buy clothes or books, going to the flea market on weekends or something like the Red Cross second-hand store is a far better way to do it.

One sign said "Take away" instead of "To go" or "Take out" when talking about drinks.

They seem to eat lamb meat as much as a lot of people eat beef in the US.

There were a lot of those things where you take a number and then the employees call out the number when it's your turn. I saw them in the bank, in the post office I believe, in a phone store I think, at a bakery...

Having coins the rough equivalent of a dollar, instead of having bills that much, was really handy. I wish we used dollar coins more in the US.

The bottoms of door frames were higher than what I'm used to, so for the first week or so I was constantly tripping over them whenever I walked in or out of a door.

All the restaurants had menus outside their door, so you could see the meals and prices before you went inside.

Even if you were standing right next to the street, it didn't smell like tons of exhaust. People didn't yell things from cars at people walking on the street. There was almost no trash laying on the ground or sides of the roads compared to here. Stores closed earlier than here in general.