I checked into the airport just fine. The baggage tags and boarding pass for Icelandair are REALLY COOL! I was so excited as I was writing the addresses on my luggage tag that I was shaking and the handwriting turned out really horrible. The security and everything was normal, then I had two or three hours to kill before it was boarding time. I called my dad, then went to Starbucks and got hot water from them to make tea, and ate a third of one of those giant sandwiches from the grocery store I had bought for the plane ride.
There was a shoe-shining booth at the airport! I only saw men using it, but it didn't stay empty and without customers for long. The customer requested that I take it from the waist down, so I did.
These were all pillars at the Seattle airport.
The plane was about 7.5 hours long, I think. I had the cheapest type of ticket so they didn't serve free food, although the food they did serve looked really good. Snorri says they used to serve free food to everyone and you had to pay for extra drinks, but now drinks are free and you have to pay for food. There was a touchscreen tv thing in the back of the headrest in the seat in front of me, and I could watch movies and things. There was a really nice countdown timer for when the estimated landing time was, and you could read a history of the airlines in Iceland and see how many miles/kilometers you had flown and had left, how far away to such-and-such city you were on the globe, et cetera.
This was my boarding pass. The red thing is just an advertisement for the Keflavík airport that they put my checked baggage information sticker on. I don't know why they gave me that sticker because I didn't need it to get my baggage on the other side.
There were no Icelanders on the plane - there was one Danish guy who had moved from DK to US and was now moving to Iceland. He was always smiling and joking and he had dirty-blonde hair, and wore a white shirt with black pants. When we got to the waiting area before it was time to board the plane, he asked 'Where's the beer?' and went off to drink at the airport bar. I think I saw him later, jogging, when Snu and I were in the cemetary. Apart from the Dane, there was a rather large group of Japanese (who spoke minimal English, like 'latte, yes, no, thank you') and a group of old people who looked like they might have been traveling together. There was a large group of friends who were in their twenties or late teens, too.
On the plane I sat next to a couple who were tourists. They were going to be in Iceland for ten days, and were renting a car and driving all around the country. They were really excited to see all the glaciers and countryside and things like that. They first became interested in going to Iceland when they saw pictures of the geography on the internet. People were saying to go to Iceland now, while the economy was bad and everything would be super cheap compared to how it normally was (super expensive). They're going to Ireland after Iceland. They spoke zero Icelandic and had no idea how to pronounce ANYTHING. I wrote down a pronunciation guide for the letters that I could remember and gave them super basic words 'yes, no, thank you, I don't speak...' to try and help them.
The first thing I noticed after getting off the plane was that it smelled different, and that it was windy. Iceland smells like the sea and something else, perhaps the sulfur. It's cold here, but a different kind of cold. It's perfectly fine when there's no wind.
After getting off the plane, they helped me and we all got to the security check, customs, duty-free and where I was meeting Snorri. We had to go through security again after we arrived because Europe has different standards than the US and Canada and we were coming from the US, but it was the same kind of thing. You put your stuff in bins and they went through an x-ray machine, and you walked through a metal detector. You didn't have to take your shoes off though.
Customs was easy. They asked you where you were going ('Reykjavík' was all I needed to say, they didn't need the address) and how many days, and then they stamped my passport and that was it. The people who sat next to me on the plane had no idea how to pronounce the town name, so they struggled through it and the customs guy had no clue what they were trying to say. They tried to write it but couldn't spell it, so the customs guy guessed at where they were going and they agreed and he let them through.
The duty-free was full of, as far as I could tell, almost nothing but candy and Hello Kitty merchandise. Mostly candy, but there was a section of Hello Kitty backpacks and candy and things. I stopped wandering around in the store when I remembered I hadn't exchanged any money into ISK yet.
Snorri was late but I thought that it was me who was late, so I thought I was in the wrong meeting place and wandered around. My suitcase was twelve pounds and I had my backpack. All the way at the end of the airport, outside, a guy was smoking and he asked me if I was looking for something. I said I was looking for my friend and he said he was in the same boat, and asked if I wanted to call my friend but I declined. Then I wandered back around the airport and as I was coming back Snorri found me, so that worked out just fine.
We drove to his house and I met his mom and dad and was shown the house and things. I took a shower - the hot water did smell like sulfur/rotten eggs but it wasn't strong at all, like I had expected. I saw his sister walk down the hallway when I was in my room, but she didn't say anything to me. Also, their microwave has a dial instead of buttons with numbers and you have to mess with the power and stuff before it lets you microwave anything. I think it's an older style of microwave but he thinks it's quite new.
Then we went to Reykjavík. We wandered all around and went into some thrift stores, and went to the cemetary, and to the pond and he told me about all kinds of stuff about the area and people he knows, et cetera.
This was the first picture taken in Iceland! That building still has the Danish crown on top of it.
There was some music playing loudly, (he knows the song but I forgot the name) and it turns out it´s part of a sort of hazing thing for students, we passed by it. The freshmen were dressed oddly compared to the rest of the kids, and were jumping in place and yelling something as far as I could tell. There was a blow-up slide thing and a tire obstacle course and some other things I forget.
I exchanged money at the bank, then ate at 'Café Paris', a really nice café. My first meal in Iceland was an open-faced sandwich with hung meat, some salad, 'bean salad', and peach slices. I should have taken a picture because in all it looked weird. The bread was a different kind of bread than I'm used to. When we were wandering around I bought postcards and Snorri bought a flag pin for a certain country to put on his backpack...
This was what I ate in the café.
This is a street in town. The sign says 'Warm Welcome' in different languages. There isn't a sidewalk like I'm used to, there's either small posts that act as a barrier between the sidewalk and road, or the ground for the sidewalk simply looks different than the road for the cars. All the cars are smaller and the roads are smaller, and it doesn't smell like exhaust everywhere even if you're walking right next to the road. There's less traffic than I'm used to, too.
This is the gate to the cemetery.
A lot of the graves were fenced off like this, but all the gates looked different.
This was a catacomb!
Later we picked up Roxy and went with her to the mall, where she bought some clothes and Snorri gave his phone to the phone store so they could fix the screen(?) on it. He got a replacement phone to use while they do that. We saw an ad for an Icelandic movie that airs in a few days, so we're going to see that.
We went to a grocery store in the mall, the one with the pig mascot. It was super small compared to what I'm used to! All the packaging on the food was really simple and you knew what most things were just by a glance. You bag your own groceries, even though there is a cashier.
Last night we ate dinner at Café Paris. I didn't finish my breakfast from there, so this time I ordered cheese-garlic bread, which was a smaller meal. It was good! Then I went to the bathroom in the café... at first I was unsure if it was a bathroom. There were three stalls, but they were actually little rooms instead of stalls. There were no gaps in the doors between the ceiling and floor, and they looked like regular doors (a bit skinny perhaps). The toilets look different and inside the café there was an odd button. Instead of those small black ones on the wall, this was a really big one of metal that looked like intersecting circles or a sideways figure eight. The water from the sink was nice and hot!
So far it doesn't seem like I'm obviously a tourist, except when I´m talking English, because at the bank they started talking to me in Icelandic. But at this other store where I bought postcards, they talked English to me because I had been standing right in front of the cashier talking English the whole time. Snorri and his friends and family talk in Icelandic, except when it's Roxy, Snorri and I where they mostly talk in English, and then usually he or Roxy will summarize conversations for me. It's strange because I only know a super tiny bit of Icelandic... people get around with knowing none, but how? Some things are entirely in Icelandic, like stuff at the phone store and things at the bank if I remember right.
It seems like nearly early every time we go into a place we have to draw a number and wait with it! This happened at the bank, the phone store... I think somewhere else too but I forgot.
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