Reykjavik has a surprising amount of international influence. I guess I was just surprised to have really good pho somewhere so remote and, well, fucking cold. Of course, it’s on an island founded by Vikings, who pillage and travel for a living, so perhaps I am just showing my own ignorance being surprised at all. I try and do that at least once a day. I usually get it done before breakfast. Usually. We walked around for our first full day and did loads of fun stuff. Shefali is great with planning so we already had a game plan when we got here. We walked around the town and found lots of cool things, but mostly tried not to touch or want anything because everything is so damn expensive here. Seriously, even though we knew to expect it we weren’t mentally prepared for it (I wasn’t, anyway) so a lot of the trip up to this point is trying not to eat. Very difficult if you know me at all. Our first stop in the early evening was a place called Microbar – it’s a beer bar that has some tasty, tasty Icelandic craft beers on tap as well as an excellent selection of bottles (even the Brew Dog Tactical Nuclear Penguin! Hard to get at home!). The bartender was knowledgeable about seemingly everything and told us that beer – good beer – is a relatively new thing in Iceland due to recent prohibition repeals. Beer, like everything else, is very expensive here so we stuck around a bit for happy hour before moving on. We were planning on going to a place called Faktory to check out some raggae DJs but got sidetracked by a little garden party. This little place that looked like a gallery happened to be playing raggae so we thought we were at the place. We let a girl cut in front of us in line at the bathroom and when she came out she told us about the party downstairs being thrown by some camper rental company (which sort of explains all the people spraypainting minivans downstairs, but not really) and that they had free beer. So you know where we went. That little tip alone saved us probably forty bucks (that’s two cans of beer each for those of you counting at home). There was awesome graffiti in the courtyard right next to this place, so we took some time to get sidetracked there as well (proof of this at [1]). We eventually got to Faktory, and it was fun, but all the little missteps to serendipity leading up to it were a blast. It’s almost as if the process of moving toward a goal was more fulfilling than actually reaching that goal. It’s like there’s a message in there somewhere. Think about it.
Vijay