Iceland Day 12 - Waiting

If there was one thing I did more than anything else today it was wait. I waited at the airport in Akureyri for two hours because of a misunderstanding when I called to fix the mistake I had made booking the flight. Then I waited for 2 hours in Reykjavik because it turns out the flight from Akureyri to Ísafjörður is actually a flight from Akureyri to Reykjavik and then to Ísafjörður. Had I known that, which is not mentioned anywhere on the English version of the Air Iceland site, I might have planned things differently. Not that things would have worked out any better. As it was I didn't arrive in Ísafjörður until about 5PM and this is a town the seems to start shutting down in the Winter at about 6.

The town is a small spit of land in the middle of a fjord, called Skutulsfjörður, that is home to about 4000 people. It's not an island, but there's only a small strand of sand that connects it to the mainland. If Akureyri is hugged by mountains, then Ísafjörður is sitting in the cupped hand of two tall mountains. The setting of Ísafjörður was startling when I first saw it. Seen from the plane, most of the land looks like a muted topographical map. The stunted looking, snow covered mountains are striated with steps and cliffs that create the elevation lines of the Icelandic map. On the ground it's like a pop-up book was opened and those mountains that looked like a little diorama are now suddenly tall and sharp and looming overhead. It's also cold as hell here. The mercury said it was about 20F when I landed, but the wind and the snow simply said “Holy shit it's cold.” Tomorrow it's supposed to get up to 32F so I'm hoping to get out and walk around for longer than what it takes to walk to and from dinner.

As far as my culinary exploits go, today was about as boring as it gets. Breakfast was a crappy buffet at the hotel in Akureyri, though part of it being crappy was my fault because I didn't get down there until everything had been picked over and the staff was starting to clean up. Lunch was an even crappier tuna sandwich at the airport, which I ate despite the fear of having a repeat of JFK (the food poisoning, not the assassination), and dinner was a seafood pizza that was actually pretty good but wasn't really what I was imagining when I landed in a snow covered fishing town. I'm hoping for better tomorrow.