Iceland Day 2 - The Homebody

Sure, I could have stayed at home if all I was going to do was stay at home, but then I wouldn't get to watch Icelandic cartoons and eat skyr. It just wasn't the best of days to be out and about. With it snowing on and off all day, sometimes a thick and heavy snow and others and onslaught of tiny ice razors, and winds gusting over 40mph at times it was hard to stay outside for long. Despite the weather I did make a few trips outside to try and get a better feel for the immediate area. The hotel I'm staying in is on the main road in the entertainment and shopping district, known as 101 Reykjavik. On the Fridays and Saturdays there is an abundance of shopping and milling around the plethora of coffee shops during the day, and raucous partying until the wee hours of the morning. Most clubs in the area don't even close until 6am, and they stay busy and bumping the whole night. Sunday on the other hand is a day for church and nursing hangovers. The energetic and lively people I saw walking around on Saturday were replaced with haggard and rough looking people that obviously haven't had much, if any, sleep recently.

Something that is rather surprising that I've seen is despite the fact that Icelanders seem to be a rather healthy group in general, or at least those that I've seen so far, they seem absolutely obsessed with fast food. In particular, hotdog (called pylsur) and pizza joints are everywhere and the food is ridiculously cheap compared to how expensive everything else is. It's clearly no coincidence that the food is cheap, the question is whether it's popular because it's cheap, or cheap because its popular. I've yet partake in any of Iceland’s unofficial national food, though I see a date with a pylsur stand in my future, I instead opted for slightly less artery clogging food. I had spent a fair amount of time sitting inside a cafe called Prikith reading and drinking coffee when I decided to eat lunch. For whatever reason, most of the menu items are named after things from the film Pulp Fiction. There are $5 Shakes, Bruce Willises, Big Kahunas, and more but I ordered a simple club. The club here turned out to be pretty much a BLT with mushrooms and a skyr-based mayo, cleverly called skyronaise. Dinner was at another small cafe but this time it was an Icelandic fish stew. It was incredibly tasty, but it was more the consistency of something like corned beef hash than the stew I'm used to. Dessert was coffee and a couple of small, twisted unglazed donut-like things called kleinur. None of it was terribly adventurous, but it was good, hearty stuff and there's nothing wrong with that.

Tomorrow is supposed to be warmer, though a bit wetter. We'll see how things work out as far as the whole being a tourist thing goes, though I can't say I'm not enjoying myself just wandering around whenever I feel like braving the weather. A quick travel tip I'd like to pass along. When I arrived I had a problem with my card being declined when I tried to pay for the room. I had already paid for a bus ticket, and later bought groceries so it wasn't that the bank hadn't gotten the forms that I would be traveling out of country (something I didn't know was required until I called the bank the night before traveling to find out what kind of charges I might incur while in Iceland). Trying to get a hold of customer service at my bank was a much bigger pain in the ass than I had imagined. It seemed every time I tried dialing the 800 number (which is NOT toll free outside of the US) I would get a high call volume message and then the system would hang up on me. In messing around online I discovered that I could call numbers in the US for free through my Gmail account because as far as it was concerned they were domestic calls. I dialed up the bank number and immediately got through, no crap about high volumes and no hang ups. After a game of 20 questions (literally 20) by a “Loss Prevention Specialist” to prove I was me and not some international credit card thief I was finally allowed to spend my own money. So if you're going overseas and want a cheap-as-free way of calling back home just sign up for Gmail and you're golden.