Show us your junk

Among the delights of travel is the chance to try foreign junk food. Sometimes because it tastes great, other times because it affords a weird little window into what a country wants to eat. In the case of Japan, for example, this is as often as not a gorgeously and antiseptically packaged bag of cuttlefish-flavored corn pops.

Iceland, on the other hand, is all about liquorice. Appolo brand is what you want; get the 400g size and share. I've been evangelizing this stuff for years in a largely vain attempt to let people know that perfectly fresh, supple liquorice allsorts, minus the gross little beady ones that resemble defective urinal cakes, is the best candy ever. Eating it is a revelation, as though you had been raised from infancy wholly on Kraft Singles and then one day were given your first bite of aged Cheddar.

You could also try a Nizza bar, a confection embodying the assertion that liquorice and chocolate go together. Or maybe you'd like a Príns Polo, which is not unlike a Kit Kat.

Opal candies are little jewel-colored hard candies in fruit flavours. If you mention them to a local person, her eyes may grow misty in Proustian reminiscence as she relates the tale of the legendary lost Blue Opals. According to the ancients, blue Opals bestowed a rapturous taste sensation beyond mortal ken. There then dawned a day when the certain officious philistines deemed the principal ingredient to be a carcinogen and central nervous system depressant or some such piffle, and Blue Opals were no more. In certain lands it is rumoured that once in a season, decade-old boxes may appear on eBay at kingly prices.

Enough sweets - let's talk hotdogs. They're made of local lamb. They're very good. They come with fried onions and remoulade. Still, one is at a loss to account for their freakishly amplified prominence on the local food scene. The place to get them is Bæjarins Beztu down by the harbour.

Or do you really enjoy a robust, old-fashioned hamburger? With a mess of fries and Coke just jammed full of old-timey enamel-dissolving cane sugar? Served in a stylish dive? Yeah? Head to Hamborgarabúllan Tómasar. Look for the weird little teardrop-shaped building by the harbour.

Next up: village filling stations. Those picturesque microtowns of 400 people always include a filling station/general store/greasy spoon where you can get some fast food, including but not limited to the lesser sort of hotdog that has clocked trillions of revolutions on a rotisserie before you get to it.

One more thing you should try that's not junk: skyr. Imagine yogurt, but zero fat and better. Blueberry and vanilla are the yummiest, and there's a little folding spoon on top. Perfect for hikes.

Okay, now I've got to bestir myself from this lavishly appointed row of collapsible seating in this sumptuous concourse and catch my plane to Iceland.

Modern telecommunications

You’d think by this extremely advanced stage of life you’d know how to make a phone call. You’d be wrong. It’s a remarkably infantilizing experience to be abroad and find yourself helplessly failing five times in a row to place a simple call. In hopes, therefore, of preëmpting this particular flavor of psychological trauma, here’s the skinny on making phone calls in Iceland.

Calling Canada from a cellphone

Easy. If you can type a + symbol, the phone will figure out the international direct dialling by itself.

+1 902 123 4567

Calling Canada from a land line

00 1 902 123 4567

00 means “this is an international call.” The 1 is the country code for Canada (and the USA and the Caribbean).

Iceland to Iceland

1234 567

Instead of “brrr... brrr….” the ringing sound sounds like “oop-oop... oop-oop.” It feels like something has gone hideously wrong with the connection but in truth it’s a normal ring.

Canada to Iceland

011 354 1234 576

The 354 is the country code. Iceland has no area codes. Why bother?

Summoning emergency services

112.

This gets you firemen, police, and ambulances, or all three at once in cases of ultimate desperation.

Phone help

118 Domestic directory assistance.
114 International directory assistance.
115 Operator.

Or just use ja.is. Once you find your party, you can even get a map showing where they live.

Can you use your own cellphone?

Yes, if it’s GSM-capable in either the 900 or 1800 bands, and your plan permits international roaming. Coverage is great.

Can you use your own cellphone without detonating your retirement fund?

No. But if your phone is unlocked, you can get a local SIM card put into it. That’s a morning spent at the mall, but then you’d have a local phone. Or you could find a Síminn kiosk and rent a phone, but that’s $30 a week. Ugh.

Get a calling card

A much better ideas is to buy a “calling card” at a filling station or convenience store. It works like this:

The price of the card is your pre-paid balance. To use it, you call an Icelandic-local phone number. Then a robot lady prompts you to enter the infinitely long secret code printed on the card. Finally, you follow further robot-lady instructions to enter the phone number you actually want to reach. Troublesome, but at a couple of cents per minute, it’s by far the cheapest way to call Canada.

You thirst for more detail

Here it is.

However...

Reykjavík is just full of free wi-fi. So consider bringing some device with Skype and buy $10 of Skype Out credit so you can call from Skype to regular phones for near-zero cost. Or use FaceTime, FaceBook, or just plain ol’ email.

How to cheap out

Since the crash in 2008, Iceland is now Half-price Land, but it’s still Western Europe. So what can you do that’s just about free?

• Hang in a café. For some reason, the country has sky-high coffee consumption and commensurately numerous cafés and an intensely serious barista culture. There are cool artist-run ones like Kaffismiðjan (The Coffeesmith), cozy visiting-with-grandma ones like Tíu Dropar (Ten Drops), and sleek modern ones like Te og Kaffi (guess). We’re also fond of C is for Cookie. 
• Hang in a bookstore. The staff honestly don’t care if you hang out all day reading all the books and magazines without buying anything. Besides affording the opportunity to marvel at the weird inventory – which includes enough English to keep you occupied – bigger bookstores like Eymundsson will include a café.
• Hike!
• Get out of the city and pick berries. All that that flat land near the sea? Saturated with bilberries come August.
• Wander around Laugardalur.
• Wander to Tjörnin. Wave at the ducks.
• Visit City Hall, look at the cool giant 3D topographic map of the country, and perhaps say hi to Jón Gnarr, the ex-punk rocker and comedian whose satirical political party rode a tremendous wave of political disillusionment all the way to the mayoralty.
• See the free, and weird, Einar Jónsson sculpture garden in the center of town.
• Poke around Hallgrímskirkja. See the view from the top.
• Wander around Laugardalur. Enjoy the trees and sculptures.
• Got hiking boots? Hike up Esja, the mountain that overlooks the city.
• Walk the seawall. See Sólfar.
• If it’s Wednesday afternoon, the National Museum is free.
• Swimming! There are 18 pools in town.
• Stroll way, way out to the lighthouse at Grótta. See the birdies.
• Wander around Þingholt; behold the Lego-like buildings.
• Hotdog at the harbor!
• Go to Babalú on a sunny day, sit out on the balcony, and people-watch the passers-by on Skólavörðustígur.
• Practice saying Skólavörðustígur.

  

Get into town

So you’ve gotten off the plane, you’ve got your luggage, and you’ve passed muster with the border agent. Then you hear that a taxi to the city is $100. What do you do? Do you take the train?

You do not take the train. There is no train. Anywhere. No trains in Iceland.

Instead the way to go is with FlyBus. There’s no need to book in advance, and it’s a fraction of the price of a taxi. They stop at hotels; if you’re staying chez Raggi, the closest one is the Hilton Nordica.

We will have a car. It’s likely, then, that we’ll be able to meet some people at the airport and drive them back. Details will emerge.

Once you’re in town, car rental is pretty pricey, and gasoline runs around $2.15 per liter. Welcome to Europe! SadCars is supposed to have the lowest prices.

The city buses are called Strætó. Their online route planner and app will tell you what you need to know. What the chez-Raggi crowd needs to know is that the #14 goes back and forth to downtown, the #5 goes to Árbæjarlaug which I am utterly determined that everyone will visit, fares are 300 kr, and you can buy passes at the main terminal. That terminal is called Hlemmur. And while city bus stations are not generally considered to be radiant pageants of joy, Hlemmur in particular is so depressing they actually made a movie about how depressing is is.

And, notwithstanding my anti-cash rant, the 300 kr fare is the one thing you might want to pay for in coins.

Gotta make a move

The movers came today and hauled everything off. One step closer!

Electricity

This will happen: you’ll go to plug in your camera to recharge it, and discover that the electrical outlets are misshapen and supply weird juice.

“Nuts!” you’ll shriek. No charge – no pictures – the vacation wrecked. You’ll crumple in despair, an empty husk of suffering, mutilated with regret that you’d not researched the matter sufficiently in advance.

So here’s what you need to know. Iceland uses 240 volts – double Canada's voltage – and the outlets accept only European 2-pin plugs:

Chargers for Apple products and many other sorts of gadgets are “dual voltage” and are safe to use, as is any equipment that says “120V-240V” on it somewhere.

Depending on when you bought it, that charger may even have come with extra sets of prongs that you can swap in. But if you need an external doohickey to convert the physical shape of the prongs, we can provide some of those.

Abandon all hope of using your Canadian hair dryer in Iceland. It will just catch fire in your hand. We'll find you a local one.

Packing

A noted Stanford mathematician recently wrote:

I'm waiting for the "detailed packing list" episode :)

Indeed, when you come to Iceland, what should you bring? Besides the basics — lots of big ziplocs for your toiletries, eight days’ worth of underthings, two clear recycling bags for segregating soiled and rained-upon clothes —here’s what to plan for:

• The weather. It’s cool and it changes. A lot — it’s not impossible to have three sun/rain cycles in a single day, and then there’s the wind. So bring layers. Think “brisk autumn day on which it may well rain.”
• An outfit to hike in. Proper boots, a sun hat, sunglasses, and rain pants are advisable. Smart people will bring an extra pair of boot laces and a woolen cap.
• Pharmacy things. Local pharmacies can replace what you forget but are steeply priced. Antibiotic ointment cannot be found at all. 
• Tip: put a ziploc in your bathroom in the morning, and every time you use a toothbrush, potion, razor, or pill, drop it in. At the end of the day write down the contents of the bag, add band-aids and nail clippers, and that’s what you need to bring.
• If you want to pass undetected amongst the locals, now’s the time to bust out the black shawls (women) and scarves (everybody).
• A swimsuit. If you have an immodest Speedo, now’s your chance to wear it. You’ll blend right in.
• Similarly, women often wear leggings+nice boots in public. On warm days, men actually wear capri pants.
• Bring your camera. Bring an extra battery.
• There will be a several-minute walk from the pier on Viðey to the reception place. So no heels; bring flats.
• For staying cheaply in touch with home, bring your favorite wi-fi computery thing.
• You’ll want electrical goodies as explained in the forthcoming Electricity post.

In your carry-on, bring:

• Orange foam earplugs. Those are the only kind that work worth a damn.
• An eye mask. Maybe you’ll want to sleep on the plane, maybe you won’t, but you’ll want it later during the bright nights.
• A pen for filling out the landing card. Put it in its own ziploc in case air pressure makes it burst in flight.

It’s pretty straightforward. Just Google “packing for iceland” and you’ll get ideas suited to how you plan to spend your time.

Get outta town

Because there are pretty things to see.

Filthy, filthy lucre

Five thousand krónur, about $40

Should you get some Icelandic cash before you go?

Nah. I never do. Here's why:

• Everybody accepts credit cards for everything. You can buy single cups of coffee with a credit card, or an individual hotdog from a kiosk, and nobody bats an eyelash.
• Anyway, you’d have to wait weeks to order the cash in, it’d be in inconveniently large denominations, and you’d get a terrible exchange rate.
• If you really really want cash, just get it from any ATM on Laugavegur. That yields the best rate, too.

The one thing you’ll want to do before you go is call the risk-management office for your card and tell them when and where you’ll be travelling. Otherwise you might arrive, attempt to use your card, and get blocked for ‘irregular activity.’ Then you’ll just need to talk to the risk-management people anyway.

If you have an RBC Visa, the number is 1-800-361-0152 from Canada. Or call collect +1-514-392-9167 from everywhere else.

Passports

You'll need one. If you don't already have one, you usually need about two weeks to get it. The good news is that you no longer have to track down a particular kind of professional to vouch for your identity. Instead, they now accept the word of most any other person who holds a Canadian passport.

You can also throw extra money at the Passport Office and they'll produce your passport faster. All the details are online.

Thunder and Blazes

You know how when you call some office and they put you on hold, the music your hear is this bland, backgroundy, subdued, horse-tranquilized elevator Muzak that's been run repeatedly through a soul-proof filter?

I had to call the Canadian embassy in Reykjavík the other day. Consistent with Iceland's mile-wide quirky streak, this was their music-on-hold:

How do you say ‘Reykjavík’?

Like this. It means Smoky Bay, so named because the discoverer saw steam rising from the geothermal pools.

In the olden days, women would do the washing at these pools because, hey, free hot water. Laug means pool; women would walk out of town along Pool Street (Laugavegur) to Pool Valley (Laugardalur) on Pool Day (laugardagur) which is, no kidding, still what they call Saturday.

Why is this useful? Raggi's place is a just short walk to Laugardalur, which has a cute little coffeehouse-in-a-garden, sports facilities, a botanical garden, and a giant public swimming pool. It's called Pool Valley Pool, or Laugardalslaug. Worth a visit.

And Laugavegur is now the main shopping drag downtown. If you're looking for cafés, people-watching, or strolling about, that's where to be.

Just don't try to pronounce it.

Picnic!

Some day during your visit, I'm thinking we should do a day trip and picnic – maybe a drive along the south coast at least as far as Seljalandsfoss, pictured here. 

The country is positively sick with waterfalls. This one, fairly close to the city, is among the most often photographed.

Behold the city

Here's an interactive map of central Reykjavík. The little grey icons produce descriptions of the buildings. Not everything worth knowing about is marked, though, so we'll tell you about the fun stuff as time goes on. But the Old Harbor, where the ferry will sail from, appears in the lower left corner.

Velkomin til Íslands

So it's July 18th. Today, therefore, starts the one-month countdown to the wedding, and we're starting this blog to keep everyone informed about what's going on, where things are happening, and how to find the cool and fun things to do when you come to Iceland.

Over the next month we'll trickle out maps, links, and anything that'll be fun or useful for your visit. Some you'll have heard of, some will be new. And if you want to share something delightful you've discovered, do reveal it in the comments.


Looking forward to seeing you in August!


-Lloyd 'n' Raggi