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.