The airport and beer and culture and you

If you are truly a beer-minded person (Icelandic: bjórsinni), pick some up some at Keflavík airport’s duty-free shop. It’s half the price as in town, and you can get this:

The airport and you

Six people are arriving simultaneously very early on the 15th. Our car doesn’t fit seven, so we’re asking you to take the FlyBus to downtown.

If your name is Darren, Audrey, Paul, or Rose, then just take the FlyBus as far as BSÍ (“byeh ess eee”) which is the inter-city bus station in Reykjavík. You’ll know you’re in the right place because the bus will stop and disgorge its passengers, who then wander around terrified they’ll make the wrong connection, get lost, and spend the next week standing out in the rain.

Raggi will drive you home and settle you in.

If your name is Lorne or Alain, ask when you buy your ticket whether you can be driven right to your hotel’s door. If not, you’re still so central they can drive you to some other hotel about a block away. I’ll hang with you while you drop your luggage off and get oriented.

After a while everybody will rendezvous downtown and have a big ol’ breakfast.

Similarly, on the 16th, we can meet Bill and Rob at BSÍ, and I can intercept Antonio when he shows up there 90 minutes later. On the 17th, Adriane arrives and she must at last surrender her Snuffleupagus card to the Huttens.

Questions? Comments? Insights?

Update: the new plan.

Beer and culture

Beer led to culture. So where is the beer?

The good beer is at Micro Bar, in a little alley just off the main square Austurvöllur.

Where is the culture?

On the 18th, kind of everywhere and all day long.

Sensible shoes

I saw you planning to wear these shoes to the wedding. You think I don’t know your secret, but I do. Can I get you to reconsider? You’ll be going up and down steeply inclined gangways something like this...

...and then up this cobbly path to Viðeyjarstofa:

So plan for that.

Surveillance

Will the wedding be drenched? Will your hike be flooded out? Will fluvial erosion erase the country altogether? You can check the weather report but nothing quite matches a webcam for tracking minute-to-minute changes. Really, it’s like being up a mountain here.

Behold cams for Austurvöllur (the town square), Akureyri (Raggi’s home town), Tjörnin (focus of our vulgar real estate fantasies), and various other places.

Your weekend plans

 

A noted Calgary epidemiologist writes:

>Are you going to post the wedding weekend itinerary?

Apparently it’s conventional to fully plan the trajectory of every molecule five months in advance. We, contrariwise, embrace a system we call “winging it.” To the extent that there’s a schedule at all, this is it:

Arrival through til Friday

Poke around.

Saturday

12:30 

Get arse to Old Harbor; embark; endure wedding; eat lunch; eat cake; poke around island; feed sugarcubes to the horses; ferry back.

Late afternoon to whenever

Prowl downtown absorbing Culture Night stuff. Eventually meet for snacks at a place called Vínbarinn near the parliament. A friend of ours runs it. Vínbarinn. Not parliament, though that would be pretty cool.

Sunday

10:30-ish

Pack some lunches, pile into the big van we rented, picnic at Skógafoss.

4-ish

Lift geas, allow guests to pursue free will.

 

The name thing

There you are at our sumptuous, stylish, but pas de trop reception, meeting local people. “Why,” you wonder in between waves of gustatory pleasure, “do the mother, father, sons, and daughters in this one family all have different surnames?”

Actually, they don’t have surnames. Few here do. Instead, they’re on the patronymic system. It works like this:

Your dad’s first name, maybe with a small spelling adjustment, is suffixed with -son if you’re male, or -dóttir if you’re female.

That’s pretty much it. In cases where the father is MIA, you can use a matronymic built from your mother’s name.

But people don’t use their patronymics much. You can know someone for a long time without ever learning it, people have never changed their names upon marriage, there are no titles like Mr., and the phone book is arranged by first names.