Anyway the semester is over and done with (finally) and I've now been on summer vacation for a little over 2 weeks... which doens't seem like much time, but feels like a lot considering what I've been up to. After a week of partying (and sleeping... oh sleeping is good) in NYC, I took off with my friend Rob from Princeton and Mark, one of his friends from GWU, to Reykjavik. I can see you all scratching your heads in bewilderment... indeed, why would someone want to go to Iceland? Well hopefully this little update will convince you.
So the hypothesis that I formulated during my stay is: Icelandic people are crazy. And it was confirmed over and over again... Reykjavik is one of the craziest party cities that I have ever been to--this coming from someone like me. We met a bunch of Icelandic students who were more than happy to show us around to the good bars, buy us ridiculously overpriced drinks and practice their (very good) English. The nightlife starts around 1am--that's just the pregaming. The real partying doesn't get going until around 3am, which of course makes sense since the sun is shining. A lot of places stay open until 7am on Friday and Saturdays because it's the traditional 'runtur', which is basically a city-wide bar crawl. Plus we happened to have landed in Reykjavik during graduation weekend, so the partying was all the more crazy.
In addition to lots of drunken stumbling and making jokes about Vikings (the best Icelandic beer is actually called Viking), we did a bit of the touristy stuff... saw the geysers (2 of only 5 in the whole world), some waterfalls, some volcanos, the mid-atlantic ridge that is slowly pushing Europe and America away from each other. I also went on a 4 hour horse trek around lava fields... Basically your usual tourist sights ;) We also walked around Reykjavik and visited the giant phallic Church and the Icelandic Historical Museum, which had fun activities for kids like dressing up as a Viking (which I did) and reconstructing heathen graves (which I did not).
Plus we saw lots of the sights and other cool stuff during our evening stumbles around town, a nice aspect of the eternal summer sun. One not so nice aspect is that it tends to make sleeping in a hostel with no black-out shades rather tricky. I think Icelandic people just deal with it by getting smashed every night, a tradition which we tried to adhere to as well.
A few last notes about Iceland and Reykjavik:
-it is the most expensive country I have ever visited--$20 for a cocktail in a normal bar (aka NOT a super upscale/trendy place)!! To put things in even sharper perspective: some of the taxis are Porsche Cayennes.
-the mullet is back (or maybe it never left)...and this applies to both men and women.
-a red light is only red if there is an old lady in the middle of the road... and it is never red at night.
-12 degrees celsius is hot weather! Break out the shorts and tee-shirts, and get yourself some ice cream!
-Icelandic rock music is very angry, which I suppose is understandable when you only have 3 hours of sunlight in winter... in addition, Icelandic people are notably sexually active (not to say promiscuous), which is understandable for exactly the same reason.
Well I'll stop boring you all about my little Icelandic journey... besides I've been in Italy since Monday so all of this is ancient history ;) I'm taking Eurorail to Paris this afternoon for a long weekend with friends and family and then back to NYC for 4 days before taking off to the UK for the summer!!
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