Air planes aren’t very spacious; at least not if you are condemned to be seated in “peasant class”. There’s always the seats by the emergency exit which provides a little extra room for my feet, but almost as if by magic these seats are always taken by extraordinarily small people…
The trip to Reykjavik reminded me very much about an experience I had several years ago on my way back home from Madeira on a charter flight.
In front of me, one of these people who are built to a scale of 1:2 was sitting – or rather lying – in his over-spacious seat. On random intervals he would try repeatedly to move the back of his seat to the lower position in order to get a more comfortable position for his beastly self. Upoin encounter with my knee-caps (which nearly burst) he tried again with renewed force until he managed to squeeze me even further back.
Upon arrivel he topped his poor display of understanding by complaining that he had been suffering from me “kicking” him in the back during the whole flight, thereby stealing from him valuable rest that he ought to have had… At this stage my lower instinct told me that this would be a good time to “put him to rest”, but being the civil and controlled person I am I decided to let him live.
Reykjavik
The thing that struck me as a Norwegian traveller was that here the cost of things surpassed even Norway where everything is already quite unaffordable. Our first dinner cost 16 800 ISK (which at a rate of about 10:1 of course is 1 700 NOK).
Reykjavik is supposed to be THE partying capitol of Europe – or so I’ve been told – so after the expensive dinner experience we strolled along to find somewhere to enjoy “Svartadaudir” or “the black death” as the local spirits is called. We found it and enjoyed it with the result that the next morning wasn’t nearly as early as it should have been…
Our guide book told us that “promiscuous behaviour” wasn’t regarded as being bad in any way and that if we ventured into a disco we should be prepared to “see or participate in” some rather heavy business, where it wasn’t completely uncommon to “skip the small-talk before…”. Followingly we stayed out of discos…
Or at least I did 🙂
Geysir and Gullfoss
In addition to the promiscuity of the Reykjavik party scene, Iceland is famous for its volcanic activities and natural beauty. So in order to catch a glimpse of this we had to go travel to the interior of Iceland and leave the coast behind.
Jumping onto a bus called the Geysir Express we set out for Gullfoss, a waterfall cascading 70 meters or so proving a very impressice sight. Afterwards the bus went on to Geysir, the errupting hot spring that has given the name to all other errupting hot springs “geysers”.