Iceland: The Thrilling Conclusion

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I guess i'll pick up from where the last entry left off and continue through to my departure. I am going to put a ton of pictures up and I suggest you check them out. The Icelandic countryside is ridiculously stunning. When this trip was initially booked, I did some research and found that Reykjavik despite it's reputation for crazy nightlife is really only a party town Thurs-Sat. As a result, I was a bit worried that I would only get one really unnecessary night of binge drinking in. Unbeknownst to me, Monday was a national holiday (I think "commerce day"), this led to two things. 1. A large %!o(MISSING)f the natives of Reykjavik were on vacation in the Westmen Islands grilling puffin, hanging out and drinking beers and 2. The people who were in town were ready to get after it on Sunday, and the bars were ready to stay open until 5am again. I got up from my nap, and dinner was at Seafood Cellar . Despite the borderline fastfood/casual dining ring of the name, it was actually excellent. The foot was great and the preparation and presentation was unique and well executed. I had a appetizer that was Kobe Beef over pan seared foie gras with what I think was supposed to be blue cheese ice cream accenting it. This was accompanied by a foie gras soup that was far better than my previous experience with liquified foie gras (Picholine used to serve and perhaps still served a Chicken Kiev infused with liquid foie gras). The entree was Salt Cod which is an Icelandic staple. I asked the waitress if it would be very salty and she said no, this was of course a lie, and as the name indicates salt cod is very salty. Luckily, I like salt, and a modern twist was put on this classic dish as it was topped with a spicy aolli and served on a bed of some sort of polenta and cucumbers. I had quasi learned my lesson from the night before so instead of heading right out to the bars I went back to the Borg to relax until midnightish. This still proved to be waaaaay to early. I got to Cafe Oliver around midnight and started drinking pint of Gull, Jack and Cokes and energy drinks and vodka (I think the drink they were serving at Cafe Oliver was called Chaos). Around 1:30, with Oliver still slow I walked a few blocks over to Vegemot , had a burn and vodka and decided it was just as dead at Vegemot as Oliver and decided Chaos mixed way better with vodka than burn so I went back to Oliver. At some point in here, I overheard a girl who sounded American talking about Obama to her bf, and since i'd had quite a few, I couldn't resist. I got her to admit that 1. Obama has no plans or ideas, 2. He would not have come close to the nom if he had been a white Senator from Maine named Barry O'Brian (even with the same record, oratory skills etc...) and 3. Had her basically admit that she has fallen for his snake oil salesman "hope and change!" song and dance. Her bf also tried to establish that since Europe would probably prefer Obama to McCain that was a valid reason to support him. He was Icelandic and a nice enough guy, but I don't vote on MY countries president based on what I think people in other countries might prefer. We kept the conversation civil though and I met the rest of her friends, who were all drunk Icelandic guys. We stayed at Oliver until they closed at 3ish, then our group and some of the bartenders from Oliver all went back to Vegemot which was now packed. I only remember bits and pieces, so here's a quick synopsis of some of the notable vignettes: 1. Icelandic guy #1 starts talking to Icelandic girl #1, he tells her she looks like Brittaney Spears and she says she gets that a lot. She is in fact about 40 pounds overweight, has black hair and looks nothing like Britt (who is not longer attractive in her own right). My obviously inebriated comrade turns to me for moral support but I think I owe him the truth. When he asks me if I think she looks like Brittany Spears I explain that I don't think Brittany Spears is hot, but at any rate this girl is fat and not even close to attractive. He admits he pretty much knows this but doesn't care and I wish him luck. 2. While out on the patio someone asks where I'm from and I say NY, then this wasted Icelandic chick comes up and says I am clearly lying because my accent is obviously Australian. Any of you who know me, know that I do not have an Australian accent. She recanted her statement. 3. One of the Icelandic dudes who is very strange periodically unzips his pants and whips it out and pretends to talk to people through his penis. The odd things is that no one in the bars seems weirded out by this or bothered and he is never throw out of a bar or even spoken to by security. Security does however follow you outside and make you put your drink back on the table inside because the threat off glass breaking on the patio is a bigger problem. I ended up at a final bar that started with an H and was a block from my hotel with 3 of the last people standing around 5am. I already felt like going to bed since I had to get up early and while I'm walking from the bar to where my friends are, this trashed Icelandic girl grabs my beer out of my hands and starts walking away with it drinking it. This is not acceptable, so I chase her down and have to literally wrestle it out of her surprisingly strong grip. She gives me a very nasty look when I take my beer back and I was like "oh right, I'm the asshole." I finished my beer, said goodnight to my new friends whose names I don't remember and went back to pass out because I had to be up at 10 am the next day...

THE NEXT DAY: I did in fact wake up at 10am, and something about Iceland agrees with me. I drank heavily until 5-6am, I slept no more than 5 hours and I was out doing active stuff for hours every day but I never felt hungover, sick or really even tired. Maybe it's the brisk air and lack of pollution. Today was to be the golden circle tour. There is an insane amount of natural beauty in Iceland, so this is the quick and dirty see as much of it as you can without getting too far from Reykjavik or spending more than 1 day version. Anton was our guide and I have his contact info (I will post it later) in case anyone is considering a trip to Iceland and would like to engage his services. He also suggested that I organize a group and we return in the winter when the glaciers are covered with 6-9 feet of snow. Apparently people built little huts on the glaciers, heat them with stoves and get drunk and drive around on snowmobiles. Anyone game? Where started out looking at a large hole in the ground that from my groggy recollection was an old volcano caldera (now a lake lies in the bottom, there is a picture of it) that Bjork once gave a concert in. The next stop was Gullfoss, which as far as I can tell (based on seeing gull + silver jewelers, Gull Lager beer and Gullfoss being a waterfall) means Gold Fall. It was a pretty intense waterfall and there are a bunch of pictures below. We stopped with Anton at a nearby restaurant and had some excellent Lamb Stew (he was pretty insistent we eat there). Anton told us Mel Gibson had recently been in Iceland and he had taken Gibson and his family on their tours and out fishing. Then at the end of his trip Mel told Anton he might as well hop on the G5 with them and come back to NY, so Anton loaded up the fam and came to the states for a brief holiday. He had to return via Iceland Air and is now a broken man as he pines for a private jet of his own. With lunch in the books, we headed for the glacier. The glacier is receding yearly and before we blame everything on global warming and co2, I would like to explain the rationale for this that Anton gave us (as per Icelandic scientists (since it is the most rational thought process related to the state of the polar ice i've ever heard). Their take is that throughout the history of earth, there have been cyclical Ice Ages. They think that what we refer to as "global warming" is actually just a naturally occurring process that is the pre-cursor of the next ice age. The relatively hotter temperatures across the globe will cause the ice caps to melt, as a result the newly melted ice flowing into the oceans will lower the worldwide temperature of the seas which will effect the gulfstream and lead to a period of global cooling which will be the new ice age. From here, the process will repeat again as it has for millions of years. Take that Al Gore, you just got shown up by an Icelandic tour guide. Anyway, since it is "summer" there isn't ice on the glacier and we couldn't go on it. Anton took us offroad and we had to drive over what alternated between something resembling a rally car race track, a moonscape of jagged rocks and huge inclines to scale and outright driving through rivers (apparently he can look at the river and tell where it's safe to cross, he must have been great at Oregon Trail). Next we saw some Geysers, including "Geysir" which was the original Geyser from which the term was derived. It is no longer under enough pressure to shoot, but there was another nearby that was active. Our final stop was the border between the North American and the Eurasian tectonic plates. The plates are moving apart, which has caused the land between them to sink gradually over the years as well as a number of earth quakes. We hiked from Europe to North America, then right at the face of the North American plate line saw the remnants of the original Icelandic Althing (Parliament) which dating to the 900's is the oldest Parliament on earth. When we finally got back to Reykjavik the sun was shining as it had most of the day. Not only does the terrain shift from lush river valley with waterfalls to desolate moonscape to glacier to enormous volcano ringed lakes every 30-45 minutes of driving, but the temperature probably swung 20-30 degrees F between some of the stops. I took a quick nap in the room and dinner that night was at a restaurant serving traditional Icelandic cuisine (Name?). Of the things I tried, I think the oddest would be Sheep's Headcheese which was salty and pretty good but had a weird consistency, Puffin (they're cute, but get over it) which was very tough to cut but tasted surprisingly good. Puffin is a red meat and tastes gamey, a bit like a cross between Squab and Venison, but closer to Venison; and Whale Steak. I did not know this, but whale is also a red meat and looks and tastes like beef. It is just different enough that you can tell you aren't eating a normal steak, but it was surprisingly good. Reykjavik was quiet monday and the bars close at 1am. That coupled with my 5am wakeup call to get to Paris meant it was an early night of packing and trying to fall asleep at 1am with the sun not fully set. Overall Iceland was a great experience. I could spend weeks just gawking at the views and landscape and if the nightlife was fun with 1/2 the population out of town I can only imagine how out of control it is when Reykjavik is at capacity. I will definitely be back soon, and if anyone wants to get sloppy on a glacier and try not to drive their snowmobile into a crevasse drop me a line.
* I forgot to mention they also have a traditional dish (that almost no one still eats because it's horrible and they have options) that is essentially rotten shark. This type of shark has a toxic level of ammonia (I think) when caught so it must be hung outside and cured for 3 months or more to be edible. It is often prepared by burying it underground as well. The smell is horrible but it doesn't really have much taste, some pictures of it are included

-Jared

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Photos

Old Volcano Caldera Lake
This is where Bjork allegedly gave a concert

Caldera 4
The water is surprisingly deep

Landscape
I took lots of pictures of landscapes

Gullfoss
The waterfall

Some cool rocks
Near the waterfall

River Valley
Where the water empties

Me near Gullfoss
I didn't fall in

The Sun
making a cameo for the day

The glacier.
It might look like dirt but that is all actually solid ice

Hikers
Two intrepid or crazy people who hiked to the glacier (which is in the middle of nowhere)

Cool waterfall
Near the glacier, the water was freezing (not surprising)