I’ve been away for the past week, checking another country off my places-to-see list. I then suddenly remembered that I should put up a blog post, so here it is. This is me working off of several days straight of must-have-more-fun-faster traveler’s exhaustion, and trying to compose words that do not contain the letters ð and þ.

I quickly learned the all-purpose greeting of “góðan dagin” (that was about all the Icelandic I mastered). But apparently I did master that one phrase so well that when one cashier told me the price in Icelandic and I asked her to repeat it in English, she gave a laugh of surprise. “You said góðan dagin so well that I thought you were Icelandic,” she told me. Score one for me, the professional linguist hopeful.

They say that if you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes. Well, I had to wait a whole day, but I did experience weather of all sorts:

Mt Esja on a sunny day

Mt Esja the next day. Clouds and snow rolled in!

Iceland is volcanic (no kidding. Eyjafjallajökull, anyone?) So there are lava fields everywhere. Or big chunks of lava. Or both.

Lava, lava everywhere

Walking around the city, it felt like everything was uphill both ways.

I went into a few books stores, of course, and did buy some books (all in English. My mastery of góðan dagin isn’t quite enough for me to read an entire book in Icelandic). One book store sold knitting supplies in the basement. Why not, right?

If you like to knit, Iceland is the place to shop.

Apparently Icelanders do not want tractors cluttering up their city streets. C’mon, Reykjavik needs a few tractors, surely.

Tractor-free zone this way

Stay tuned for more Icelandic-themed posts in the future, and maybe a guest-post by me on a blog about Iceland!