hot water culture - MondayApril292002

setting: somewhere over the North Atlantic

Around the time Gretchen fell asleep in her cramped narrow airline seat, I noticed the first light of the new day illuminating the distant northeastern horizon. I hadn't really thought about it, but the lit part of the globe moves much more slowly near the poles than it does down in temperate regions. For the time period of our flight, the place where night turned into day sat nearly still while our plane flew towards it as if it was some sort of continent. There was even a spectacular period during which I could see the place where the curve of the earth divided night from day.
Meanwhile the clouds lay as a wrinkled old blanket above the black waters of the Atlantic. From our height, it looked as if the clouds were hugging the water closely, insulating the warm Gulf Stream against frigid Greenlandic gales, but it turned out that the clouds were high above the water. I could tell this because of the view I had of the whitecaps on the water's surface through the occasional small breaks in the clouds. Because of perspective and the distance between the ocean and the clouds, the whitecaps seemed to being moving quickly in the direction of our plane. You can simulate this effect by circling the finger and thumb of your right hand and then looking through resultant hole at the tip of a finger of your left hand, then moving your head in some direction relative to your hands.
Our first visions of Iceland showed it to be a dark brownish-grey and treeless landmass pockmarked here and there with low volcanic craters. The only evidence of man was a number of narrow roads and a single lonely white lighthouse.
Even after we'd landed and come to a stop at the gate, our plane continued rocking and experiencing the shudders of mild turbulence just from the gale-force wind blowing across the tarmac. There was a small crew of airport guys out there unloading baggage and such and despite their head-to-toe day-glow green ski coats, they all looked miserable. We'd had the misfortune of landing in Iceland during a week of unseasonable cold. Normally temperatures would be in the 40s in late April, but today they never rose above freezing.
Gretchen thought the inside of the Leifur Eiriksson International Air Terminal looked sort of like a ski lodge, what with the exposed metalwork and raw wood. It was a surprisingly big place, especially given how few people there were to fill it. We didn't exactly get the third degree as we went through customs, but the guy with the IS stamp lingered a little longer than usual over our passports because there was some guy standing behind him to "observe."
The reason we'd come to Iceland was that Gretchen had responded to a web banner advertisement. Yes, she'd actually clicked on one of those 468 by 60 pixel images at the top of a web page that most experienced web surfers filter out mentally - like they do telephone poles, pigeons, and Pepsi logos. The deal she'd responded to included air fare, transportation to and from the airport, and accommodations at a "four star" hotel in Reykjavik. The transportation into Reykjavik was via the "Flybus" (or, in tiny Icelandic letters, "Flugrútan"). "Flybus," like "Icelandair" and even "Phallological Museum," was one of many primarily English-language logos geared to Iceland's mostly English-speaking tourist population.
The ride To Reykjavik from the airport passed through some of the bleakest, most desolate land we'd seen in many years of travel. To our left was the dark blue of the wind-aggravated ocean, and to our right were vast empty brown expanses of ancient but still uninhabitable lava. Now and then we'd see a sheltered harbor with a tiny fishing village clinging more to sea than to land. Despite our eagerness to fall in love with this place if only for the duration of our three day vacation, there was no mistaking its ugly bleakness. "...In this godforsaken land" was a phrase we kept using as we discussed the scenery. Even in the deserts of the American southwest there are signs of life more advanced than stringy brown grass sprinkled on crumbling lava.
One evidence of human activity we saw in abundance was cairns, or little piles of rocks. Cairns are one of the simplest ways a human can demonstrate that intelligent forces have been at work amid the chaos of nature. In this part of Iceland, the raw materials for cairns are much more abundant than the raw materials for other sorts of human creative endeavors. We saw so many cairns that we started joking about cairn-making being one of the big diversions and weekend activities of the bored youth of Reykjavik. Then, of course, there also must be the subset of bored youth who delight mostly in "cairn tipping." What a hoot!
Reykjavik itself has more the appearance of a village than it does of a city. Most of its buildings, even in the downtown area, are houselike in appearance and only two or three stories tall. Many of the roofs are painted either red or green. Dominating the skyline, such as it is, is the single tower of Hallgrim's Church on a hill adjacent to downtown. It's a Neoclassical concrete monstrosity that many in Reykjavik will never come to love until the day a terrorist crashes a plane into it.
Our hotel was the Hotel Esja, which was out on the eastern fringe of town along the coast. Having been told it was a four star hotel, we were a little surprised to find it situated in a strip mall across the street from an active construction site.
Even more surprising was the room we were provided. It was way up on the eighth floor with a commanding view of the Reykjavik harbor, but it came equipped with two tiny twin beds. What, did they think we were brother and sister? Gretchen immediately called down to the main desk to ask what was up with the beds. Unbelievably, the woman at the desk claimed that the hotel didn't have any rooms with double beds. "Well, then can I have the name of some other hotel that does have double beds?" Gretchen asked. It turned out that the Hotel Esja does have double beds, but they're in the fancier rooms designed for gentlemen traveling "business class," not for naïve Americans clicking on banner ads. But after some hemming and hawing, the woman at the desk upgraded our hotel room. Unfortunately, this meant we'd be staying on the second floor instead of the eighth and our only view would be of the construction site with its occasionally-swinging crane.
After we'd moved down to our hard-won room, we went to take advantage of the Jacuzzi in the health center on our floor. But upon finding out the price of admission was 2000 kronur ($20) each, we said screw it. Then, back in our room, we found that the only television available that we wouldn't have to pay to see was CNN, Turner Classic Movies, and (best of all) a live broadcast from the floor of the Icelandic Parliament. It was difficult for us to fathom the existence of a four star hotel where the standard room came equipped with tiny twin beds, three channels of unwatchable television, and a Jacuzzi costing something other than free. In Paris, even the cheapest hotels have double beds, cratered and broken though the mattresses might be. And in the United States, even your basic $45/night Best Western room comes with free access to the Jacuzzi and several channels of HBO.

After a multi-hour nap, Gretchen cajoled me into getting out of bed so that we could do something other than sleep through our vacation in this godforsaken land. We bundled up in scarves, gloves, hats, and winter coats and then set out westward toward Reykjavik's downtown on foot. The wind was blowing so powerfully at times that it stopped us dead in our tracks. Occasionally we ducked into an alleyway just to avoid the chill. On the few occasions when the wind stopped it was almost comfortable.
To get out of the cold if nothing else, we ducked into a coffee shop called Te & kaffi on Laugavegur Street. There we had a late breakfast of coffee and cheese bread that cost us about 1000 kronur ($10).
We made our way down to the harbor in downtown Reykjavik and went into the Harbour House art museum, which is housed in a converted warehouse. Admission was free.
The featured exhibit was of the paintings of the Icelandic pop artist Erró. But the term "pop artist" doesn't really do justice to Erró's work. To my eye, he's an oil painter with an eclectic visual appetite, sort of the visual analogue to the audio post-modernism of rockers like Soundtrack of Our Lives and Ween. Erró's talent lies in his ability to sample disparate visual styles and then synthesize them into cohesive (if improbable) wholes: Guernica-style cubist roadkill spread out on a lonely Icelandic highway behind a 50's era recreational fisherwoman in one painting, a renaissance-style lady with a platter of disembodied breasts posing in front of two antenna installations in the next. I'm not a big fan of traditional surrealism, but such visual sampling (verging on painted collage) worked for me. Interestingly, many of Erró's paintings contained strongly pro-communist imagery and dated from the early 70s, when such things had none of their present kitschy appeal.
After awhile Gretchen and I noticed that there didn't appear to be any sort of security in the museum at all. There were no cameras and no guys hanging around on the floor to see to it that we weren't handling or stealing the art. In fact, it wouldn't have been the least bit difficult to take a small painting from the wall, conceal it beneath a jacket, and carry it away. It's not like the place was crowded with world-famous paintings, but there was at least one Roy Lichtenstein. Apparently the people of Iceland don't have all that much experience with big city crime (or, for that matter, violations of the honor system). You can tell a lot about a city by the way its people lock their bicyles, and I didn't see a single bike lock in Reykjavik that didn't make me chuckle.
Gretchen was so struck by the small metal sculptures made by a Harpa Bjornsdottir that she asked about her down at the front desk. The woman working there, who apparently had nothing else to do, went through all the books she had for sale and even the local Reykjavik phone book in an effort to track down what information she could find. Because of the small size of the population and the unusual patronymic system of last names, people are listed according to first name in Icelandic phone books. Coming from a place as big and anonymous as New York, it struck us as quaint that you could just look up a national gallery artist in the phone book.
Back out on the street, downtown Reykjavik smelled exactly like kipper snacks. I love kipper snacks. I would have eaten a tin of them right then and there.
We wandered over to the northwest corner of Lake Tjönin and sat for awhile outdoors in the sun. By some miracle we were sheltered from the wind there and felt reasonably comfortable just hanging out by the water's edge. Several pigeons, ducks, geese, and swans came waddling up to us intent on begging, and upon realizing that we had nothing, they were content to preen themselves instead.
In the basement of the adjacent Iðnó Theatre, we found a huge three-dimensional relief map of Iceland. It was at least 20 feet across and we spent an unexpectedly long time examining it.
Just west of Lake Tjönin we found a graveyard choked with small gnarled trees, stones, and wooden crosses set at slightly different angles. It hadn't really dawned on me how inviolate the unique Icelandic patronymic last name system was until I saw it on every single gravestone in the graveyard. Everybody was either So-and-so-son or Such-and-such-dottir.
Gretchen had been keeping a keen eye out for signs of Jewish culture in Iceland, but so far Iceland was proving to be a cultural monolith, with the only religion in evidence being Lutheran. Occasionally we'd see an unexplained menorah design, but in the absence of other data, we'd have to dismiss it as a fluke. But then we came upon two unmistakably Jewish graves in the Icelandic graveyard. They belonged to an Arni Jonsson and a Jon Carlsson and came complete with Stars of David. There was also a grave belonging to a Jon Porlaksson that had a heavy menorah theme, but there were also tiny crosses used as bullets between dates engraved on the headstone. Perhaps these had been carved in error by a stonecarver unfamiliar with Jewish burial needs.
We walked back east past Lake Tjönin to the hill dominated by Hallgrim's Church. Heading up and down Laufásvegur Street looking to find a kitschy museum called the Volcano Show, we managed to find the American Embassy instead. It was being guarded by an extremely Icelandic-looking young man who had no doubt had it drummed into his head that Al Qaeda prefers striking America's interests in the most unexpected places.
By now we were so chilled that we desperately wanted to take advantage of one of Iceland's many geothermally-heated swimming pools. There was one nearby called the Sundlaug Reykjavik Swimming Pool, and we knew that the typical price for admission was 200 kronur, or $2 (as opposed to the 2000 kronur price of the Hotel Esja Jacuzzi). The only problem was that we'd forgotten to bring our swimming suits from the hotel.
We must have come to an authentically Icelandic pool, because the woman working the desk couldn't speak English (this was to be the only Icelander we met during the entire trip who could not speak English). She got one of the customers to translate and quickly we learned that we could rent swim suits, no problem at all. Gretchen's one-piece suit was normal enough by American standards, but mine was this tiny little European speedo thing, just like in that episode where the Simpsons go to Rio de Janeiro. I shrugged and took it.
I had no idea of the proper protocol for using an Icelandic pool. After I'd locked my stuff up in a locker, I was wandering around in the maze of lockers like some sort of forgetful laboratory rat. Finally this custodian type guy (who could barely speak English) asked me if I was lost and showed me to a sign that explained the rules in variety of languages. Basically, in Iceland you're expected to strip naked and shower thoroughly before entering the pool. They don't want any traces of fecal matter in their geothermal pools.
After getting over the self-consciousness of my tiny swimming shorts (and the way they showcased, nay, exaggerated my gender-specific profile), I entered into the hot water pool-based culture with enthusiasm. The Jacuzzi area was outside in the cold, but the water was so gloriously hot that the cold gale-force winds blowing overhead could at times come as something of a relief. When I'd had enough of the hot water, I'd go inside and jump in the swimming pool, which was kept at a temperature perfectly complementary to the Jacuzzi. After I'd had enough of that, I'd go back to the Jacuzzi or maybe even the super-hot steam room. Sometimes I'd have to just stand in the cold wind to erase the heat from my body. With every change of temperature came a whole new feeling of comfort, and as soon as the conditions were no longer comfortable, they could be replaced with something else. It was the temperature analogue of the way you'd imagine cocaine and alcohol working if they actually cancelled each other out, enabling multi-day binges of chemical excess. Like taking drugs, altering body temperature seems to have a profound effect on moods, emotions, and the sense of well being. I could easily imagine someone going back and forth between hot and warm water for hours and hours.
While hanging out in the pools and Jacuzzi, we had ample opportunities to study genuine Icelanders in their native habitat. In this cold godforsaken corner of the civilized world, they seem to have adopted their geothermal-powered lifestyle with as much passion as their Nordic hearts can muster. Looking at their facial features in the random intimacy of the Jacuzzi, I was struck by the fact that nearly all of them had eyes in the exact same shade of blue. I could imagine that, as an isolated population trapped for generations on this small, mostly-uninhabitable island that they might gradually become genomically monolithic. But there was more variety to their facial bone structure than I'd first thought. Indeed, later I learned that Iceland is actually more of a melting pot than other Scandinavian countries, especially these days when they have to import people to work in their fish processing plants.

Looking for dinner options, Gretchen and I walked west down Austurstræti. We were looking for something of an authentic Icelandic dinner experience for our first night in Reykjavik, so long as there was also a vegetarian option available for Gretchen. With an economy based mostly on the harvesting of fish, we imagined that an authentic Reykjavik restaurant would have an extensive seafood menu.
We ended up at place called Lækjarbrekka which, it turns out, is a bit more traditionally Danish than Icelandic, but not in any way that I could identify. Inside it felt a like the dining room of a fancy bed and breakfast, with lots of dark wood and folksy details. The atmosphere to a little getting used to, since there was no music playing and all you could hear was the uncomfortably-hushed conversations at other tables. A bottle of wine later, though, we were having a great time. My lobster-tail pasta dish was exquisite, and Gretchen found her vegetarian dish similarly delicious. The staff were exceptionally courteous and kept giving us extra things, compliments of the chef. These included little ball of duck (I ate Gretchen's) and glasses of after-dinner port. The only time I've ever felt this fussed-over at a restaurant was at Uguale in Manhattan. Every now and then I'd look outside and note that it was still dusk. Sundown happened at 10pm and dusk lasted past 11.

On the walk back to the Hotel Esja, Gretchen and I were the victims of a random drive-by shooting. I know this sounds absurd, especially in a place a clean and apparently crime-free as Reykjavik. But there we were, minding our own business, when suddenly a car passing by slowed down, its driver shouted something in unintelligible Icelandic, and then took a shot. There was a bright bluish flash and then he sped off. Instead of taking our lives, he'd taken our picture. Who knows why.

View a gallery of pictures from this adventure.

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