Iceland

Trip Start Jun 22, 2007

Trip End Sep 01, 2007

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Flag of Iceland Reykjavik, Iceland
Tuesday, June 26, 2007

My European summer started with a three hour delay at Logan Airport, after we had all boarded the plane, on time, we were told there was a technical problem and would have to get off the plane and wait for them to fix it. They said it would only take an hour, but it took three, they said no one would miss there connecting flights, but pretty much everyone did, except me. My eight hour lay over in Reykjavik (Ray-key-vick) Iceland was just cut down to five hours. But I still had to listen to everyone else complain.
When they finished replacing a part of one of the engines that was leaking oil we re boarded the plane. In the front of the plane they had a rack of Icelandic newspapers. For no good reason I grabbed one and put it under my arm. Suddenly the flight attendants started greeting me in Icelandic rather than English, I just nodded my head back at them and discovered something I'm almost positive will come in handy this summer

Iceland1

. If you don't say anything and nod your head when it seems appropriate people will assume your a native, a quiet aloof native, but a native none the less.
    The flight was nice but I couldn't get any sleep because the sun shone through the window on the far side of the plane directly into my eyes the entire time, and even when it was 2 o'clock in the morning as we were flying over the tip of Greenland it didn't set it simply hovered on the horizon in a constant blue-green sunset. But by this point I had given up on sleeping and simply stared at the illuminated ice flows in the arctic circle below. The sunset made the water a eerie deep glowing blue and the ice sparkled. IT looked like a moving milky way in the ocean (at this point I am sleep deprived and making poetic analogies in my mind quite easily).
    When we land in Iceland at 4am the sun has already risen back up without ever fully having set and I can see over the Island as we circle in for our final descent. It reminded me a lot of the coast of Nova Scotia or any norhtern coast except more barren. Fields of volcanic ash abutted fields of lavender that surrounded the airport. When we landed I walked past the crowd of people encircling Icelandair's service desk to get new connecting flights and headed towards customs to get my first stamp on my new passport. It was kind of anticlimatic the customs guy just stamped it and shoved it back under the glass in his booth and said nothing to me, no "Welcome to Iceland world traveler", no "Bj�rk is waiting through those doors to tell you all about our small, proud country", no nothing. So, I simply walked through the airport and out into the parking lot.
    Iceland has a population of of 300,000 people, 97% of whom live in Reykjavik which is actually no where near the airport. So I wondered through the parking lot, took a few pictures and headed back inside to find my connecting flight to Stockholm.        &n bsp;

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