Nearly Wrecked in Reykjavik

The trouble began just after we landed in Reykjavik. In a hurry to take my meds, I grabbed a backpack identical to mine, except for three little color-coded strings. Aargh: At the hotel, the bag proved to be full of ladies shoes. I mean think Fetish City! It was 0200h before my meds got through Customs. And it was as bright as day outside. Holey Moley. I couldn’t get to sleep. Wondering what the gal with too many shoes looked like, from the ankle up. I’ll never know.

Alas, at the airport, no lockers! And my flight is the next day! (To move my appointment ahead a day would cost me around 800 more dollars, obviously a fiscal impossibility.) I spy a phone connected to a local motel. The Alex Motel. He’ll pick me up, free, in ten minutes! A 21-year-old local. Polished by an exchange year in Indonesia. Taking a degree in math at the U of I. If you’re using Keflevik International— Iceland’s only global connection since NATO took its missiles and left for home— think Alex. They actually have a range of services—camping sites, a trailer park, old-fashioned Route 66-type cabins, as well as the standard hotel room where I put up. Free computer. Marginal breakfast. But I stock up on powdered coffee and do-it-yourself soups. Big TV in “the living room” abutting the reception desk. I took a three-hour ramble into the airport’s namesake.

The next day I was still a universe away. That evening sun, she don’t go down.

Reykjavik’s main business street is an architectural revelation. It seems that at the turn of the 20th Century Iceland had rotting wooden roofs—and plenty of fresh fish. Britain had scads of corrugated iron—and many hungry mouths to feed. They swapped. Eventually what was good on the roof was even better as siding. Add a pinch of Carpenter Gothic’s decorated eaves and such, and you’ve invented the most beguiling vernacular architecture on the whole globe. Paint those corrugated iron sidings with bright barn colors, and you’ve created a unique genre to stun the smug cosmopolitan.

A local architect proudly took me to an innovative high-rise whose glass-enclosed balconies are designed to foil the erratic high winds that plague the island. Except two condo ladies had moved all their ugly Borax furniture out on these glassed terraces, thereby engendering in his staunchly libertarian heart a real burn. By the time we had arrived at his prime achievement— a $6 million villa overlooking a lake in a massive lava field, designed for his own contractor— he already seemed accepting of how those aesthetic slobs had disfigured his sylvan terraces. (He was learning it was not easy having thoughtless clients.) I traipsed throughout this three-storey house built over an indoor swimming pool.

The art scene on the corporate level was OK, but they try too hard to achieve the Higher Goofy at the National Gallery— a maze in total darkness except glimmers to mislead you into “feeling” you’re about to find the door out. Meanwhile, back at the City Art Museum, there are more arcane games. No permanent collections to gew and gaw over. But one grand exception that would make a trip a must until the end of August: the 40th anniversary of the Nordic House, a cultural center to encourage northern intellectual fraternity. By Alvar Aalto! With a comprehensive retrospective of the greatest Finnish architect of our time.

And the shops. I’ve never seen so many stores featuring superbly creative work, from jewelry to clothing to home furnishings. And I saw a collective bless the side of a nondescript house with a quirky mural praising Iceland’s inscrutable mountains— all in honor of Independence Day, June 17, which occurred in the middle of my one-week visit. A bus pass– for one day, three days or a week— is an unbeatable bargain. The buses go everywhere and frequently, and schedules are clearly marked. Iceland is the best-brochured territory I’ve yet encountered. Not only are they intelligently written, they’re great book art to boot.

I’m not going to babble at length on Iceland’s food. Hostel breakfasts were solid if eggless. But toward the end of my stay, I asked my photo lab technician for a good place to eat fish. He gave me clear instructions to a place on the harbor, in the last of three parallel rows of former warehouses, which are behind the Orange restaurant. Asking for a menu, I was shown a small fridge with a glass door. I picked whale, along with the tastiest lobster soup I have yet consumed. You sit on kegs. You babble endlessly with a constantly moving flux of interesting people.

The only other venue with such pizzazz is the top-floor coffee shop of Eymundsson’s, the biggest bookstore in town. USA Today and the Herald Trib both on sale. I was skeptical about all the blather I had read about Icelanders being the most literate 300,000 currently inflicting the earth. But they are. Honest to God. Damn, where Philly has one free Metro daily, the Icemen have five to choose from. What a way to grow! Best week yet in my life.