If Tamerza is heaven on Earth to date-lovers, then Iceland must be heaven on Earth to geologists. As they so often reminded us, Iceland lies on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, over a hotspot. What more could one want? Unadulterated hotspot material, lava, volcanoes, earthquakes, geysers, glaciers. It's all there and I got to spend six weeks in the summer of '99 studying all of it on a geology program.
Getting to Iceland was an adventure in itself, seeing as I almost missed the plane. Since Icelandair doesn't fly out of Belium, I took the Eurostar to Paris, arriving an hour before my flight was to depart. Ordinarily, I like to come much earlier, but that is the it worked out. However, seeing as the train is rarely all that late and would be arriving at the airport terminal, I figured there should be no problems. Of course, we all know that if something can go wrong, it probably will. So, I arrived in a different terminal. Then, it took me a while to find the bus that would take me to the correct one (everything was very poorly marked). Of course, everyone was waiting for the bus, and there was no room for me. So I waited for 15 minutes for the next one. For reasons unknown to me, the bus driver got out in the middle of the route to check his tires, which took forever. By this point in time I had half an hour until departure and was getting very worried. With twenty minutes to go, I ran into my terminal and saw that my flight was already boarding. Of course, Charles de Gaulle airport is horribly constructed and I had to ask at information where the Icelandair desk was situated, since I didn't have enough time to go searching for it. And then the mad race began complete with two backpacks. After lots of panting and lots of racing down escalators (of course, my gate was the farthest away it could possibly be) I finally boarded the plane. Needless to say, I was the last one, and everyone gave me annoyed looks for holding them up. There was one advantage. My luggage was one of the first out, which never happens to me. And so, I got to Iceland, where it was cold, cold, cold.
My first impressions of Iceland were not exactly positive. A barren, lunar landscape of grey lava flows (some covered in greyish-green moss) against a grey sky and grey ocean and nothing to break the monotony. Sitting alone on the bus from Keflavik to Reykjavik, I began to seriously wonder why I had chosen to spend the next six weeks here. Reykjavik didn't prove to be much more exciting. Certainly, the multi-coloured houses were new and different, but the streets were empty, as were the supermarkets. And then there was the sun. It never got dark, just an endless supply of bleak light. How did people ever live here? Well, the the sun came out the next day and I understood Iceland's attraction.