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What a forward-thinking country Iceland is, giving you free Internet access in coffee shops, even if the keys are in strange places. What you are supposed to do with a button that has a ? on it, I don’t know. I also have yet to find the ‘at’ symbol. Perhaps email hasn’t taken off in a big way here yet.

Last night’s flight, what I remember of it, started off bumpy, made all the moreso by a brat in the seat behind me who insisted on kicking me in the back as far as Liverpool, at which point I fortunately dropped off, amid turbulence and an episode of Home Improvement on the telly.

I woke up two hours later. The brat was asleep, an uneaten vegetarian meal sat on my tray and Allo Allo was on the telly. Outside the window was bright grey/blue sky, and a low, brilliant moon. My watch said 2am, but it looked like half past eight on a winter’s moning.

We put down half an hour later in a modern airport reminiscent of Dr No’s lair. All around us the landscape was black, and permeated by a smell like week-old body odour covered up by cheap deodorant. Down here it was twilight, but as the bus we took drove us towards Reykjavik the sky got brighter, and by the time we changed busses on the cold tarmac of the domestic air terminal it was getting quite light.

The sun was up by the time we made it to bed in our modern, pleasant hotel where the water that comes from the taps has the sulfurous smell of egg mayonnaise. There is an airing cupboard by the little kitchen area that is a tangle of hot pipes with not a boiler in sight - all of the hot water seemingly comes straight out of the ground.

The weather today is fair. From where I sit typing I look out across a duck-filled lake, above which blue skies are dusted by pretty white clouds. The wind coming up off the sea is cutting, but when you find a sheltered corner the sun feels quite warm.

We pick up our hire care tomorrow and go out in search of waterfalls and geysirs.

Meanwhile, my coffee is getting cold. I must log off.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 18th, 2002 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.