Iceland: thinking of beginnings from the end

SKYR LOVE IS TRUE LOVE

I'm starting this post on hour 6 of 11 at Keflavík Airport on my 57-hour return trip home (with 30-hours of layover goodness). I guess this is the time to transition, between time zones, places, and states of mind.

Sleeping on top of lumpy backpack is really uncomfortable. I won't be able to listen to Of Monsters and Men for a while after hearing the same sample from "Mountain Sound" play once every 10 minutes as part of a tourism ad on a monitor right above my sleeping settlement. I'm being tempted by all of the wonderfully licorice-y Icelandic candies being sold on the other side of this atrium. There are pastries baking behind me and that is also tempting, especially since they seem to be wafting the smell right at me.

I've been considering walking to Keflavík proper, but it's cold outside, a 45-minute endeavor each way, and I'm carrying about 40 pounds of stuff that I have to take with me via non-backpacker backpack and tote bag. It feels like time wasted, but then again it's 5 in the morning and I've hardly slept for the last day and a half, so I'll let the inertia slide this time.

Tjörnin, Reykjavík

Being here in this airport harkens back not only to the beginning of this trip, but to my first real self-determined travel experience as well, back at the beginning of the summer between high school and college when I came to Iceland with my friend Katie. For a lot of reasons, it was a travel experience that's hard to rival for a number of reasons. Anyone who knows me well has probably heard me talk about my love for Iceland at some point; this trip was taken around the height of my obsession, after I had spent two years learning all sorts of things about the country. I knew the majority of the CDs in every record store we went to in Reykjavík. I learned how to pronounce the alphabet and practiced by reading signs everywhere we went ("Neyðarutgangurinn"? No problem! Or you might say...no emergency). I asked people to teach me words, and greeted everyone in Icelandic (my vocabulary consists of basic travel phrases, obscure words from song lyrics, and the tiniest bit of grammar picked up from a month-long attempt to actively learn the language). I had read endlessly about all the places we were going, and could spout a ridiculous number of facts about things like huldafolk and rímur.

And if that wasn’t enough, this was the first time I’d tasted independence like this: all day every day for that entire week, we would do whatever we wanted, and if you couldn't tell from the paragraph above, there was a lot that was wanted. The possibilities were endless, and much sleep was sacrificed in order to cram them all in.

That week was also a turning point in realizing that the world is actually a much friendlier place. And it sounds silly to say, but that strangers were less likely to be sources of stranger danger and more likely to become friends. I'll qualify this by drawing attention to the fact that we were in Iceland, an extremely safe country with one of the highest standards of living in the world, but still, people are people no matter where they are and there's goodwill somewhere no matter wherever you go. We made so many friends in so many random ways, and sometimes I wonder what these people that I'll likely never meet again (minus a few, and to one in particular if you're reading this you know who you are and I'll come to a music festival with you someday, I promise) are up to now. All of them helped me along my way to being friendlier and more sociable after years of keeping up my status quo as a quiet person - high school was over, and this trip was the beginning of a change.

This is still one of my favorite photos ever.

Speaking of communication, I thought about language while sitting next to a three-year-old Icelandic boy on the plane over from Amsterdam. I've heard it mentioned by people time and time again and it's always amusingly relatable: "Whenever I hear children speaking foreign languages, I'm always so impressed at how fluent they are! And then I think about it."

Language is a signal of belonging. After spending two months with little more than "dober dan"s and "grazie"s before resorting back to English (and feeling lucky that I grew up fluent in the language that the rest of the world has decided to learn), I've become very aware of this. It's the most outward and obvious reason that I don't really belong in any of the places that I've been to lately. Nothing says, “I’m trying to connect to you” like speaking someone’s language, especially when it’s unexpected that you can. Being able to communicate with someone with the words that they think and dream in is a whole different world from engaging them in their second or other language. I try and use Spanish whenever I meet a native speaker for that reason – people never expect to hear it coming out of an Asian girl’s mouth (the opposite of that surprise effect occurs, however, when I try and speak Chinese, which I speak more poorly than Spanish. No surprise points there).

If the right combination of time and motivation ever hits me, I’m going to make an effort to learn Icelandic. It doesn’t matter to me that it’s one of the more rarely spoken languages in the world. In my world, it’s spoken frequently enough. It’d be a way of solidifying that meaningful connection to this place that’s been so peculiarly important to my life and who I am.

While traveling, going around and seeing sights isn't the most important thing to me. Trying to internalize thoughts like these while trying to understand this world, is.

Reykjanes Peninsula from the sky