We aren’t headed back to California yet, but will be touching down in New York City today. So long, Rekjavik, I will miss your American-flavored chips. They taste like me.

2009 Reykjavik Fireworks from Benjamin Garrett on Vimeo.

The whole reason we traveled to Reykjavik during the Winter, necessitating the light machine and so forth, was that I wanted to be somewhere different for New Years.

We only learned after coming here that Reykjavik has a crazy New Years fireworks spectacle. So I was expecting an American-Style fireworks display, where everyone congregates in a particular place and watches the fireworks launched from the bay.

But no, this is not how it’s done. Everyone in town just buys an extraordinary amount of fireworks and sets them off in public places from 11:30pm until 12:30am on New Year’s Eve. During the ’show’, an older American guy in an NFL hat and quipped to us “This is like Iraq”. He seemed too old to have spent time in Iraq, but I do agree it seemed like we were under heavy bombardment.

The scariest part is that about 1 in every 100 fireworks would fizzle out before flying into that air and instead fly into a crowd of people and then explode. Numerous ambulances arrived during the show.

Before coming to Iceland, I found this interesting article about the battle on the island between rabbits and puffins. Puffins are native to the island and very strikingly cute looking birds.

Rabbits, as you may know, can and will reproduce every 30 days and can eventually destroy the habitats of native animals. In the case of Iceland, the rabbits were brought over from Spain some time ago. Puffins dig holes in the ground to lay eggs and spend the rest of the year flying about elsewhere. While the puffins are away, these Spanish rabbits drop in, connect the holes to each other to form burrows and have their own babies.

Puffins return and naturally want to use the same holes as the last time they laid their eggs and so there is a bit of a scuffle in which it’s believed the rabbits win.

Apparently Icelanders feel for for the puffins (even though they also tend to eat a bit of puffin here and there) and so are shooting rabbits to help out the puffins. But on the other hand, Icelanders also feel for the cute rabbits and so don’t want the rabbits shot.

I can’t find any more recent information on this ongoing Puffin/Rabbit struggle than the 2006 article. So I guess I’ll have to set up a Google alert for this to see if there are any future developments.

We knew Iceland was going to be dark for much of the time before coming. When we arrived at the hotel around 8a, we asked the concierge when the sun would come up. She guessed around 10:30a. It starts getting dark around 3:30p. But the thing is, it’s kind of hard to tell because it’s not ever really bright. At some point, you just have to figure it’s as light as it’s going to be.

I remember this from when I lived here but I think Neb had some difficulty adjusting. Our sleeping hours were completely irregular and unpredictable (well also because of New Years Eve and the Saturday night we decided to see what the famous nightlife scene was all about, which doesn’t even start until midnight or 1a). By the end, he started to lose it a bit.

Today we went for a swim and some hot tubbing at Laugardalslaug, the city’s largest pool facility and the one I went to as a kid. At the facility, Neb finally found some relief:

Finally, I found the Sunlight Machine from Benjamin Garrett on Vimeo.

The lamp in question is the Philips EnergyLight. Related, and tempting to neb, the Philips goLite BLU.

Misa and I went to the Blue Lagoon last Friday. The Blue Lagoon is interesting because it’s a warm, blueish-white pool that’s really just industrial waste. It’s runoff from a nearby geothermal plant (note the steam in the background of the above picture). The people that run the Blue Lagoon have found that the waste runoff is full of silica which seems to be good for the skin, especially for people with certain types of skin problems. So they built a big resort there, with a hotel, restaurant, spa, massage, etc etc. They even have a line of skin care products (which seems a bit like a scam to me, but that’s just my opinion.)

The more I considered it, I think the Blue Lagoon would be a great place to film a low budget slasher movie. You start out with a group of UK tourists (maybe with Kiera Knightly if you want to blow the budget on one person, and so the audience knows who will make it out alive) visiting from a boarding school for kids with absent rich parents. They’re visiting Iceland, driving out to the Blue Lagoon, but there’s something creepy about it all.

Then bad things start happening. First, the snow piles up and all the roads close. Then, the power is cut. And things go downhill quickly from there. The bad guy could even be an evil Icelandic elf or something.

Anyway, Misa and I filmed very short snippet of what this could be like.

Blue Lagoon Slasher Movie from Benjamin Garrett on Vimeo.

We happened upon the weekly economic protests in Reykjavik. I tried to translate this sign but it was a little too poetic for the translator to make sense of. Something about continental drift.

Here’s an article about the economic crisis going on in Iceland.

Geysir from Benjamin Garrett on Vimeo.

The more you know: The original geyser from which the word comes from is in Iceland.

Update: Ditched the embed tag.

We took it easy today, wandering around the city on foot to the house where I lived from 1985-1989. On the way there, we saw my old Icelandic school (where I remember Meg & I eventually started skipping in secret a lot), our old local swimming pool and the Reykjavik farm zoo which didn’t exist when I lived here but they had rabbits, so of course we had to go!

We’ve seen the hot dog stands everywhere which I remember from my youth as well, but I also remember the sauces as being the dominating issue and since I didn’t feel like eating lamb here (especially after seeing them at the farm zoo!), I’ve been getting them without the meat - which is on the menu, so it’s not that strange. The brown flakey looking stuff is dried onions; there is also fresh onions, ketchup, a mayo type of sauce and a really delicious mustardy sauce as well.

Check out this Daily Show coverage of Iceland’s contribution to the Iraq war effort. The hotel the Daily Show correspondent is staying in is the same as our hotel, the Radisson 1919.

Part I:

Part II: