This post started out more negatively than I’d like, so I’m mixing it up a bit in the hope that this will reduce that a bit.

I’m staying at the Reykjavik Downtown Hostel, which conveniently enough is actually downtown, and which seems like a nice place.

My first afternoon here, during the time I was awake, there was a … Class? Workshop? … on making bags from old t-shirts, as part of a reuse & recycle programme the hostel is a part of.

This goes as far as the bathroom in the hostel reception/cafe, which had a notice about Moon Cups, going into some detail & menting that they’re available for purchase at reception.
They’re very much into reducing waste. There are free food boxes in the kitchen for anything left over, so there’s a lot of pasta, a lot of rice, a variety of cereals, and a phenomenal amount of salt.

I’ve seen book swap shelves at other hostels (San Francisco & Rotorua spring to mind) , though this is the first time I’ve seen then divided by language. Could maybe be tempted by the Dark Angel tie-in novel, in exchange for my J.G.Ballard collection.

There’s also a gear swap box, which seems to have a solid layer of camping gas cannisters.

You can’t take fuel cannisters on a plane, so that part makes sense to me. The jandals, on the other hand, … I got nothing, and those weren’t the only pair.

How do you end up with surplus jandals in Iceland? The country actually has ‘ice’ in the name, which should be an indication that beachwear isn’t going to cut it.

The flight was, for the most part, horrible. I slept badly the night before the flight, which is standard for me, and worse on the flight, which is also annoyingly familiar, so … That wasn’t fun.

Takeoff was very rough, to the extent that I was wondering whether there was an actual problem. Turns out there wasn’t a problem, just Chicago providing a Windy City farewell, but it left me rattled, and that stuck around for most of the rest of the flight. Re-watched “Warm Bodies”, so it’s not like the whole trip was horrible.

Got to Iceland roughly when we were scheduled (the plane was late getting to Chicago, so we departed late) , and getting through immigration was a simple process thanks to my shiny UK passport. Going to have to enjoy that while I can.

It was still dark outside, and I was starting to feel the dehydration and lack of sleep kick in, so I bought the biggest bottle of water I could find and drank it while the sky turned grey & the sun came up. The vague plan was to get a bus to the hostel once the sun came up, so that I could see the view.

Naturally, I fell asleep on the bus.

Still, I made it to the bus terminal, and then onto a smaller bus to get to my hostel, as the bigger vehicles won’t fit down the streets.

Something I’ve noticed on some long flights is that I get a sort of “travel hangover” in the days following. Headaches, odd fever spikes, and generally feeling ill. It happened in London, but I didn’t notice it in Chicago, and who could possibly notice a fever in Dubai.

Well, it happened here too, but this time I was expecting it, and made sure to have no plans for the first few days.

There was no way I’d be able to get into my room/bed at 10am, but I did stash Big Red and hang out, by which I mean sleep, in the lobby/cafe. I didn’t go for lying down on the benches, as some other folk did, mostly because they’d grabbed the ones that weren’t a massive inconvenience for patrons.

After a while, the reception folks gave us access to the guest kitchen & the wee lounge upstairs, because it’d be a more comfortable place to sleep. And possibly so that we’d get the hell out of their nice lobby.

There was already someone crashed out on the sofa, but there was a comfy chair, and I got in a couple of hours of much-needed sleep until check-in. When I got to my room, there was already someone sleeping there. (She’d also arrived that day, but managed to convince them to let her get in early)

Didn’t do much for the rest of the day. Hung out in the lobby cafe, listened to some folks making bags from t-shirts and talking about sustainability issues & gear recycling, that sort of thing.

Roommates turned out to be a (formerly sleeping like the dead) woman from Wales, here on very much a spur of the moment trip with a monumentally cheap flight deal, and a guy from San Francisco who was finishing up his trip, having already done a bunch of sightseeing up North.

Someone arrived at around midnight, and did a pretty good job of being quiet as he located his bed, more or less figured out how the duvet worked, and got into a top bunk without turning on the light.