I’ve been home from Iceland for four hours. I am very, very sleepy. My eyes itch. My upper lip feels funny. I’m having that looming and staring and trying to remember how to type feeling. So why am I up and writing in my blog about Iceland when basically I’ve been writing in a blog about Iceland for the last four days? Because that one was for them. This one is for you. And just like in the daily diary where “we” meant “I,” in this case “you” means “me.”
Plus I’m really digging being back on a keyboard that doesn’t go all umlauty on me when I least expect it.
The trip home was relatively uneventful, despite my many close encounters on the Baltimore-to-Raleigh leg with a pair of fellow passengers from a country where the preferred mode of travel is clinging to the outside of trains. Not only did the man basically sit on me in the departure lounge, but he chose the seat next to me on the plane, thanks to Southwest’s cattle car approach to boarding. Then he placed his left elbow into my right side and held it there until it was necessary to move it to answer his mobile, which rang while we were landing. And he had a dry, hacking cough, which he made full use of throughout the flight from BWI to RDU. Should I succumb to dengue fever or beri beri in the next few days, be sure to send my regards to Passenger X.
Last night was the Airwaves wrap party, but I totally blew it off. After four days averaging three hours of sleep, I moved into a hotel for the final night, for a variety of reasons too mundane to catalog. But it was fantastic, and not just because I saw this from my window this morning. Being in the hotel allowed me plenty of time to re-establish my love for the minibar, which in turn helped me to ponder what the hell this sign hanging on the towels might mean. I also got to do my favorite thing in the world: order from room service, who supplied me with the worst $34 meal in history.
I just didn’t have the rock in me last night. I fell asleep at 8:00 p.m. with every intention of sleeping until about ten minutes before my plane took off, but I sprang fully awake at midnight. Apparently my body thought I was napping in preparation for once again staying up all night. From midnight until 4:00 a.m. I surfed the eight channels available. I especially enjoyed the Germans Doing Really Mundane Things channel, and the Two Guys Talking About Videos in Icelandic channel. There was also a channel with trivia questions in Icelandic. The multiple choice list of potential answers for one question was “Oscar Wilde, Robert Downey Jr., Kofi Annan.” I’m having no more luck coming up with a question for that list of answers than I had in the middle of the night with half a minibar in me.
And I watched “Detroit Rock City.” Perhaps if you’ve ever been in a similar situation you can understand how annoying it was to be wide awake watching “Detroit Rock City” at 4:00 a.m.
This morning I walked into town to buy some CDs by some of the Airwaves bands “Icelandic gangsta rap party at my house!” and availed myself of all that ReykjavÃk has to offer at 10:00 a.m., which is basically nothing. I suppose I could have gotten something to eat here, but there’s something about a chain of fast food places with a name reminiscent of the physical act of vomiting that I find strangely unappetizing.
I’m fading here, but I do have to share a story that is to date my favorite blog experience. “Warning: if it will lower your opinion of me to find that I am a shameless attention whore, stop reading now.” Before I went over, I wrote here about how excited I was to see the Icelandic band Ske, who I missed last year and whose album I fell in love with after I got home. I saw their show Thursday night, and it was amazing. I wrote about it the next day in the daily diary. Saturday night I was in a club, and an Icelandic guy walked up to me and asked, “Are you Fistful of Ploopie?” “Ploopie, Plooble… who can blame the guy.” It was Hrannar from Ske, who, according to the liner notes, plays rafgÃtarar, gÃtarar and forritun. Being a musician, and therefore a bit of a shameless attention whore himself, he had done a web search after their show to see if anybody had written about them yet, found this site and recognized me as the guy who was taking pictures at the show and singing along. We had a brief chat, and he’s a very nice guy, which makes me feel even worse that I invited them to a party after their show with no beer and a naked Scotsman.
Okay, now I’m going to bed. Or maybe I’ll be watching a really bad movie.