Returning – Reykjavík

I've been starting to wonder lately if I actually lead a charmed life. (In Iceland, at least, it certainly seems like it.)

I waited to write to friends in Iceland until my very last day in Berlin – Icelanders are the most spontaneous people I've ever met, and in my experience advance planning will get you nowhere but last-minute-ness is all!

So on Thursday I wrote to various friends saying I would be in Reykjavík this weekend and did they want to meet up, and one of them said, oh, I'm going to be away this weekend, but do you want to stay in my apartment while I'm away? It's empty, and the cat would love your company.

Speaking of Icelandic kindness, and Icelandic spontaneity!

If Berlin was a huge homecoming, Reykjavík is at least a small one. Walking down familiar streets, dropping into favorite cafés, marveling at how normal it feels to be here. Staying with the very same friend I stayed with two years ago, cat-sitting for the very same cat. (The fluffiest! gray! cat!). Getting joyfully reacquainted with my beloved Reykjavík City Library (where, two years ago, I spent many hours intently writing/revising to meet a deadline, from one of the desks by the windows on the fifth floor, looking out over the beautiful view of the harbor).

Just as it was in Berlin, it feels like I've simply stepped back into an existing life, unchanged in all the best ways.

(Photo break: a random shot of a bit of the Innipúkinn music festival going on in Reykjavík right now, because it's one of the few outdoor pictures I've taken so far. It's been gorgeous weather these last days, pleasantly mild and brilliantly sunny. And no, I still haven't found out why they always lay down strips of sod in the street whenever a music festival happens!)

I'd forgotten, too, the magic of a late-night flight into Reykjavík. I left Berlin at 10 p.m., but because we were flying both north and west, the sky actually got lighter as it got later, until we arrived in Reykjavík at midnight to a still-bright sunset sky. How I love Scandinavian summers. I don't think I will ever get over that awe at the endless light and color of a near-Arctic summer night sky.

And to add a final touch to the magic:

On the plane here, I got curious to know precisely what day I arrived in Iceland the very first time I came here. That very first, short, just-a-taste-of-what's-to-come trip to Iceland was five years ago, also around July/August/ish. Then I looked back through old pictures and things and realized – I'm traveling to Iceland, now in 2016, on Thursday, July 28. The date of my arrival in Iceland on that first trip in 2011 was...July 28. It was even a Thursday, too. Some kind of very pleasing symmetry about that!

Here was arrival in 2011, on the ferry pulling into Seyðisfjörður, a fjord on the eastern side of the country:

And here's one of my very first midnight sunsets, on my first night in Reykjavík on that first trip. This is literally just minutes before midnight:

Returning to the present: Tomorrow morning I'm off to Ísafjörður, a small town in a remote fjord, where I'm going to learn Icelandic for three weeks. JÁ!