Across Northern Europe: Lonely Love in Iceland

by Brook Silva-Braga on

I checked my e-mail yesterday and got that feeling you get when you have a giant crush on someone and they show up in your IN box. Your eyes go to their name and everything else becomes spam and you click on the message like unwrapping a package. You are in a kind of love.

I’m in a kind of love with Marie. She’s the Brit who posted a message on the hostel message board saying she wanted to go to the Westmann Islands with someone. I was very happy to see that message because I wanted that too. So I e-mailed and waited, like a kid passing a note to the cute girl in class. Iceland’s biggest festival crams 10,000 youngsters into a campsite each August and I didn’t want to be there alone

When you’re traveling alone the desire to meet someone is like a hunger. Explaining it to someone who has never traveled alone would be like explaining hunger to someone who has never had an empty belly. Like real hunger, it can make you a little loopy in the head and make everything around you sharper and more real. Then when you no longer feel it, you can’t even really understand what you felt or why you wanted to eat so terribly badly.

When I got home from my long trip I gobbled up people like a castaway survivor. I think there’s a Jack London story where the protagonist makes it through a terribly hungry ordeal and then can’t stop eating once he’s rescued. I was like that for a while too, until finally I realized I couldn’t eat anymore and realized some other things that don’t extend so neatly in this far-extended metaphor.

The thing I like most about traveling is how you have to work just to get through the day. You don’t know where to shop or how to get to town or which bus leaves when. You don’t speak the right language or know the customs or have a favorite restaurant you visit too often. You are engaged in a way you just can’t be at home.

I can’t say I like that feeling of stomach-empty loneliness but I like that I feel something and I love the rush you always get when the cute girl in class passes a note back.

So it was last night and Marie wrote back. We met up on the porch outside the hostel with a little light left in the 11pm sky. It was cold. I sat at the same table where earlier in the night the British couple celebrating their 20th anniversary asked me to snap a picture as they sipped champagne. They were in a different kind of love.

But I’ll settle for Marie and I’s kind right now. We’re going to take the 5.40pm bus to the 2am ferry. We’re going to share some booze and food. We’re in love, Marie and I. We’re never going to speak after Monday, we’re never going to kiss. But I checked my e-mail today and no one made me feel like she did.

Previously on Across Northern Europe: Shining a Light On Iceland

Brook Silva-Braga is traveling northern Europe for the month of August and reuniting with some of the people he met on the yearlong trip which was the basis of his travel documentary, A Map for Saturday. You can follow his adventure in the series, Across Northern Europe.

Across Northern Europe: Shining a Light On Iceland

by Brook Silva-Braga on

There’s something nice about traveling in Iceland. There are a number of nice things, I’m sure, but one came to mind specifically as soon as I landed. This nice thing is nice if you’re a certain kind of traveler. Namely, the kind who maybe sometimes pretends to be a little poorer than you really are. We’re all that kind of traveler by month two in South Asia. That’s the traveler I was when I chose the 250 baht guesthouse in Bangkok and scoffed at the 500 baht room with aircon. I was pretending to be poor.

But there’s no need to strike a pose in Iceland because, friends, I am poor. On my yearlong trip I didn’t carry a tent and rarely camped but I’m glad I have one now. Even my slab of campsite grass is 520 baht (that’s US$13 if you’re not Thai) and a real roof would have run me about $100. Iceland is expensive, that’s what I’m trying to say. Iceland is small and homogeneous and cold. Those are cliches too. That last list hasn’t proven that true to me so far but the expensive thing is as true as an $80 entree.

Today I went to Gunar Haraldsson, the director of the Institute of Economic Studies at the University of Iceland, and asked him why everything was so expensive. “Because we’re rich,” he informed me.

So that settles that.

You don´t need me to come to Iceland to tell you it’s expensive and you don’t need me here to tell you it’s light all the time, but I guess I just did that too. There are about 20 hours of light each day and it has the effect of making the day very slooooow. It feels like you have time to do so many things, even though everything closes by 6pm and the main things you have to do then are walk around or type in the basement of a coffee shop.

Lonely Planet told me Icelanders are all in bands and believe in fairies.

“That’s Bjork’s fault,” Sevinn Bjornsson told me, blasphemously, today. He’s the editor of Iceland’s English language newspaper, The Grapevine, and he had a bone to pick with the woman who would have put Iceland on the map if it hadn’t already been there all distorted and lonely in the middle of the north Atlantic. He’s sick of tourists asking if Icelanders believe in fairies and assuming they are all in bands. She started that, he said. For the record he has fifteen friends in bands, and one who believes in fairies.

I will now segue from fairies to ferries. They run from the main island to the Westmann Islands and I want to be on one this weekend. On the first weekend in August “all the rules in Iceland change” and “Iceland is not Iceland” according to the girl at the tourist information office. That’s because the whole country goes camping for a long holiday weekend and the most out of control incarnation of the party is out on the Westmann Islands. Ten thousand revelers are expected and most thought to buy a ferry ticket more than two days in advance and won’t — like me — be compelled to make the three hour crossing at 2am.

Except no one goes camping the first weekend in August as it turns out. Not the economics professor, or the editor of the paper, or the girl at the tourist office, or even the girl at reception at my campsite. They all told me the whole thing was just too drunk and out of control these days. “And it usually rains,” Sveinn added.

So to recap: Icelanders don’t believe in fairies or go camping when they’re supposed to. They don’t all belong to bands or look the same. But they charge $8 for a local bus when you don’t have exact change. They charge $11 for a beer. They charge $40 for a ferry in the middle of the night to a campsite where the entire country (or no one at all) may be camping in the rain.

Brook Silva-Braga is traveling northern Europe for the month of August and reuniting with some of the people he met on the yearlong trip which was the basis of his travel documentary, A Map for Saturday. You can follow his adventure in the series, Across Northern Europe.

Blogger Brook Silva-Braga

by Brook Silva-Braga on

Introducing another new blogger at Gadling, Brook Silva-Braga…

Where was your photo taken? Varanasi, India

Where do you live now? New York, NY

Scariest airline flown: Not sure they had a name but it eventually went to the Virgin Islands after first stalling on the runway.

Favorite city/country/place: Who can chose a favorite?

Most remote corner of the globe visited: Muktinath, Nepal

Favorite guidebook series: Don’t make me plug LP, they don’t need the help

Favorite foreign dish? Restaurant?… Masaman curry at Green Papaya in Ko Phi Phi, Thailand

Favorite travel book: A Moveable Feast

Where would you buy a second home/retire? St. John, USVI

Country with the most beautiful women/men: Girls from Denmark + guys from Switzerland = unfair to the rest of us.

Brook Silva-Braga is traveling northern Europe for the month of August and reuniting with some of the people he met on the yearlong trip which was the basis of his travel documentary, A Map for Saturday. You can follow his adventure in the series, Across Northern Europe, which begins tomorrow.