Hanging Out in Reykjavik, A Cool Place But Not Exactly All That

Before taking a trip there, near everything I’d read about Reykjavik, the capital and only real city of Iceland, was positive.  Everyone simply loved it.  Cute, intimate, creative, having the nightlife of a city five times its size.  Nightlife that runs all night.  Lots of microbrews and sub shops for cheap food.  Everyone is creative, lots of arts and indie music.  Nightlife, yes.  People keep food blogs on the place.   Quirky, creative, colorful, lots of writers and music, and yet again, awesome nightlife.

I’ve lived in two places (Chapel Hill, North Carolina for grad school, and Takoma Park, Maryland) that share that same native-self-love quality.  The residents in those places adore them in a way I found creepy.  It’s not just love, they utterly adore them, as if they each are an oasis in the heart of despair.  My neighbors would gush, truly gush, about how wonderful the place is and how people move there and never ever ever leave.  Places like that scare me.  Residents will mention the most trite establishments down the street as if they’re eight-star restaurants and claim (rather falsely) their real estate market is one of the most competitive in the country, because naturally everyone wants to live there.  I left both places as soon as I could.

“The Next Prague” is a phrase travel writers throw around to indicate what is going to be the next cool, hip, cheap destination city to which the world will flock, the way people did to Prague once they discovered that wow Prague was wow gorgeous and seriously edgy and the beer was so good and cheap.  Prague became a backpacker, then a mainstream, must-go.  Reykjavik is often touted as one of the Next Big Things, but let us tarry a bit on that.  Reykjavik has a bit of an edge, but not the other stuff need to be the Next Prague.

I’m suspicious of places that everyone loves (I didn’t love Prague, for instance), and there’s no shortage of people who love Reykjavik.  It’s a small town that thinks it’s a major city.  It’s a puritan society product that thinks it’s hedonistic.  Iceland artists and musicians are the real thing, but are medium fish in a tiny pond.  People write blogs about how wonderful the city is, but other Nordic places like Copenhagen blow it out of the water.  It doesn’t have sights, except one big church.  It’s not a pretty or striking city in any way.  The beer is not cheap, quite the opposite.  It may be a better place to live than to visit.

I liked the city well enough, but my expectations had been raised too much.  Frommer’s guide says Reykjavik “is more cosmopolitan than you can shake a martini at…”, and that “it’s easy to fill a long weekend or a whole fortnight” there.  Lonely Planet says, “Most visitors fall helplessly in love, returning home already saving to come back,” and that once you consider all its charms, “you’ll agree that there’s no better city in the world.”  No, on all counts, especially the fortnight part.  The city is vibrant but in a college-town way, not like a real city.  The vibrant part runs out several blocks off of downtown and a few blocks away from the main edgy street, Laugavegur.  It seems to have no crime, pollution, or even homelessness, but read local papers like the English-language Grapevine and you’ll find its problems.  Plus, it’s damn expensive, probably because, as an MBA friend of mine said, “They’re on the edge of the Arctic Circle and they still insist on having a first-world economy.”

And the coup de grace:  there’s only one store in the downtown area at which you can buy alcohol, a state-run place called Vinbuðin.  There are bars and restaurants of course, but no stores sell alcohol.  The whole country is like that.  This attitude towards alcohol betrays all their counter-culture self-image, as Iceland basically had Prohibition until 1989.  Any seriously edgy place needs cheap drinks; that’s how Prague got popular.  If you just want to pop into a 7-11 to grab a few beers in Reykjavik, forget it.  You can drink at a bar, sure, but that will cost you plenty.  The state-run liquor stores have the strangest opening hours ever; one out in a small town several hours away was open for one hour (5:00-6:00) a few days a week, that’s it, and I had to plan my sightseeing that day to be back in town during that hour just to pick up a few beers for that evening.  The strategy of every visitor upon arrival in Iceland should be to stock up in the Duty-Free store before leaving the airport.  Really, just bring the beer on the bus, to your flophouse or hotel.  You’ll be glad you have those when you find that every bar in town charges $10 for a simple lager.

Another sign of non-edginess: Reykjavik’s favorite food is the hot dog.  People debate which stand there has the best, with one near the waterfront having mythical local status.  Their second-favorite food seems to be pizza.  They promote eating minke whale to the tourists, and are quick to tell you it’s legal, but that’s only because the Icelandic government refuses to go along with the International Whaling Commission’s ban on whaling.  The rest of the world (except Iceland, Japan, and Norway) says whaling is illegal, and wrong.

Checking out the town

My street here in Reykjavik is called Laugavegur, by far the most interesting in the city.  It starts in the small downtown area.  Outside that, you immediately notice that so much on the street is for tourists, and for me, Reykjavik is now included in the “Cities you didn’t realize were very touristy” list.  There are a double handful of places dedicated solely to booking you a tour.

The other tourist alerts were the gift shops, and they seemed to never end.  They were full of stuffed puffins, tee-shirts, and other things made in China.  The prices were nuts.  I wanted to get a small stuffed puffin for a friend, but even a tiny one was $14.  Tee-shirts with funny sayings on them were selling for $33 each.  Most stores had a deal: buy three get one free.  Who spends $100 on tee-shirts?

Laugavegur is full of bars, thank goodness, just like the main street in a college town.  I tried most of them.  The standard national light lager beer that every country must have is called Viking here, and it’s about $10 in an average bar.  Happy hours are your friends.  I liked the bar scene here, but they have a few silly ones, like the Big Lebowski Bar and the Chuck Norris bar.  (They are exactly what you would think.)

As to What to Do in the city, there’s one main sight: the Hallgrímskirkj, the tall white church that’s nearly the only symbol of the city (besides a boat sculpture on the waterfront).  It’s a rocking building.  The sky was turbulent and I got some good photos from the front.  Inside, it’s stark and mostly barren, just white with almost no decoration.  You can go up the tower for $7 but how good can the view be?

The other What to Do in the city is the National Museum, about $10, small but totally worth it.  What you’ll discover through the museum’s stories and other books around town is that Iceland, unlike many Next Prague contenders, never had a Golden Age that left it with beautiful buildings just waiting to be discovered.  I had been thinking of Iceland somewhat like Denmark, but no.  It has been more like Greenland, little more than an outpost for most of its history.  Only in the past couple generations have people had any money, and only in the current generation can being Icelandic be cool.  Their first-world status is recent and fragile.

The Harpa concert hall downtown is bound to show up on any what-to-do list.

As to What Else to Do, look on any list and you’ll see the other recommendations involve getting out of town.  Go see the countryside, because that’s what is good about Iceland.

You already suspected it was damn expensive here, smart you.  One problem with being the Next Prague is that the Next Prague must be cheap, as that’s another reason why Prague became the Current Prague.  I’m mostly talking flophouses and beer, two things that much of us need when we travel, but we also need to eat.  I was in Reykjavik for an academic conference, and the first evening I met dozens of grad students, fellow conference attendees, in the small supermarket down the street from my crashpad, all of us buying groceries so that we wouldn’t have to eat out much.  The cheapest hostel in town is about $50 for a 10-person dorm room.  The prices go up with less people in the dorm room, and a private room, no bath, is at least $100.  A mid-level hotel room would be about $200.

Eating in Reykjavik

As for cheap eats, within the numerous sub places, the falafels, even the spicy Asian soup with tofu, the cheapest item that might conceivably pass as dinner runs about $13.  There are no $5 burrito shacks in Reykjavik.  My biggest temptation was Nonnabiti Subs on Hafnarstræti Street, downtown.  They have fish subs, which sound great right now, but $15 for a sub seemed a bit beyond the pale.  Your best bet besides supermarkets is smaller food stores that have ready-made sandwiches and the like.

Food in general is quite good throughout Iceland.  I became a fan of their soups, always good and always with bread to fill you up.  Veggie soups are $10, going up to $15 for meat or seafood.  Almost every one I had was marvelous, everywhere, even just a green pea or a cauliflower soup.  Other dishes are simply prepared (Scandi-style) without strong flavors, but usually done exceptionally well.  A middling entrée starts at $20 and goes way up, so add a bowl of soup and a beer and dinner is at least $40.

Lobster soup, world-famous and world-expensive, at the Sea Baron

A place called Sægreifinn (“Sea Baron”) was my only must-eat destination, as every blog and guidebook and TV show mentions this place, many raving, especially about its lobster soup.  It’s in a shack by the harbor, it’s cheap, it’s awesome, they say.  Frommer’s puts the place in its “inexpensive” restaurant category and says it has “the city’s best value seafood”.  Let us see.  You choose a fish kebab, looking over the selection in a tall cooler to help you chose, and if they offer any other food besides kebobs and that soup, I don’t know what it is.  The kebabs are all fish chunks with just one tomato slice in the middle.  They look great, and there are many, many types and each one is $18.  The soup was $16.  That’s not cheap.  The kebab was quite good.  The soup was less great.

Experiencing the city

The weather continued to do what Icelandic weather does, changing every half hour.  It rained, but never hard, sunshine, but not much, wind, just a bit, then more, then it eased.  It rarely gets much above 10C (50F) degrees in the summer and in the winter of course it’s freezing.  You never know what to wear.  Go in the winter and you may not see the sun for days.  In the summer (I went in late May), having the sun up nearly all the time is pretty cool, but the tropics this isn’t.  There’s a difference between being a sunny day and just being light outside.

I was there during the city’s “Sea Harbor Festival”.  Who doesn’t love a festival, and ah, here it is, right by the harbor.  Various unusual fish were laid out in coolers, just for an amusing display.  A few booths stood opposite, two with food, free samples of pickled herring on bread and some cooked cod, both great.  The few other booths probably were selling auto insurance or cell phone plans.  A very small stage sat at the end of the fish box row, with a folk band playing and twenty or so people in the chairs in front.  And that was the festival.  The local newspaper, and other signs about, had maps of the harbor and what all was going on in the festival and such.  One got the impression that there were activities all over, but no; it’s only on this strip that anything was happening and nothing much was happening.

This could be you in the crowd

Everyone mentions the nightlife in Reykjavik, and it is indeed good, if you can afford it.  Locals stay home for a while drinking, to lay a base so they don’t have to buy too many expensive drinks outside, and you should too.  Half of Reykjavik seems to be in a band, and the music scene is large.  You’ll find something.  I spent a few evenings popping around the music venues downtown, easy to find.  The clubs on the downtown end of Laugavegur are supposedly insane, but I didn’t have the budget for that.  The good things about the nightlife scene are:

• You can walk to everything, including back to your flophouse.
• There are few cover charges.
• The attitude is open—few places are exclusive and you rarely see a doorman.
• There are few VIP rooms or table service.
• It goes about as late as you want.

Read enough blogs and you’ll find that Reykjavik has a reputation for casual sex and nudity.  People write about how everyone leaves the nightclubs and then goes swimming nude in some hot spring together.  Read the blogs even more and you’ll find people who went to Iceland with an idea of hooking up and were frustrated when it never happened.

The verdict

I was primed to appreciate Iceland’s small but long cultural history, and I did.  The sagas, the elves (they have them), the language.  You’ll fly in and out of Reykjavik on any Iceland trip and it’s perhaps worth a day or two, but the reason to go to Iceland is the landscape around the island—you probably haven’t seen anything like it and it’s bloody phenomenal.  It’s one of the most beautiful countries I’ve seen, and I’d go back tomorrow just to do more photography.  If you stay in Reykjavik, you’ll like it okay, as I did, and hopefully you’ll be happier there than me, but don’t expect to necessarily feel the love.

One good thing about Reykjavik — lots of public art

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