20080713 CE Iceland - part I

After two years I'm looking back to the summer 2008 when I was in Stockholm, Iceland and Ukraine. Here are some notes which I made in that time. Trip to Iceland began in Stockholm which was described here.

20080713 CE Island

At the airport a policeman called me into a special room, took a look at my bags and found excessive amount of alcohol. Ok, it was mostly extremly cheap whiskey which I bought on Stockholm airport so I wasn't too sad about that. I bought it because I've heard how alcohol is precious and expensive here. So, I left some of the boose at the airport but still bringing domestic liquids. In the bus which was driving to Reykjavik we met rest of our team which was to participate on cultural exchange. Culture exchange (CE) is very cool event because you need to pay only for the trip and everything else is arranged by the organisers of the event. Now we were the guests, it was our time to enjoy, just like Icelanders enjoyed their stay in Croatia.

We were accommodated in one of many houses of one of the organisers (Einar). It was huge house with lot of free space and big windows. Perfect party place.

As you all know, Iceland is volcanic island and they use a lot of geo-thermal energy. Houses have 2 pipes of water: cold and hot one, which means they don't need to heat cold water like we do.

In the afternoon we went to public pools and enjoyed hot pool in the open. Now we come to interesting part. When you enter public pools, before going into the pools itself, you should walk naked to the showers and clean yourself. There is even a chart which shows few important spots on the body which require special cleaning :) At the showers there is always some weird looking guy whose job is to check if everybody goes naked to the showers before going to the pools. Which means he's looking at huge amount of dicks for the whole day. Personaly, I didn't feel very comfortable around naked men, but after few days I got used to it. Now I'm still not so stressed about it as before which is something which I always wanted to feel, freedom. Fuck the shame. And when you go back from the pool you can put you pants in a machine which uses centrifugal force to dry it out. Works pretty fast.

In the evening we met more organisers at the party at our house. I can say girls around there were pretty big, aggressive and "open". Well, yeah, it's cultural exchange, it's all very interesting.

Next day we went to the city and walked around. Some parts were full of birds which you could feed. Sometimes when you throw food you can watch air battle between birds fighting for the flying pieces. For the first time I've been to Lutheran church. Minimalism rules there, white colour, big space, no pictures, only few statues.

Did you know that you can enter a house of the Prime Minister whenever you feel like and go and chat with him, if he's available? Well, you can! They really seem open-minded people. You can also sometimes meet him during lunch time at nearby hot dog's. It's kind of special, president Clinton also ate there when he visited Iceland.

Buses in Reykjavik drive on hydrogen. At the time, they were testing it on the cars as well. Resulting product of using hydrogen is water. A guy who was giving us presentation of this technology even started the engine, waited for few seconds in front of exhaust pipe and picked up water which went out from it and drank it. Of course, this isn't the best water to drink, but it is kind of drinkable. At the time in Reykjavik was 1 hydrogen pump operating (without profit, but it's a beginning).