akureyri

Dates traveled: February 21-22, 2017

We didn’t spend the night in Akureyri, but we spent parts of two days there travelling from one hostel to the next. I think it’s the Icelandic version of a small hipster village with trendy cafe bars (with vegan things) and lots of university students. Apparently it’s a good place for snowboarding.

There was a pretty big hill in the middle of the city, decorated with lights up its spine. They also had a small university. The closest I came to meeting a girl off tinder was a student from the school there, but alas, even that didn’t turn out.

I might’ve bought something from one of the cute bookstores if all the books hadn’t been in Icelandic. They did have a cafe attached to a hostel there I was able to make use of. It was especially exciting not only because it was ‘trendy’ in a way I’ve grown accustomed to artsy cafes being, but because you could get a meal for under 20 bucks, which was rare there.

Like everywhere else in Iceland, the thing I most noticed about this place was the outdoors. Being the second largest city in Iceland, I’m guessing most people go there for the more city-life elements, and there was a degree of comfort in being in a somewhat urban environment after several doors in snowstorms and in small towns adjacent to the Arctic ocean. I don’t people think of Iceland as a driving country, but I also think one of things we did – take Ring Road around the island – is fairly common for travelers to do. You wouldn’t know it by the lack of cars on the road on the eastern side of the country, but then again it was February.

I got my first-ever speeding ticket entering one of these freaky single-lane tunnels where there was a speed camera. A lot of the speed limit signs were covered in snow, which would’ve been my excuse if I tried to fight the ticket. But I realized, after paying the rental company fee, that it’d be difficult for the Icelandic authorities to hunt me down for a $300 speeding ticket when I live in Canada. Later that decision made for a nervous stop-over at the Keflavik airport when I had to go through customs, but thankfully they didn’t interrogate or bar me from catching my next flight. It’s possible that the government systems are as disconnected there as in Canada so the customs people wouldn’t have a clue that I was a wanted person.

Icelandic suburbia seemed harsher than a lot of other suburbs, but I’m guessing people just spend a lot of time indoors.

Akureyri was the one place in Iceland outside of Reykjavik that I noticed public art. They have a handful of giant murals and a block in town that had historical pictures and facts of the area. It’s easy to not be impressed by a town’s public art scene when you come from a relatively big city, but the entire population of Iceland is only 338,000. With 18,000 people in Akureyri, it’s the largest city outside the corner of the island where Reykjavik is.

There are a lot of places I would like to re-visit one day, while also recognizing there are so many places I have yet to visit that re-visiting somewhere is going to be rare. It’s entirely possible I’ll never come close to Iceland again, as much as it’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to feeling like I’ve been in another world. With the recent closure of Wow Air, there are fewer cheap options to get there. If I never go back, I’ll especially remember the weather and the people and how blue and big the mountains looked driving down the highways without much sun.