Iceland Blogging Oct. 20

Well Rob in Baltimore is Rob in Reykjavik for a few days. While I'm having a great time, to be honest, missing O'Reilly on Stewart AND maybe being out of the country when Rove and Libby (and Cheney?) do the perp walk is really disappointing.

I'm here primarily for the music at the Iceland Airwaves festival. Started off the night with Benni Hemm Hemm (an interesting group with a ton of horns in addition to the standard rock fare - you can download a really odd song in MP3) and finished off the night at a club called NASA listening to Annie (the Norwegian Madonna I'm told). Last call weekdays is 1AM, so it was a relatively early night. On weekends last call, if there is one, is like 5AM.

Culturally, I've had an opportunity to meet and talk to only a few Icelandic folk. Pretty nice so far, but not quite the friendliest of peoples. (To be fair, there are a TON of annoying American hipster-wannabes here, so perhaps I'm being bunched in with them.) Reykjavik is an interesting place so far. Iceland reminds me a lot of other European countries (Iceland has a limited economic cooperation agreement with the EU, and was settled in the 900s by Norse). The hot water in our hotel smells like sulfur. (I'm assuming that it's natural geothermically heated water.) Smoking is EVERYWHERE. As someone who quit smoking a little more than a month ago, being surrounded by it all day all the time is a little frustrating.

So there you go, my first impressions of Iceland. I'll try and upload some pictures if I can find some server space to park them (we're beyond full here on Blogger).