Author: Patrick

Breakfast has invigorated me—several cups of coffee did as well. I’ve walked back to a pond I passed by earlier in the morning before the city was awake. The sun is coming up, and I thought it might make for some good pictures.

Because of Iceland’s northern location on Earth and its trailing position within the time zone, the sun is not properly up until around 10:30AM. Local time tells me the day is just starting, but my near‐sleepless night on the airplane is telling me it’s still the middle of the night. The camera clock confirms it—4:35AM is what time it is back home, but here the birds are starting to chirp as night fades…

…and the ducks and geese are standing around on the ice looking cold.

I’m cold now as well, and as I turn to leave I see the spire of the church behind me catching the day’s first light. I’m not a religious person, but I do find religious buildings interesting as they are full of science and engineering—in this case the sunlight shining on the upper portion of the spire is demonstrating the curvature of the Earth.

And it’s also beautiful.

What’s kept me from posting anything in great detail about my trip is a new difficulty I’ve been facing on and off for a few years now, and that’s an inability to break down the steps needed to complete a large or complex task into clearly defined and achievable tasks. I used to be excellent at this, but I forgot somewhere over time that any and all things are finished not because one did everything at once, but because one did everything in sequence. How do I share almost three weeks of travel experiences and hundreds of pictures? The answer is deceptive in its simplicity: by sharing one story and one picture at a time. I read once solutions were easy—it was identifying the problems they solved that was difficult.

It’s now just before 6AM back at the end of January. I’m on a bus taking me from the airport in Keflavík to the capital of Iceland, Reykjavík. It will take about half an hour, and the same winds that were blowing the airplane around in the sky are blowing the bus around on the ground. I feel its crabwise motion down the road. The headlights of oncoming traffic dazzle in twisting chunks of sideways rain. We clear the storm and a quiet applause breaks out as we arrive at the bus station—our driver is congratulated on getting us all there in one piece.

The final leg of my journey is the 2.5 km walk I left for myself from the bus station to where I’d be staying. I’m prepared for it to be frigidly cold, but it’s not—maybe around 7 ºC—almost tropical with how warm and damp the air is. I vanish into the unfamiliar streets of city with only a vague sense of where I’m going based on the map I studied before, and then it hits me: I’m walking through the capital of Iceland at 7AM, and no one else is. I stop and look around. It’s just me. I scan the lit windows of buildings. Still just me. A brief moment of sleep‐deprived and disorientated panic spreads: no one else is here…

And then I hear something—something far away is slowly getting closer, a big, lumbering something: a street cleaner. I stare at it creeping closer to me, creeping closer down the empty and spotless street. There’s at least one other person here with me now. Panic fades. It starts raining and gusting wind. It’s the storm from the highway. I’m starting to notice I’m cold, tired, and hungry, but it’s still a few hours before where I’ll be staying is open, and at least an hour before anything else will be open.

I keep exploring the empty city as my legs grow officially tired of walking. My suitcase is too heavy now for either hand and I refuse to use the wheels built into the suitcase because the sound on the cobblestone everything is embarrassingly loud—although I don’t know why it matters as there is still no one outside to be embarrassed in front of—the rain no longer charming or tropical, it’s getting colder and aside from the operator of the street cleaner the only other people I’ve seen where warm and dry in a hotel dinning room eating breakfast.

Back home I know at any hour of any day I could find a coffee and croissant in most any neighbourhood of downtown Toronto. It may not be the best coffee or croissant or neighbourhood, but I know I could do it. As I’m thinking just that, I round another dark corner and find the block is bathed in the unmistakable omnipresent lighting found only in shops open 24 hours a day. It’s a convenience store, but with extra fancy things to eat and drink, including fresh croissants and fresh from the machine coffee, plus places to sit and watch Icelandic morning television. I am so happy to be warm, seated, and caffeinated.

Someone had left an English tourism magazine at my table, and as luck would have it there was an article on where to go for breakfast when visiting downtown Reykjavík. As double luck would have it one of the places in the article was down the street from where I was and would be open soon, so I waited and then headed over for second breakfast.

I’ve become one of those people who writes on their piece of fashionable technology in what at least looks like a fashionable place to eat breakfast and drink coffee.

After flying all night I found myself having walked for half an hour away from the bus station in Reykjavík with only a vague recollection of the way from there to downtown with the idea of watching the city wake up as I drink coffee and enjoy a croissant.

It’s 8:30AM and the sun is still two hours away from being up, and until around half an hour ago, the only people downtown were me and the guy driving the street cleaning machine—it would seem at least. I’m used to a larger capital city. It’s raining, but I find a 24‐hour grocery store after my third wander for something to eat. They have coffee and

…and that’s all I got down before my amazing breakfast arrived. More details are in this post from the day of. I did get a good picture of the restaurant, which to me felt like a mix of past and future breakfast nooks sprinkled with 70s decor via the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries. I like it.

The sun is just starting to come up as I’m finishing eating. The streets are filling with activity, but I’m not able to check into my room just yet. I’m tired, but I’m also on my third wind from my second breakfast, so I head out to get some of my first pictures.

It’s January 30th—around 5PM—and I’m waiting in Toronto for my flight to Keflavík, or at least I was. I’ve been and gone, and now I’m back. Now it’s November 1st—around 11PM—and I’m still waiting, it feels like, still waiting to arrive or depart to where I’m going or where I’ve been. The nature of stationary plays havoc with direction.

I brought with me on my trip to Berlin via Iceland the camera built into my phone from 2014, the camera built into my iPad from 2017, and a Nikon D7100 borrowed from my Dad. I took many gigabytes of pictures—hundreds of them—and they’ve all been sitting on my computer ever since I took them. I love taking pictures, but what to do with them after isn’t anything I’m particularly consistent with. It’s the same with writing: I love it, and there are piles and piles of notes all transcribed into and sitting on my computer ever since I wrote them.

I’d started to cover some of my trip before and during with entries here, here, here, and here, and then another after I got back here. It’s an okay start, but now I’m going to do the rest.

As I take my seat in the plane it becomes clear this Airbus must be an off‐lease deal from an eastern European or Russian airline…

…and with the open cargo door visible from my window, I can see the exterior purple paint is covering what used to be a white airplane. Fun fact—the extra coat of paint on this aircraft adds an estimated 300 kg (about 660 lbs.) to its overall weight. So, Wow air, how about instead of charging me an additional fee for bringing clean clothes in the form of a packed suitcase you scrape a few kilograms of extra paint off that wing?

Anyway—me, my cameras and clean clothes, and hundreds of kilograms of superfluous paint are soon flying over Toronto. The late winter evening sun blasts into the cabin as we bank sharply over the lake. Our path east adds to the speed of the rotation of the earth and the daylight fades away in front of me as we climb. I feel my eyes water. I love flying. I love seeing the city from above, seeing something so full of activity appearing more and more static the higher you get above it.

Dusk vanishes and it’s immediately night. All I see out the window now are the pockets, strings, and smatterings of orange light, the colour of night, broadcasting up from the last remaining roads and towns before being replaced with the uniform darkness of forest and ocean.

There’s no in‐flight entertainment, and I had neglected to load anything onto my iPad prior to departure—so after going through every single possible setting in the control panel and geeking out, I start to sketch on it using a stylus my mum gave me…

I sit quietly for a few hours, meditate on the state of being motionless in my seat as it hurtles through the air, and eventually fall asleep, something I am often unable to do on an airplane. Gentle turbulence wakes me, and increasingly turbulent turbulence keeps me awake for the last hour of the flight. Our decent becomes rougher and rougher as we creep closer and closer to the darkness below—in the distance I see an island of orange light. Closer still and the winds blow and the cabin flexes while we bank down in a series of turns that in my sleep‐deprived state make me wonder if the pilot is lost.

But we’re not lost. The ground catches up and the wheels touchdown. It’s just after four in the morning local time. It’s raining and warmer outside than it was back in Toronto. Winds are so high the ground crew is unable to use the jet bridge—so we’re told to put on our coats and be careful as it is “quite windy” and make our way down the stairs they’ve rolled up to the airplane and walk to the terminal.

It’s an incredible welcome: the wind smells different. The rain feels different. And I can tell I’m no longer departed. I’m arrived.

At just over a month and a half into my program everything is on hold owing to a province‐wide strike by OPSEU college faculty members. I’m disappointed—things were just starting to make sense in my classes. News reports are suggesting this strike may go on for some time—whatever that means—so I’m going to do my best to make the best of the new time I have available to me during this setback.

That said, I fully support the striking faculty members. I do wish a strike could have been avoided—I view strikes as a public display of the failure of two sides to understand each other—but it is what it is, and I respect that. I’m happy also to see various student associations now becoming involved in the process. Fundamentally what is troubling about a strike or lock‐out is how those, usually groups within or the general public itself, who do not have a voice in the negotiations are now not only involved, but being used as leverage. And the term negotiations might not be accurate. From what I understand the College Employer Council dug their heels in and will not budge from any of their points—hardly a negotiation when one side isn’t going to do anything other than expect the other side to do all work. It’s discouraging to hear.

I did find one thing that cheered me up, and that’s the following video. I like numbers and what they do, so I’m ending the post here on a positive note before I start to rant about money, power, control, and the cost of idiots—just remember, proper education is important and requires proper investment.