Insane!

I might consider a vacation in Iceland one day, but not in mid-January.

Forget everything you thought you knew about the Midnight Sun.  There is no sun at midnight now.  It would be lovely if there were.  Daylight this time of year lasts only five hours, and it happens only between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. One can almost hear Icelanders cheering because daylight today is 4 minutes and 47 seconds longer than it was yesterday.

The very air is blue this time of year.

The spare Nordic glass, metal, and wooden apartment buildings along the road to Reykjavik still glitter with multicolored Christmas lights and giant white stars, to hold the winter darkness at bay. People trudge through the snow, in the dark, to and from their jobs, to and from brightly lit supermarkets.

You might, like us, end up here simply because Iceland is a snowy stepping stone in the North Atlantic between Europe and the United States. But then the peculiarities of the place might draw you back, in spite of yourself.

Icelandair's ultracool inflight ad campaign is designed to help do this.  It features such enticing snippets of information as "The most interesting thing about Iceland isn't that it has a 100% literacy rate, but that there are more sheep than people ... isn't that it has the largest glacier in Europe, but that Icelanders line up for ice cream, even in a blizzard." You can't get this stuff out of your head. And the sheep are brutally cute.

Its inflight video, which blends safety instructions with soothing New Age music, a Gwyneth Paltrow lookalike, and shots of stunning Icelandic scenery, is actually a pleasure to watch. What other inflight safety spiel could warn you to leave your belongings behind in an emergency by showing a lithe young backpacker dropping her sweater and scarf softly on the Icelandic tundra as she marches off into the distance? Icelandair's ad agency even managed to transform the panic-inducing "brace" position into a serene yoga pose. One can imagine them chortling with glee as they came up with these ideas around their blonde driftwood conference table.  "Yeah!  And we can show how to use the evac slide by having her jump off a waterfall! Cool!"

An old friend decided it would be fun to take his wife to Iceland for a New Year's Eve by flashlight. When I shared this information with our pal Siggy, the pale Icelandic youth whom we kept encountering in his new home of Kuta, Bali, he was very interested indeed.

"Do you know Quentin Tarantino?" he asked.

"Yes, Siggy, but not personally."

"Ha!  Well, he is an insane party animal."

Insane is Siggy's favorite word, hands down. He applies it to the cost of everything in Iceland, holiday traffic in Kuta, Quentin Tarantino, the amount of beer Americans seem able to consume, the dismal quality of his Christmas roast beef dinner in Kuta, the low cost of street food in Kuta, and, as we would soon learn, New Year's Eve in Iceland.

He went on. "And Quentin Tarantino says that the most insane New Year's Eve in the world is in Iceland."

This is probably backlash from Iceland's peculiar relationship with alcohol. Beer was banned there, beginning along with the rest of the temperance-addled world, in 1915. But after Prohibition was repealed everywhere else, Iceland just kept on banning beer. Strong spirits were okay. In fact, Icelanders are famous for drinking themselves silly with the stuff. But strong beer, over 2.25% alcohol, was verboten--the rationale being that, because beer was cheaper, it could lead only to worse depravity. This particular insanity lasted until March 1, 1989--"Beer Day," a major cultural event in Icelandic history.

Beer is now Iceland's most popular alcoholic beverage. And, in mid-January, Iceland can probably claim the longest happy hour on earth.

Air travel makes us ugly

It's hard to describe the bleakness of Iceland. The route from the airport to Reykjavik cuts through craggy black lava fields studded with standing piles of stone that look eerily like gnomes huddled against the cold. That your first exposure to this uniquely peculiar island should be such a lifeless moonscape somehow befits the place's character.

I should like Iceland, I really should. My ancestors were Vikings from nearly this far north, in the northernmost of the Shetland Islands.

I think I prefer Florida.

Icelanders' grasp of English is sketchy at best, and their native tongue sounds like a recording played backwards. I understood perhaps a third of what our driver tried to convey. I think he said that all the electricity here is powered by the geysers and that cold hotel water is either unmatched anywhere else on earth or impossible to achieve because the geysers are so hot. They are very proud of their water here. There doesn't appear to be much else, to be honest.

Because we arrived at our hotel in the morning, after a groggy night on a plane, and needed to crash well before the usual check-in hour, we had reserved an extra night and confirmed ahead of time that our room would be waiting. This was nearly too much for the unflappably pleasant blond elf at the front desk to comprehend. Wielding an infuriating smile and a soft, passive-aggressive voice, he consulted numerous calendars and rule books while Bill grew more restless. I now realized that the lad's demeanor was designed to defuse American impatience. His colleague, an Icelandic milkmaid in reindeer leggings and heavy sweaters, remained glued to her phone, showing no sign of talking to anyone. When she finally lent a hand, we were weaving with exhaustion, but succeeded.

New snags greeted us at the room. None of the lights appeared to work, nor would any of our numerous adapters allow us to charge any of our electronic devices.  Oh boy. I get the chance to talk to Snowball the Elf again. This time he provided an adapter for our iDevices, mildly admonishing me to return it when we were finished. I wanted to punch his sweet little nose. He also said that, to have electricity, one must insert one's door card in a special "No Smoking" slot inside the room.  Why refraining from smoking should have anything to do with turning on the lights was unclear to me, but it worked. All the lights went on at once, and we both fell asleep for several hours.