Another sleep-deprived tinged moment of calm in the Copenhagen airport -- my second in a month. First, when I arrived all of .03 seconds late and missed my 7 AM flight to Amsterdam and thus sat and waited, hungover from the previous night's crayfish party & annoyed at myself and the Skåne train system, until the next flight went out at one o'clock. A hazy start to a strange trip -- quite fitting in retrospect. Second, that is now, due to bad judgement about how long it would take to write 12 pages in Swedish. Or probably just procrastination. Whatever it was, the stapled papers are laying in Eva Queckfeldt's mailbox in the historical institution in Lund while I am sitting in Kastrup airport preparing to board a 14.00 flight to Reykjavik. October 4-12 on Viking-infused Iceland. ---> flight is boarding...
Tired still oh so tired but with "a slice of Iceland" in my belly and the feel of Icelandair tea still on my throat. We're flying over the Faroe Islands at the moment, whose cliffs and crashing swells are visible even from up here at 30,000 feet. Another hour or so and I'll be in Reykjavik.
I'm hoping to meet people in the hostel to at best rent a car with and to at least go crazy with during Reykjavik's infamous "runtur" nightlife. We'll see. Soemtimes things fall into place and sometimes they don't. If I don't I'll just enjoy the solitude, the loneliness of a geologically and geographically extreme land. There is definitely something decidedly alluring about wandering a landscape of geysers, volcanos, and misty lagoons all alone. I've come to learn that solitude does not equate to loneliness, though the line can be thin at times.
Though I do seem to revel in it. Upon discovering these 10 days days of virtually no class I could have, for example, flown to Spain and visited Yuliya or to Rome to see Kayleigh or to London to Megan or France or Italy or the other places filled with familiar faces. But no, I chose to hop alone on a plane to Iceland. And to what end? To see the country, of couse, but also to escape to an unkown, to borderline desolation, to experience something for myself again. [[Over Iceland now, 20 minutes until landing.]]
I'm not fleeing from a disappointing life in Sweden. If anything, I'm becoming more attached to it as the days slip by. It's comfortable. Nice. Uncomplicated. Not extreme by any means. The people on my corridor are as lovely as the town is, and I can't say I'm not looking forward to the scarves and coats that will accompany the fall chill. But there's something missing, something I seek that I can't put a name to. But I think I'd be looking no matter where I was.
It's time to wrap this up now; Icelandair is passing around the child fund envelopes, always a telltale sign of the planes's imminent landing. 10 minutes and I'll be on Iceland, the land I was reading about a year ago at Berkeley that I figured I'd probably never see. Goes to show you -- what do I know anyway.
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