Sleeping Around (19 page)

‘I wonder why that bit's not frozen,' I said.

Smári then spent the next ten minutes explaining why with a complex mathematical equation. Apparently it's the water density times the volume times the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. Or something like that.

The setting sun cast long shadows and a golden glow over the city as we wandered down stone-paved streets past brightly painted peaked-roof buildings. ‘The sun sets at around five-thirty this time of year,' Smári said.

‘What about in mid-winter?'

‘At Christmas the sun doesn't rise until noon, then sets two hours later.'

Gee, that must be depressing, I thought.

‘People get depressed in winter,' Smári continued. ‘Then, in summer, people get insomnia, and that's just as depressing.' At the height of summer, the sun sets at midnight and is back up again less than three hours later.

When we reached town we stopped at a cafe for a beer. Most of the hip, cool-looking people in the cafe were tapping away on laptops. ‘Just about every pub and cafe has free wireless internet connection,' Smári told me as we ordered our beers. ‘We also have the world's highest per capita internet access.'

And, I imagine, the world's highest per capita quota of cafes with very little conversation going on. Even groups of friends sitting at tables were stuck in their own little computer worlds.

When I finally dragged my jaw off the ground to drink the beer that cost $12 a glass, it tasted horrible. It was probably very nice, but with my cold it tasted like dishwater. Smári finished his beer before I'd even taken two sips. I certainly wouldn't be keeping up with him unless I was prepared to re-mortgage the house. I didn't really feel like finishing the beer, but for twelve dollars I even drank the very last soppy dregs (or two dollars' worth).

On the short walk from the cafe into the city centre, Smári pointed out Hofdi House, where Ronny Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev agreed in 1986 that pointing nuclear-armed missiles at each other might not be such a good idea after all. Smári was pointing out all sorts of things, but my cold-induced fuzzy brain was having trouble taking it all in.

The city centre looked more like a small village centre. Even though Laugavegur, the main drag, was full of boutique shops, pubs, discos, theatres and restaurants, it looked positively tiny. We walked past the prime minister's office, which was a modest two-storey building that had no fence around it and no security guards. ‘I think Iceland is the only country in the world where the prime minister's name is listed in the phone book,' Smári said.

If I did decide to look him up in the phone book, Smári told me that I would need to look up his first name as Icelanders address each other by their first names. Surnames are just made up of the Christian name of the father with the suffix ‘dottir' or ‘son'.

‘Here is a good example of Icelandic sarcasm,' Smári said as we passed a small bluestone building. ‘It used to be a prison and now it's the Ministry of Finance.'

It's amazing that although Reykjavík is the size of a country town, it is a capital city with all that entails, including government buildings, media, arts, museums, headquarters of major companies and all the infrastructure involved in running a country. And, according to Smári, the population is smart, beautiful and a bit smelly. Iceland has the world's highest per capita ratio of Nobel prizewinners and Miss Worlds, and 60 per cent of Iceland's national income still comes from fish.

We met up with Smári's friend Johann in the city centre to grab a bite from ‘one of the cheapest places in town'. I liked that idea. And so did my bank balance.

‘I offered you my couch,' Johann said when we met. ‘But you said that you'd already found one.'

‘Oh, you have a robot called Benjamin,' I said.

‘Yes.'

‘How is he?'

‘Good, he was busy tonight, though.'

What a coincidence. Johann was Smari's best friend (and possibly his cousin).

The restaurant did look cheap, but the cheapest thing on the menu was a seventeen-dollar crepe. We all ordered crepes. Like Smári, Johann had a job that had something to do with logarithms and Pythagoras's theorem. And, also like Smári, Johann was only wearing a light jacket and a T-shirt. When I asked if they were both a little bonkers, Johann told me that, although the Arctic Circle was less than 300 kilometres away, the Gulf Stream so moderates temperatures that in winter Reykjavík is never freezing.

‘But it's, um, freezing now,' I said with a shudder.

‘We're used to it,' Johann said. ‘Even in summer the average temperature is only thirteen degrees.'

‘It got to twenty-three degrees one summer a few years ago!' Smári said brightly.

‘Oh, that's too hot for me,' Johann winced. ‘Zero is the perfect temperature for me.'

After we finished our dinner Smári announced, ‘Let's go get some dinner.'

Our crepe was just an appetiser.

As we tottered down the road Smári said, ‘I'm going to take you to the most famous restaurant in Iceland.'

Oh dear. If a simple crepe was seventeen dollars, how expensive would the most famous restaurant in Iceland be?

‘Dignitaries, celebrities and politicians have eaten there,' Smári said. ‘President Clinton went there twice.'

Oh dear. The soup is probably 50 dollars.

I was just about to say that I was already full from the rather diminutive crepe when we rounded a corner and Smári announced, ‘Here we are!' We had stopped in front of a hot dog stand.

‘The most famous restaurant in all of Iceland,' Smári said proudly. The hot dog stand was called
Bæjarins beztu pylsur
, which translates as ‘The best hot dogs in town'. And it wasn't just the best hot dogs in town. On the wall was a newspaper clipping from
The Guardian
newspaper in the UK, which selected
Bæjarins beztu pylsur
as the best hot dog stand in all of Europe.

‘You can even get a Bill Clinton hot dog,' Smári said.

‘Does it come with a free cigar?' I smirked.

We all ordered a
pylsa
with the lot and, best of all, because Smári's friend from university was manning the stand, our hot dogs were free.

Johann had to get home. ‘My apartment is disgusting and I've got a couch surfer from Australia arriving at midnight,' he said before scurrying off. It was dark now and the sky dazzled with constellations burning big and so bright they seemed within reach. Some were so bright in fact that I thought they were planes in low approach to the runway.

‘Do you think couch-surfing hosts and guests ever, like, get it on?' I asked Smári as we trudged back to his apartment. ‘Oh, don't worry,' I hastily added. ‘I'm not going to try and make a move on you, I was just thinking about Johann and the Australian girl.'

‘Johann has a girlfriend, but I don't think it would happen that often anyway.'

‘Yeah, I suppose,' I said. ‘If you're a male host, then it's pretty sleazy coming on to a girl you've invited into your house. And the opposite is even worse, when a girl invites you to stay then you try to stay in her bed.'

A few minutes later we passed a bookshop and Smári asked, ‘Do you mind if we go in here?'

‘No, not at all,' I enthused.

If Smári had asked if I wanted to go into a vacuum cleaner shop, I would have said yes. Anything to get out of the cold for a minute. The bookshop was called Mals & Menningar and it had a huge selection of books in both Icelandic and English.

‘Iceland has the highest literacy rate in the world and there are more books published here per capita than any other country,' Smári said, as I flicked through a Harry Potter book in Icelandic (
Harry Potter og eldbikarinn
).

When we got back to Smári's apartment I discovered why he knew so many facts and trivia about Iceland and, well, the world in general. Smári was one of the main contributors to the Icelandic version of Wikipedia and he'd personally added a few thousand articles and pages to the site. It's amazing what you can achieve without a television. Smári was also writing a novel. In English. It was an historical Icelandic fantasy-fiction story. If Smári managed to get his book published, he would join the nation's average of one in ten people who will publish a book of prose or poetry within their lifetime.

Smári told me that he spent a lot of time on the computer either writing, researching, programming or—now and again—downloading a movie or TV show to watch. As this trip unfolded I was witnessing first-hand how the computer is turning the world into one big shared household. Smári showed me a video on YouTube that both Bob in Chicago and Pedro in Rio had also shown me. The internet-connected folk from every corner of the globe are all watching the same YouTube videos, reading each other's blogs, buying each other's junk on eBay, finding info on Wikipedia, chatting to friends on MySpace and Facebook, and all Googling like crazy.

I went to show Smári something on the net and when I Googled for the link, he said, ‘Do you know how Google works?'

‘Um, you type something in and it finds stuff with that, err, name in it.'

‘Google assigns a numeric weighting from zero to ten for each webpage on the net, which denotes the site's importance according to Google,' Smari said as he rubbed out the equation on the glass door and began writing seemingly random letters and numbers in adjoining boxes. ‘It's called page-rank and . . . blah blah logarithmic inbound links . . . blah blah analysis algorithm . . . blah blah hyperlinks . . .'

Smári was still explaining and drawing boxes of numbers and letters when I'd set up the air mattress and hopped into bed.

I woke up at four in the morning lying flat on the hard floor. My air mattress had deflated. I tried to blow it back up again, but the hole was too big for my mouth. Then I remembered that there was an electric mattress pump under Smári's bed. I very quietly tiptoed past Smári and carefully plugged in the pump. I even delicately flicked the switch, so there wouldn't be a loud ‘clicking' noise to wake Smári. Then . . .

‘VRRRRROOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMM!'

The pump sounded like a small plane taking off. Smári flew out of bed and landed on the floor with a thud. ‘What? Shit! Who's there?' Smári shrieked, with wild eyes and even wilder hair.

When I woke up again later, Smári was already up and sitting at the computer in his baggy underpants watching the sci-fi television series
Babylon 5
. ‘Gee, it looks like a beautiful day today,' I said. The bright morning sun was streaming through the window.

‘Yeah, a scorcher,' Smári replied without looking up from the screen. ‘We're expecting a high of zero today.'

Once you get over the smell of rotten eggs, having a shower in Iceland is heaven. Because there is an endless supply of hot water, you can shower for as long as you like. I only got out after 30 minutes when Smári enquired if I'd fallen through the plughole.

Smári had an Algorithm Analysis class to go to, so I went in search of some Icelandic goddesses. Ever since I'd seen this photo of fifty of the most perfectly gorgeous Icelandic girls posing in the Blue Lagoon, I'd wanted to go there. I was also hoping that the therapeutic and invigorating waters might help get rid of my cold.

When I left Smári for the bus station, he was still in underpants watching
Babylon 5
.

I began my therapeutic program with a sauna. I had no choice. The inside of the bus was so hot and steamy that I soon stripped down to my T-shirt. I was a little worried that by the time we got to Blue Lagoon, I'd be just like Smári in his underpants (except I'd be wearing my own underpants).

On the drive out of town it looked as if someone had plonked a brand new two-lane highway on the surface of the moon. Just as bizarre were the brightly coloured houses, a splash of red here and a drop of yellow there, sitting in the middle of the Sea of Tranquility.

As I caught my first sight of the Blue Lagoon, my attention was caught by the cottonwool balls of smoke drifting up from the geothermal power station alongside. In the midst of this extraordinary vast, monochromatic volcanic landscape was the lagoon itself, which looked more milky than blue.

‘The Blue Lagoon holds six million litres of geothermal saltwater (two-thirds saltwater and one-third fresh water), which is piped directly from the source 2000 metres beneath the surface. The water in the lagoon is totally renewed every forty hours.' I was reading this inside the very sleek and modern information-centre-cum-ticket-office-cum-changing-rooms-cum-souvenir-shop.

It felt very odd indeed running barefoot in my bathers across a lava field dotted with frozen puddles. Steam was rising in sheets from the lagoon into a bright blue sky as other bathers loomed up in the mist like ghosts. Most were just floating about, while a few were sipping cocktails at the water's edge.