places

It's hard to describe what a magnificent, beautiful and unique place Iceland is. One member of the group said that it would make a perfect home for a James Bond villain: miles of barren lava fields, beautiful women everywhere, and lots of bizzare buildings that look like secret hideaways.

The ride in from the airport takes about 45 minutes, and you see nothing but lava, covered with a green moss that is protected as an endangered species. (More than one person wondered, "If there's nothing out here, why didn't they put the airport closer to the city?"

Reykjav�k itself is a very manageable city, both to learn your way around and to walk. In the photo at left, you can see the Tj�rn, a large pond populated with 40 different species of birds that is a central part of the old city. To give you an idea of scale, our hotel, The Hotel Saga, is the large building near the top left edge. To walk from there to the area in the right edge of the photo takes less than ten minutes. Yet we still took cabs home. By now you shouldn't be wondering why.

If you're coming for Airwaves, the best-located hotels are the �dinsv�, the Saga and the Hotel Borg (which is maybe a little too close to the action if you're planning on sleeping during any part of the night).

At right is Hallgr�mskirkja, a Lutheran church completed in 1974, with lava as a chief design influence. It's very beautiful inside, but the main attraction is the tower, with fantastic views of the city in every direction (the photos above were taken from there). We went up it the first day, and it's very helpful for getting your bearings. The church itself became a useful landmark for inebriated and/or hung-over navigation. We knew that we had to keep it on our right when we were going out and on our left when we were going home. Despite the fact that it is visible for 20 kilometers in any direction, Greg managed to lose sight of it on one trip back to the hotel. We think he ended up in Greenland, or possibly the Faroe Islands.

The Blue Lagoon (stop thinking about Brooke Shields) is formed by the runoff from a geothermal power plant, and gets its color thanks to a particular algae that seems to like living there, right up until the water kills it. The world's coolest hot tub, the Blue Lagoon is famed for its restorative powers after a night on the tiles. The mud is also really great for your skin. We walked around for the rest of the day touching our faces and exclaiming in wonderment. Located outside of Reykjav�k about halfway back to the airport, it's hard to miss. Drive until you see the giant plume of steam, then turn left. You can buy the mud online.

Reykjav�k is a fantastic place to lounge around in coffee shops and bars, soaking up the atmosphere and just generally trying not to look American (we never succeeded). It's definitely a sociable culture, and coffee shops serve as surrogate living rooms. Lots of places have two lives, with quaint little cafes and swank restaurants turning into throbbing, pulsating dens of iniquity at night. There were lots of different venues for the Airwaves shows, some large and some unimaginably tiny.

Our favorite place to begin the day was Kaffibarinn - very relaxed and comfy and with an extremely nice bar staff. On Day One, Christy broke the ice by asking them who their favorite Icelandic bands were. After a few moments of "here go the Americans being all chummy again," our table was soon surrounded by people giving us the local knowledge. ("These guys all sound like Radiohead. My boyfriend is in this band.") Kaffibarinn is owned by Damon Albarn from the English band Blur, who came to Iceland and liked it enough to want to buy a piece of it. Hey Damon, how about some paper towels in the men's room?

We also killed our fair share of brain cells at Gaukur � St�ng, which I'm told means "cuckoo on a stick," although I still don't know what that's supposed to mean. Gaukur will remind you of any of a hundred grungy music dives, and has a really good vibe (although very high on the jostle index). After going there on the first night and getting our kidneys elbow-massaged, we found out on the second night that there's an upstairs with a screen showing the bands, its own bar and (most important) its own bathrooms. We often found it very hard to leave, and not just because we couldn't remember how our feet worked.