Sleeping Around (20 page)

The water temperature was perfect. I slipped in and wallowed in the biggest bath I'm ever likely to encounter. There is something surreal about bathing in an open-air, steaming hot pool while the lifeguards are wearing ski jackets, gloves and balaclavas—and wouldn't have a hope of seeing anyone who was drowning in the mist anyway. The rising steam often blocked out the bright sun, then it would clear to reveal glimpses of the pipes and large domes of the power station.

There were quite a few people in the lagoon, but no gaggles of gorgeous Icelandic girls. It must have been pension day, because the clientele was mostly drawn from the wrinkly set. Mind you, after 30 minutes in the water I was well and truly wrinkled myself.

I was doing some serious wallowing when, like angels rising up out of the mist, I saw two girls. They were tall and lithe, with eyes as blue as the Arctic sky, hair the colour of sun, skin as creamy as French vanilla and smiles to warm the coldest northern night. I'd found my dream Icelandic girls. Then one girl turned to the other and said, ‘This place is fuckin' wicked, innit?' My Icelandic girls were from East London.

After almost three hours in the water, even my original wrinkles were getting wrinkly, so I waddled out and had a fifteen-minute shower just because I could. The Blue Lagoon may have nearly taken my breath away, but the job was completed when I saw the price of a hamburger in the Blue Lagoon cafeteria. Thirty-five dollars, and that was without tomato sauce. I was happy to pay the exorbitant price, though, because I'd had the most marvellous morning. And best of all, my nose and stuffy head had magically cleared.

In my couch request to Smári I told him that I was good at washing dishes and in his reply he had written:

I don't do dishes. They happen to end up being done by a grumpy somebody who otherwise resembles me once in a while. You're welcome to them.

Every single glass and cup in Smári's apartment was dirty. He'd even resorted to drinking out of bottles instead of having to wash a glass. When I'd resolved the dirty dishes dilemma, I started to pick up a few of the empty Pepsi bottles and by the time I'd finished I'd filled two huge black rubbish bags.

‘Ah, is that what my apartment looks like?' Smári said when he returned from his Applied Linear Statistical Models class.

We went next door to the small mini-mart to get some dinner. We both got some pot noodles and some savoury-pastry-type-donut-things. I had no idea what they were, but they were the cheapest thing in the mini-mart. ‘Right, let's go drink some cheap beer,' Smári said when we'd finished dinner.

The cheap beer was to be found at the Mathematics Club, which was housed in their very own ‘clubhouse' near the university. As we stepped outside the apartment, I glanced up into sky and stopped dead in my tracks.

‘Oh my God! Wow!' I gasped.

‘Oh, that's the aurora borealis,' Smári said casually.

The heavens above were dancing in a light show that glimmered and seemed to swirl as pale curtains of brilliantly shimmering green light were drifting across the night sky. I stood there mesmerised.

‘That's just an average one,' Smári said, as he marched ahead. He had more important things to think about. ‘If we get there too late, they'll have drunk all the beer,' he groaned.

The Mathematics Club was in one of those building-site workman's huts and was full of seriously intoxicated mathematicians. It took my eyes a while to adjust when I stepped inside because the room was glaringly bright under the industrial-strength fluorescent lights. One entire wall was taken up with a whiteboard that was filled with incomprehensible numbers and symbols. About a dozen students were lounging on couches around a large coffee table covered in empty beer bottles watching two spotty students playing chess. The boys were either tubby and spotty or stick-thin and spotty. There were also three girls in the room and they were all drop-dead gorgeous. Some ‘stadium rock band' music was blasting out from an iPod plugged into a computer, while a student with long greasy hair jumped around playing air guitar.

Smári introduced me to a few people, but I didn't stand a chance of remembering their names. I couldn't even pronounce them. There was a Gunnlaugur, a
, a
and a
. Or maybe they had simple names, but because they were so drunk that's what their scribbles looked like when I asked them to write their names down. One fellow was so inebriated that he was barely able to stay upright as he scrawled some complicated formula on the whiteboard. He kept swaying back and forth so he could focus on his chaotic computation.

We stayed for a couple of hours and everyone was really nice. Oh, except when the swaying student cornered me for twenty minutes to argue that mathematics is better than physics. ‘Do you agree?' he slurred, poking me in the chest.

The air mattress did its deflation routine in the middle of the night again, so Smári earned the ignominy of having the lowest couch rating so far:

Couch rating: 4/10
Pro: The bed was soft and flat
Con: The bed went
very
soft and
very
flat

Smári had an Acute Angle lecture (or something similar) to go to, so he suggested that I should go on a tour and see some of the natural wonders of Iceland. I did a quick search on the net and contemplated booking on an Elf Spotting Tour in the lava caves of Hafnarfjodur (many Icelanders apparently believe in elves, fairies, gnomes and trolls), but decided instead to book on a Golden Circle Tour (and for you Australians, it had nothing to do with pineapple pieces).

I only just made the coach departure from the bus terminal and by the time I got my breath back we'd already driven out of town. After 40 minutes of travelling through moonscape, the landscape changed to the plains of Mongolia, with faded-brown rounded hills dotted with Iceland's famous little horses. I find that the more I travel, the more new places remind me of somewhere else.

As we drove past a small group of trees, our guide announced that it was the largest forest in Iceland. The entire ‘forest' was no bigger than a football field.

‘If you are lost in an Icelandic forest, how do you get out?' the guide asked us. ‘Stand up!'

There was a howling wind outside and the trees in the ‘forest' were being blown horizontal. The wind was also throwing the bus around as if it was a toy, but this semi-cyclone was ‘just a slight breeze' according to our guide.

Our first stop was the small village of
. ‘The houses in the village are a fine example of baroque architecture,' our guide told us with a wry smile. The Japanese tourist behind me snapped away with his camera. ‘Ahh, baroque style!' he gushed excitedly. All the buildings in the village were very simple wooden houses.

We were stopping in
to visit one of the town's many greenhouses, which are heated by volcanic hot springs and grow most of the island's fruit and vegetables. The largest was called Eden, but we had to walk through the huge souvenir shop, and past the Adam and Eve toilets, to get to the actual greenhouse. Inside was a lush tropical garden with meandering paths, park benches and a few tweeting budgerigars in cages. Locals come to Eden when the country is under the winter's gloomy embrace and wander around and have picnics under bright lights pretending they're in a park on a summer's day (but not an Icelandic one, because then it would only reach 13 degrees).