Two more days in Iceland

We got back to Iceland at the end of a mildly harrowing experience at Luton airport,.. and arrived in Reykjavik in the middle of an Icelandic version of a Nor'easter. Except this was in the southwest of the island, so whatever. It was winds between 30 and 50 mph (That's 48 to 80 kph for you metric types, which includes Icelanders. It was mildly jarring going from metric to the only other nation stupid enough to use Standard and then back to metric) and driving rain. Combined with the wind, when the rain hit our faces, it was actually painful, so that was fun. When we landed, we were supposed to go right to the Blue Lagoon, but because of some confusing email traffic, we missed the bus. $90US for a cab ride later, we were at the famous Blue Lagoon (another hot spring with a lot of blue silica in the water) and it's always fun being in a hot spring and wading up to the bar... except when you're constantly trying to not face at least one direction to keep your eyes from being hammered by the stratospheric bullets. So, yeah.

The day was mildly rescued by finding a place to eat that night that was the best food we've had on the entire trip: Salka Valka. It's down on the western end of the city, a little off the main drag of Laugavegur, and there's not a ton of seating. But it does traditional Icelandic food with modern preparation. There was a fish soup with a chickpea base that was astounding (especially fitting for a day when a nor'easter has been drenching us the whole time) and their fish stew and lamb shank were also excellent. Seriously, this was beyond everything else we've eaten. If we ever come back, we're eating there again. Maybe twice. The day was also rescued by our being able to find that weird candy shop with the salty licorice: Taste of Iceland. If was trying to find anything I could on Google and then went down to Laugavegur to see another more famous candy shop (Vinberio) because I knew we'd passed that at some point. I started walking east and was about to give up when we found Taste. Of course, I later discovered their wares in Keflavik airport, so maybe I could've saved us some of the hiking.

On our next (and last) day, we took a tour of what Iceland tourism refers to as the "Golden Circle", which is an area in this part of the island that has the most tourist attractions. We went to the continental divide, where you're standing in the 5 km gap between the North American and Eurasian plates, the first named geyser (Geysir, which is where the word comes from), the most impressive waterfall we've seen here, and yet another hot spring, known as the Secret Lagoon. It was a worthwhile way to spend the day, but followed with some less than impressive food at that same food court we visited last week. Seriously, the fish and weak-ass fries thing (instead of chips) just has to go. I realize it's a lot cheaper for restraurants to just get already-produced stuff, rather than asking staff to slice into dozens of potatoes a day, but it's really disappointing. 

On that somewhat down note, I will say that the transportation options in Reykjavik are a little aggravating. In Liverpool, we just Ubered everywhere and had a driver within one minue almost every time, no matter where we were going. In London, we had the Tubes and still had three other options (bus, taxi, Uber) if we wanted it (The service we used to get to the airport on our way out is called Bolt.) The bus system in Reykjavik is divided between city buses and tour buses with no seeming connection. Also, taxis seem to operate strictly between airport and city, as we never saw one sitting on a curb waiting for a customer and failed to find a way to call one when we weren't interested in walking a dozen blocks in the driving rain. And there is no private driver service like Uber yet operating. So, if you want to get around, you're either walking or renting a car; the latter of which is something that our friends, Katie and David, recommended to us so, y'know, they were right.

So, anyway, that's a wrap. We're leaving at the crack of dawn (that's a joke in Iceland around this time of year, where it stays light outside for around 20 hours out of the day (we have to draw the curtains and blinds to blot out the light at 11 PM so Tricia, at least, can get some sleep.)) There were a lot of highlights to the trip (Liverpool game, attending a Shakespeare performance in Shakespeare's theater) and no genuine lowlights, so a success, overall.

Three days in London

This was a much easier travel day, because all we had to do was take the train down from Liverpool, which takes about 2 hours. We ended up in a nice place nominally in the West End (Edgware Road was the closest Tube station for those of you in the know.) London is, as you all know, a massive city which is still suffused in money, even post-Brexit and which has people from so many walks of life that trying to say that you met the "average Londoner" is akin to saying you met the "average human." The common expression and dialogue on the Tube leads one to believe in the stereotypical "dreary English" type as the grain of truth to said stereotype, but it struck me that most of that distraction was more typical of people engaged in the boundless energy required of major city life. I have spent time in NYC, Chicago, LA, Miami, New Orleans, Seattle and, of course, Detroit (where I grew up) so that kind of life and the personal intensity that it often requires isn't unfamiliar to me. But it struck me that London is still quite obviously one of the loci of human engagement; again, even after the idiotic departure from the EU.

Tricia had been to London once before, but unless you're a regular user, the Tube system takes a little time to pick up. By the third day, we were easily finding our way across routes and beating Google Maps' suggestions for how to get to places. As with most major public transit systems, where you are often defines how good they are. The main line off of Edgware is the Bakerloo line, which is populated by older trains, without digital readouts, with speakers that left the automated announcers' voices muffled ("Mind the gap!" should have been a band name by now, as it does have its own Wikipedia entry), and with trains that reminded me of 80s NYC, where you had to open and close doors to proceed from one car to another. In contrast, the Elizabeth and Victoria lines are much more modern, with wider, more comfortable cars, digital readouts displaying the current stop and the next one both on the interior and exterior of the cars, and flexible joins between cars, so each train is essentially one long carriage. The latter two lines, of course, service the more wealthy parts of town. They were also the ones that produced the standard London, Business Capital of the World encounters, when groups of mostly men would enter the car still engaged in whatever dealmaking they had been pursuing (often overloud, to declare their importance and intent.) That was echoed in some ways by the number of people I saw pursuing a behavior that has largely gone out of style in the States about a decade ago: walking and conducting a phone conversation that only they can hear through ear buds. Back in the day, it was Nokia or Blackberry earpieces. Now it's earbuds, but it's the same behavior: walking along and half-shouting your half of the conversation. That's a rare event as far as I can tell in the States anymore, but every fifth or sixth person we passed in London was doing it. Maybe it does still happen on the regular in larger cities here? Dunno.

When we got in on our first day, we rushed across town and managed to check in before flitting off to Soho for a Music and Pub tour. It was pretty cool. Our guide pointed out a bunch of studios where everyone from Bowie to Hendrix had worked and then the bars that they frequently got drunk in. The highlight for me was visiting the Dog and Duck; Orwell's favorite haunt and where he wrote most of 1984, Then we went on a mildly absurd excursion known as the Bustronome. It's a glass-topped bus that drives around the major sites of London while serving you a six-course meal. It was entertaining, except that they played pop music instead of announcing things we were driving past (sometimes quite quickly) and the food was good (the best course was probably a salmon mosaic that was served first, unfortunately), but I don't think it was worth either the time or the money.

We got up early the next day to do a four hour walking tour of many of those major sites (The Tower, Parliament, St. Paul's, etc.) Our guide was an ex-cop and a total Tory, failing to hide his contempt for the protesters outside Parliament and for particular members of the royal family who didn't conform to the wishes of the recently-deceased queen (Diana, Fergie, etc.) Apparently he'd been a member of the Queen's Guard unit at some point and he displayed all of the attitudes and perspectives that you might expect from someone like that. He was also a West Ham fan. Nice enough guy, though. He gave us the tickets that he collected for the Tower so that we could use them to go back in and look around some more.

That night we went to one of the highlights of the whole trip for me: a performance of Much Ado About Nothing at The Globe, the recreation of William Shakespeare's theater. Just like at Anfield, I was totally geeked to be there. It was an excellent performance and they added a few musical elements to it which worked really well. The theater is fantastic, except that sitting on the edges of the various levels might be a bit problematic for those with longer legs, like I have, as I basically couldn't sit comfortably without my knees intruding on the spaces next to me (which, thankfully, were Tricia who has very short legs and the aisleway.) The next day, we came back to do a tour of the theater and our guide was an unabashed fan of the Bard, talking about how he didn't have complex plots but had a) compelling characters because they acted like actual humans and b) had them because he was interested in telling a story, which is why he breaks the Fourth Wall so readily in most of his plays. He's talking to the audience because he and they are aware of the fact that he's telling them a story. Tricia turned to me at one point and said: "It sounds like I'm listening to you." I was like: "Yes! Because that's the point! That's why Shakespeare works! His characters are  real people, not just levers to the plot, and he's, first and foremost, telling a story!" (This, of course, is a constant refrain in my movie and TV criticism here. The guide pointed out that the Game of Thrones TV series worked because it had compelling characters, while House of the Dragon doesn't because its characters are all ciphers to drive the plot. (Bingo!)) The fact that our guide's name was also mine (albeit spelled with a "k") just made it feel that much more like I was listening to one of my own rants.

We later went to a couple of the stores that Tricia wanted to see, like Pick 'N Cheese, which is a conveyor belt of two dozen different (mainly English) cheeses with various accompaniments. Made a whole meal out of that. That night, we met a friend that I've known for years only electronically, via the board game site (ThereWillBe.Games) and his wife, as they introduced us to a nice vegetarian place in town (Plants by Etta.) One thing I have noticed is that English restaurants in both Liverpool and London are extremely conscious of vegan and vegetarian options. It's growing in the US, but it's still often in the form of "Has a vegetarian option" or "Ask about said option", while in the UK those options were main choices on the menu almost everywhere we went. That kind of segues into what seemed to me to be the strongest cultural icon of England at the moment: Pret a' Manger (which, of course, is a French phrase...) It's a higher-end sandwich shop and it's everywhere. EVERYWHERE. We saw them constantly in Liverpool. We saw them in every neighborhood we went to in London. The night we were on the bus, we were driving past the city center and passed two of them on the same stretch of road, thirty seconds apart. We did not, of course, stop to try one because we usually avoid chains, but the English do love this one.

But one of the more ridiculous moments also took place that night, when we went to get a drink after dinner with our friends. The aggravation for me in drinking both in the UK and Iceland (and Germany, five years ago) is that everything is mass-produced lagers, whether English, American, or Icelandic. There are some ventures into IPAs, which I'm not a huge fan of, and I discovered that Guiness, when it's fresh (i.e. was produced in the neighboring island maybe a couple weeks ago at most, as opposed to the months getting to the US) is actually pretty great. (You can taste the caramelization of the grain!) But, still, just like in Germany, I was constantly on the hunt for something red or dark that wasn't Guiness and always failing. We did find a couple nice local ales on the Pub and Music tour, but that's about it. So, on our last night, we roll into a bar and I see the usual selection of lagers and I ask one of the bartenders if they have a porter. His response: "What's a porter?" I had to stop and blink a couple times. It was invented here! In this city! And this kid doesn't even know what it is. So, yeah, it's safe to say that we are spoiled for cboice here in Michigan and the craft brewing movement still has a long way to go to get anywhere in most of Europe.

We lit out at 4:30 in the morning for our return to Iceland (after having watched a fox simply stroll across the road in the middle of London. Our driver said they're basically pets, which reminded me that I hadn't seen as many squirrels as I'd expect with the number of trees in the city.... We made it to the airport with what we thought was enough time, but then turned out to be the first time I've been sprinting through an airport to catch a flight in many years. Luton Airport is not the most organized of places, just FYI.

Three-plus days in Liverpool

This was the reason for the whole trip, of course, as we'd landed tickets through the local supporters' club back in January and had picked the last game of the season simply because we knew the weather would be warmer than the other options (games in February and April.) A couple weeks later, Jürgen Klopp announced that he was leaving the club. At the time, we were also leading the league, so here was an amazing opportunity: to see his last game as manager and to maybe watch us lift the most important trophy, the league title. In the end, the latter didn't happen as we went through the typical January fade in April and finished a few points back. But despite having been a Liverpool fan almost as long as I'd been a Michigan fan, I'd never managed to get to a game at Anfield, so this was my opportunity to redress that, no matter how the team finished.

I titled this "Three-plus days" because although we did get there on Friday afternoon after traveling all day (Reykjavik to Luton to London to Liverpool), we were both so wiped out by the process that we didn't do a whole lot on Friday, other than search for a place to eat. We managed to get to a place called The Black Horse, which is your traditional English Pub and also happened to be an Everton bar (which I probably should have expected, given that we were in their section of town.) I only noticed this after we'd ordered (bangers and mash and steak pie) and turned to see the large Everton badge on the wall, surrounded by black-and-white pictures of heroes of yesteryear, like Dixie Dean. We were both wearing LFC gear, but they let us order three minutes before the kitchen closed, so no trouble. Money is money, after all.

And that latter point is blatantly obvious in much of Liverpool. It's a large city, but not a widely wealthy one and the difference between the US standard of living and the UK one- even with the UK remaining one of the wealthiest nations in the world -is often stark. Prices in Iceland were often absurd because it's a tourist haven (#1 industry,) In contrast, some things seemed absurdly cheap in Liverpool, ranging from Uber to food to basic grocery items. The Tory governments, which have somehow remained in power for the post-Brexit period despite the negative effects of that change being blatantly obvious, are still operating on the Thatcherite/Reagan model that infects our society, as well. There are probably just enough racists/xenophobes in the wider society to keep them viable as a political entity that regards all change as an evil that must be resisted, which includes continuing to screw the poor at every opportunity.

We had this message driven home when we stopped into The Park on Saturday night, which is one of the more famous bars right next to Anfield (the place we were staying was two blocks from the stadium; you could see the roof of it when we stepped out the front door.) We grabbed a drink and went out back and were immediately hollered at by Janey, a woman who definitely works there and may have a piece of it, as well (I'm not sure if her referring to herself as a "part-owner" was a joke or not.) She wanted to reassure us that we could share the covered space with her as we were looking for a place to sit. Immediately, I thought: "Yeah, this is someone I want to meet."

Janey is a Scouser, through and through. She grew up in Toxteth, which is one of the rougher parts of the city (lots of projects; "council estates" to the English) and had been ripped by riots in 1981, while she was still living there. She'd spent a few decades working as part of the cleaning crews at Anfield and was a season ticket holder. She speaks Scouse which is a sharp dialect/accent of the King's English. I understand it because I've been listening to it for 45 years. Tricia did a lot of nodding and smiling to things that were said for the first couple days before looking to me to quickly translate, but she picked up a lot of it by the time we left on the morning of the 21st. Not everyone speaks it in the city and it's always been that way. You don't hear Scouse in any of the Beatles' recordings or interviews, aside from a mild bit of the accent on Maggie Mae.

Janey and her friend, Melanie, who later joined us talked a lot about the state of the club, the state of the city, and the world as a whole. Melanie had spent many years in the army as a way out of south Wales, even though her family had been one of those that owned the local coal mines and had the local town on a hook for its very existence. She wanted none of that and, at one point, asked us what we thought about the prospect of a second Trump term. I said: "It would be an absolute disaster." She sighed: "Oh, thank God!" We talked a lot more about the economy (Melanie wants to buy a house in Liverpool, live on the main floor, and rent the top "at a reasonable rate!" to a young couple trying to start their life), since England has the same housing issue we have, where big corporations own most of the housing and younger people have no place to go and are stuck living at home with their parents or other relatives. (Janey's two nieces and their boyfriends, who all live at Janey's sister's house,later showed up to punctuate that point.) 

It was a great way to spend the evening with "genuine Scousers", as it were, even if one of them was a Welsh transplant. They were a lot of fun and were agog that we'd traveled all the way from Detroit. I mentioned that Detroit had a lot of similarities to Liverpool (steep decline in the 70s and 80s, kinda recovering now) and Tricia mentioned the even closer parallel when we first stepped on to Walton Breck road where we were staying and she saw the row houses: "This is Baltimore."

We, of course, toured the stadium and spent way too much on LFC gear. We also hit all of said famous bars: The Park, The Albert (which is on the same lot as Anfield), Taggy's, and The Sandon. The latter was right across the street from where we were staying and we spent a lot of game day (Sunday) hanging out there with a horde of Reds. At other points during the weekend we took a ferry out onto the Mersey river and did the requisite Beatles tour (went to the Cavern Club, etc.) The section of town where the tour operates is the center of the city and the roads are a bit more of a medieval layout. I learned a lot that I didn't know about the band and even more about the history of the city, which was cool. On the tour with us was a couple from Singapore; a man who was taller than me (mildly uncommon) and a woman who was shorter than Tricia (incredibly rare.) They had become fans similarly to the way I had (British TV in the former colony.)

The game was kind of anti-climactic, as Nélson Semedo for Wolves got himself ejected on a straight red (studs up into Alexis Mac Allister's ankle) about 25 minutes in. Plus, it was the last game of the season and neither side had anything to play for, except us trying to send Jürgen out on a high note. But I ended up hoarse from singing with The Kop for almost three hours, before the match, and through Jürgen's extended departure after it. His song was deafening for the last few minutes of the game and there were a lot of people crying in the stands as he was saying his goodbyes. I loved the fact that someone started up "Poor Scouser Tommy" three or four times during the match, too, since I can't get anyone but Tim to sing it with me at Magee's.

Can't say a ton for the food. Much of it was stereotypically English (high fat, high carb) and not especially thrilling. But the traditional stuff we got at The Black Horse was good and we went to a nice seafood place down by the Albert Dock called Cargo. Am expecting much better in London. The weather was extraordinarily warm for the area for this time of year, sitting in the low 70s for most of the time we were there. That meant we had to buy a couple extra T-shirts at the club store, as you do,

It had been a lifelong dream to sit in The Kop and watch a match and now I've done it. I'm still not quite sure how I feel about that because of the down note which was Jürgen leaving at the end. I definitely feel like I'll be back to do it again a lot sooner than the first time.

(First) Two days in Iceland

Since there hasn't been much that's been genuinely compelling in the theater or on TV these days, I figured I'd use this space which hasn't been touched in two months to give a rundown about our recent vacation to Iceland and the UK. I've already posted rough versions of these entries on the message board at the end of the Internet, so these will just have some mild updates but also a lot of pictures, which I've never felt like bothering to learn on that site's HTML format.

Iceland is an interesting combination of the hyper-modern and the extremely aged. Since tourism became the leading industry circa 2010, many aspects of the aged are mostly for curiosity-seekers, rather than a declaration of culture. For example, in a small cafe right next to the Hallgrímskirkja (the gigantic Lutheran church that you can see from the majority of the capital city of Reykjavik), I tried fermented shark. It's a weird, very umami-forward flavor that I wouldn't seek out but was at least interesting to try. I was advised by our server to chew and swallow within about 10 seconds to avoid the overwhelming ammonia flavor that gives most the reason to avoid it. In the four bites, I took, I encountered that only once but it's still more of a stunt than encouragement to try out something Icelandic from the 13th century. As one tour guide told us on a two-hour walk around Reykjavik, the place where I had the shark (Cafe Loki) claims to serve "traditional Icelandic food" but he'd never seen an actual Icelander eating in there. That doesn't mean the food isn't genuine because, again, the stark mix of the modern and the old. But it was just one example of the internal cultural divide. One American we met there who's a resident by marriage (he's a former native of NYC) kind of corroborated a few of my observations when he mentioned what he perceives as a cultural self-esteem issue, in that Icelanders see themselves as the red-headed stepchild of Scandinavia; carrying a chip on their collective shoulder because they want to be more like Sweden, but they're not. On that note, the evidence of Swedish and Danish culture is quite dominant in things like architecture.

The main thing I thought about was the young people. With the emergence of the Internet, it's easier than ever to see how vibrant things could be and compare them to how they're not in one's own hometown. Reykjavik is the biggest city, by far, on the island but they still kind of roll up the sidewalks at 10 PM and don't open a lot of things until 12 hours later. That's not exactly the recipe for a vibrant night life for the younger crowd. That American told me that a lot of them do leave, as you might expect, but a lot of them come back because the small population creates familial bonds that are stronger than many other places. As another tour guide mentioned to us, they don't have much serious crime because everyone knows one another. If someone committed a serious offense, even when they were done serving their sentence, they might still be socially ostracized because so many people would have been intimately familiar with the victim.

We ran into a lot of non-Icelanders out of the obvious places (tours, etc.) because, again, tourism is the primary industry and a lot of people stick around. One of our bus drivers was a Japanese man, still speaking English with a prominent Japanese accent but also perfectly fluent in Icelandic. A server at the Cafe Loki spoke to us in English and then had to call out another customer who came in speaking Icelandic, telling him that she couldn't understand him.

We saw a lot of Reykjavik, as it really isn't that big. That one walking tour was led by a guy who spent an hour telling us about the history and societal origins and changes (he pointed out where the original edge of the harbor was, before a few million tons of stone were added to create the land for more buildings) and another hour being the local chamber of commerce, pointing out where you could get the best pasta or the cheapest drinks and so on. We spent a fun couple hours in The Lebowski Bar, the most notable feature of which was a menu with at least two dozen different variations of a White Russian (Kahlua and some kind of cream were the basis, but then they went in all different directions.) We got in at the last minute when someone else left, right before they started the weekly music trivia contest, at which we completely bombed, since neither of us are as familiar with pop music from the last five or so years as was needed.

We saw at least a half-dozen family-owned, "been here for years" Italian restaurants, which is understandable as an alternative to the generally bland traditional food. The food at the Loki was good and we had some fish and chips later and it was OK, but both were kinda lacking in ways that a lot of modern palates might expect; most notably salt. This is completely aside from the fact that in both Iceland and England, two places noted for their fish and, thus, their fish and chips,. all forms of the latter have become bog-standard American fries. When I order fish and chips, I want potatoes, not something that just came out of a McDonald's fryer and doesn't taste as good. Oddly enough, the best place we found on our initial two days in Iceland was part of all the latest rage in town: food courts. As opposed to the American perception of them (collections of franchise food), these are apparently all independent operators or local chains. The one we stopped into was across the street from our hotel and it was solid. They stuck to the usual primary ingredients, like lamb and Arctic char, but enhanced them with much more elaborate preparation and presentation. There are at least four food courts that we found in the city. We also had an excellent lamb goulash in Wik, which is on the south coast. Hot dogs are also apparently a popular thing, at the moment.

Aside from Italian, Icelanders are also apparently fond of licorice. On that walking tour, we ended in a local candy shop that specialized in elaborate licorice concoctions, including one that starts with an extremely salty layer (like, burning your tongue salty) and then went to licorice and then a much more mildly salted licorice. It was cool because it was totally weird. Apparently, various tariffs and restrictions prohibited the entry of many other sweets from around the world for a long time, so candymakers in Iceland had to become creative with the one thing they could produce: licorice. There was another version that was licorice mixed with black pepper, which was also quite good. Both ice cream places that we stopped into also had various licorice flavors (chocolate licorice, etc.) so it is a cultural marker of sorts.

We stopped into the Sky Lagoon, which is right near town. It's a heated lagoon (hot tub temperature) with a swim-up bar, There's also a side path where you can walk from cold plunge to dry sauna to cold rinse to skin scrub to wet sauna. Invigorating, at least. Then we took a trip down to the south coast to see a number of waterfalls (walked behind one of them; bring rain pants), one of the quickly-retreating glaciers, and one of the black sand beaches, so all of that was pretty cool (and most of the pictures of same are above.) It's an interesting place and I'm glad to say that we'll be back to see more of it before heading home.