The three lane highway is utterly deserted. I leave the bus terminal with map in hand and set off to explore this new land. There is absolutely no one around. Shops and cafes are shuttered. Reykjavik is deserted. Sleep deprived after the long flight, I check my phone again. It’s 9am. There is seriously no one around. Every so often I see another soul…but shortly after I see their map, and their pack which tells me they’re anotherearly-morning tourist. The only other sounds are of the one or two street cleaners, hosing down the sidewalks of late night debris.

I end up chatting with a couple from Boston, we share tourist chit-chat and jokes, we navigate to the Hallgrimskirkja church. Sitting on top of a treeless hill, it towers above the street, like another rocky volcanic structure, its tiered sides of concrete push against a cotton-puff sky. The views are breathtaking.

Eventually we split up. They go off to find breakfast and I set off to take some pics, my time is short and I want to see all I can. I wander through streets with names like Hateigsvegur and Skolavordustigur. Neat, orderly houses, sided in corrugated metal of all shades of color, each with a little garden or ornate gate, line pristine streets. Despite the “early” hours, I see not a single homeless person in the corner. Despite the intensely graffiti’d parks and alleys I pass through, I feel not the least bit of unease.

Still no one, no sign of an operational coffee shop. I hear echoes of music. Then realize her calling to me. “Haloooo, Haloooo”

She’s standing in the middle of the road, barefoot, bleached blond hair hanging on her shoulders, tight jeans and loose white shirt…and a glass of champagne in one one hand as the other hand waves to me.

“You? Hey! You! Cigaretto?” she makes the universal sign for smoking. “Cigaretto”

I laugh, sorry no….

Before I can say anything else, she’s immediately dismissed me with the wave of a tan hand and pads up the street, already waving down the next person. “Halooooo….You?….” Champagne glass, daintily, in hand.

A little after 11am the colorful little city starts to yawn and wake up. I start to see movement. I try the door to the first cafe I see with a person manning the counter. But the door is locked, 10 more minutes, he mouths.

I laugh. Oh, this would never do in my Seattle-world! Finally, I find coffee, and just about every other one of my bus-tourist friends. I eat the most amazing apple pastry and settle in for people watching, as my head starts to spin with incoming jet-lag as the day slowly warms to comfortable t-shirt weather. And slowly the streets fill with trendy Icelandic families, mothers pushing the cutest children in the cutest old-fashioned strollers as SUVs with the largest tires I’ve ever seen, advertise island adventures, as they parade through tiny streets.

I get a text and email confirming Henrie will be waiting for me in Amsterdam. I’m renting Henrie’s flat (clean, broadband wired, and without elevator) for two weeks after finding it on craigslist, it sounds fantastic, but who knows what it will be…all I know is how it’s worked before, Indonesia, New Orleans, Mexico…

I leave with an hour to find my way back to the bus terminal outside the city, get lost, get helped by a man in a store who speaks “not good” English (and yet when I attempt to pronounce Islenska words, I send him into gales of laughter…apparently I speak “not good” Islenska, we agree!), I find my way back to Fjoiugata and Smaragata Streets and finally, back to Vathsmyarvegur (a long word that means nothing, but where the terminal is) only to miss my bus, wait out the next one while snacking on a meat pastry and a Coke–shreds of cured meat between a lefsa-like tortilla. I can’t pronounce the name, but I’m starving and it’s delicious.

As I leave I wonder what it was, but in a rush to catch my bus, all I see if the store’s logo: a rotund cartoon chef with a cartoon platter, on which rests, a smiling cartoon goat head. Yes, smiling! As my own stomach does backflips over something in this unexpected visual, I have fond flashbacks of Christine arriving in Indonesia that first day and introducing her to her first “kambing on a stick”…

Before I jump into the tiny Reykjavik airport, to Amsterdam, I pause to take my last gulp of cool Arctic air and giggle, one last time: I’m in Iceland, in June…in flip-flops.