Back in the DHSS

I'm back in the UK now. It took me about thirteen hours from leaving my bed, on Jo, Roz and Duncan's sofa at 4.00am, to get back to Rotherham. Thirteen hours of miserable journeying with a hangover and two hours sleep as my travelling companions. We (Duncan, Roz, Lilja, Atli, Bjarki, Margrét, Hrafnkell, Iris, Jo and I) had been drinking the night before with some goodbye drinks that quickly turned messy. Several sad goodbyes later I crashed out on said sofa until my alram woke me up. At Gatwick I bid Jo a very sad goodbye. I probably won't see her again now until after I come back from South Africa in July. After getting home I dashed out and got myself a chippy tea. It looks like my car has been mistreated whilst I was away as well. The back tyre has a nail embedded in it and the thing was as flat as fuck when I got to it. Not only that it looks like my parents have been running it on empty, there was no fucking petrol in it when I went to get the chips. I give someone my car for four months and you'd think they could at least fill it up. You have to when you hire a car, so I don't see why the rules don't apply to me.

How my car looked on my return..

Lísabet added a comment asking if I had good memories about my time on that forbidding rock in the Atlantic. And frankly yes I do, it may seem as though I was massively unhappy in Iceland, but on the whole the experience was good one. I have no regrets about going and I met some brilliant people, whose generosity and pleasurable company was difficult to parallel. I was bored at work, but then I would have been bored anywhere really, having to trowel off bog deposits. Just one mattock would have been like a God Send. My arm muscles have atrophied, yet my hand muscles have grown out of all proportion. They look like two melons stuck on the end of pencils.

I was also bored in Reykjavik, but some of that was partially my own fault. I could have joined a night class or something similar, but the problems of doing this was illustrated by an earlier post I wrote. Also, the language barrier was always a difficult hurdle to cross besides anything else. I never saw the point in learning a language that 300,000 people speak in a country that I will never settle in. Call me small minded but Icelandic would be no use to me unless I planned to settle there, which was never a thought I had in mind. I actually love the language and I loved listening to it being spoken. The sound of it is very soothing, the use of 'th' sounds gives it a lovely comforting quality.

I mean, really, what the fuck does this say?

I found Reykjavik town a little too small, which is something I also covered in another earlier post, and that lack of escape was quite a problem for my mental state of being. I'm a man who likes his creature comforts and being Iceland only convinced me of this. I never really unpacked my suitcase from when I first turned up. Jo said I should have put some pictures up in my bedroom to make it a bit more personal. The only pictures I had were the ones from Terrorizer magazine. Not being fifteen anymore I didn't really relish the idea of Cannibal Corpse watching me sleep.

Would you sleep easily with these fellas watching you? No, me neither...

Like I said though, no regrets, I got to do so much stuff that I would have never done anywhere else. I played live three times, once clearing a bar and getting thrown off stage. I walked on a glacier, stood on a volcano, saw and ate Puffins, ate Whale meat and Sheep's head (albeit in jellied version...). Finally the country has to be the most unbelievable beautiful place I have ever seen. On a 7000 miles of a road trip across America not one place came close to the beauty and absolute gob smackingness of Iceland, except maybe the Grand Canyon. Outside of Reykjavik one surely can get Lost in Iceland. I will look back on my time there with fondness and good memories.