Iceland Archives - Nadine Walks

Searching for Hans Christian Andersen; at what point does a visit to a country “count”?

January 19, 2015

A few months ago I had a short conversation- in the comments section of one of my blog posts- about what it takes to check a country off your list. I have this scratch-off map of the world, and as I start to do more traveling, I’m wondering which countries I can scratch off, and which ones I need to spend a little more time in.

I think this is probably an interesting conversation on its own, and I’d be very curious to hear opinions on the topic. If you’re spending a 2-hour long layover in an airport in Belgium, does this count? I think a lot of people would say no, and yet, I had a friend who vehemently believed that setting foot in a country- in any way and for any amount of time- “counted”.

And then, how much time is enough time to feel like you’ve gotten to experience a place? Can you experience a place in 24-hours? A few days? A week? A month? A year? All of the above?

It depends, of course. I spent 9-months studying in France, and a month walking through Spain on the Camino de Santiago. In both instances I felt like I was able to experience the culture of these countries, in a much more intimate way than I have on any of my other travels. But then I think about Italy, where I just spent a week, and I feel like I don’t really know the country. I was even able to stay in someone’s home and chat with some locals and see a few places off the beaten path… but to know Italy, to try to understand it, I need more time. I’m still checking it off my list, still scratching it off my map, but there is more I want to experience there.

And what about Iceland and Denmark, the two countries I “visited” on long layovers at the beginning/end of my travels? I’ve been wanting to write about this idea of the long layover and more about my experiences (and I probably will, in a future post), but for now, I just want to consider the idea of whether I have actually visited these countries.

Some have said that you need to have a unique experience in a place to say that you’ve been there. So I think about Iceland, about my two long layovers: busing out to a hotel at 4am and peering out the window to see a light sky. Sleeping a disjointed few hours in a comped room and then meeting up with a few people I’d met the day before for lunch. Wandering through Reykjavik, touring the Hallgrimskirkja and going up its tower to see a panoramic view of the city. Buying a warm bowl of soup from a food truck, drinking strong coffee in a cafe and writing a blog post, walking along the old harbor. On my second stint in Reykjavik I again walked along the water, for a few hours (I was just coming off the Camino, so walking was the only thing I felt like doing); I found another coffee shop and I ate a hot dog and I could get around some parts of the city without my map.

Then I think about Copenhagen, and I’m not so sure I can check this off of my list. I was in Copenhagen for less than 24-hours; I slept in a hostel and I toured an art museum, but does this count? When I was on the train heading back to the airport, I thought: “I’m in Copenhagen, but just barely.”

And yet, traveling gives you these unique moments and experiences that feel like something. They are so much bigger than the moments in my typical days because they are foreign, because I am far from home, because I got myself on a plane and on a train and down a street in a city in a different part of the world. I had a few moments like these in Copenhagen. They were so regular, and yet, they were also strikingly different. I was walking down Stroget, the main shopping street of the city, and so many people walked down the street with me, bundled up in long puffy coats and thick scarves and wooly hats. The street opened onto a small square and a man sat on a chair strumming a guitar. The music drifted down the street and as I listened to his voice and walked past bright window displays, I saw a large, full moon hanging low in the sky, just in front of me. I had to stop walking, I had to stop and stand against a building and consider where I was. The music and the people and the moon and the fact that I was walking through a city in Denmark.

Later, I wandered through Magasin du Nord, a large Danish department store. I ended up eating dinner in the cafeteria area on the 5th floor; it was a good solution for a (shy) solo-traveler on a winter night. I saw a few ladies sharing a small bottle of wine so I bought one for myself, and as I ate my meal and drank my red wine, I laughed a little at myself. Shouldn’t I be having a different kind of experience? I justified my department store meal with the knowledge that Hans Christian Andersen had, at one point in his life, lived in a small room in this very building. So after my meal, and feeling nice and warm from the wine, I set off to find the room. Except I couldn’t. I think I had the wrong building (I had the right department store… somewhere in Copenhagen there is a Magasin du Nord that has a room that Hans Christian Andersen lived in, I am sure of it). I explored every nook and cranny of that store, convinced that the room must be tucked away in some obscure corner, but finally gave up (I had a similar experience on my first visit to Paris, when I spent several hours hunting for Jim Morrison’s grave in the wrong cemetery).

So, is this an experience? Of course it is. I can’t say that I know Copenhagen and I certainly can’t say that I know Denmark, and yet, I’m always going to have these memories. Of a beautiful voice and a busy street and a full moon. Of wandering around, a little fuzzy from my department store cafeteria wine, searching in vain for Hans Christian Andersen’s room.

For now, Iceland and Denmark “count”. But the great part about traveling is that you get a taste for more. If I never make it back to Copenhagen, then at least I have a story about the time I drank wine and wandered around a department store looking for an author’s room. But now I have a reason to return: among all of the other things to see and experience… I need to find that room.

Department Store Dinner, Copenhagen, Denmark

Dinner in a department store

Scratching off my Map of the World

November 3, 2014

There’s this poster tube, wrapped up in newsprint (a travel section of the New York Times), resting against the wooden blanket chest in my bedroom. It’s been there for over a year- just sitting there, ready to be unwrapped, ready to be opened, ready to be used.

The poster inside the tube was a birthday gift that I bought for my ex-boyfriend. In May 2013, he was still my boyfriend, and I had stumbled on a great gift: a 23×32 inch scratch-off poster map of the world. You grab a coin and scratch off the countries you’ve visited; after years (months?) of travel you’ll have spots of bright colors scattered across the map to reveal all of the places you’ve traveled to.

I loved the map and thought it was perfect for my ex. In his twenties he’d been on a quest to visit all 50 US states, and since he only had Alaska left, I knew that he would soon start to travel internationally. When we were together, we often talked about all of the places on our “lists”: our dream travel destinations around the world. We planned the places we would see together, the adventures we’d have.

The map was for him, but I knew that in the coming years, as he scratched off countries, I would inevitably be part of some of those travels.

I ordered the map well in advance- his birthday was in August, and I ordered the map in early June. I needed the map early: I’d be driving up to Vermont- where my boyfriend lived- in early July, then flying to France for a month, returning back to Vermont for several weeks in August before finally coming back to Philadelphia. I planned to wrap up the map, leave it in Vermont and have it ready to give to my boyfriend when his birthday rolled around in August.

These details are important because the map never arrived. Well, it did, but not in the way I expected. June was a flurry of activity as I finished work and visited friends and vacationed with my family and got ready for France. Around the end of the month it dawned on me that the map had never arrived, so I asked the handyman of my building if he had happened to see a poster tube arrive in the mail recently (the handyman is the partner of my landlady and they live in the main part of the house that my apartment is connected to. It’s a confusing and quirky building and mail gets mixed up, quite a bit).

The handyman looked at me, squinting his eyes. “No, I don’t think I’ve seen anything like that… no.”

“You haven’t?” I asked, trying to clarify. “It was probably this long,” I held my hands a few feet apart, “and it was a map of the world.”

Recognition sparked in his eyes, quickly followed by a very, very guilty look.

“That was for you? There was no name on it, just the address, we didn’t know who it belonged to.” He shifted on his feet, uncomfortable.

“You have it then?” Already I knew it was a futile question. My handyman has a heart of gold, but also, at times, a careless attitude and complete lack of reliability.

“Well, you see, we didn’t know who it was for. And it had been raining, and the map was wet. It was soaked, it was ruined.”

He wasn’t done yet, so I waited.

“And we scratched it off. We scratched off all the countries.”

I stared at him for a minute. I pictured it in my head: a rainy evening, one too many beers, a scratch-off map of the world at his fingertips.

“It was a gift,” I mumbled. I didn’t know what else to say.

He promised to order me another one, to overnight it. But it was the weekend, it was the 4th of July holiday, I was leaving for Vermont in a few days. I knew there was no way I would get it in time but he ordered the map anyway. It arrived at my apartment the day after I left for Vermont.

So I didn’t have the map ready for my boyfriend’s birthday, but I figured I’d just give it to him the next time I saw him. At the time, there was no way I could have guessed that I would never see him again (that is just a slight exaggeration: I saw him only once after that summer, and at that point the map was the very last thing on my mind).

I returned home in August, my relationship ended, the map sat, unopened, in the corner of my bedroom. All other traces of my relationship were tucked away: photos, stray CDs and books, notes and a stack of letters, a wooden cribbage board. I swept through my apartment and gathered up every reminder, packing most of them away in a box in the back of my closet.

But I left the map in my bedroom, because I didn’t know what to do with it. It was too late to give it to my (now ex) boyfriend, I didn’t want to give it to anyone else, I didn’t want to throw it away. So I just left it there and figured that, eventually, I’d figure something out.

And I have. It took about a year, but finally I figured out what I want to do with that map.

That map is now MINE.

Initially I thought that keeping it for myself would be too hard, that it would remind me of my ex-boyfriend, of all of those unfulfilled plans and dreams we’d had together. But time is a funny thing. I haven’t forgotten those plans and dreams- I probably never will- but they just don’t matter as much anymore. Because I’ve moved on. I’ve moved past that time, and life is about all sorts of new and exciting things again, and not about what I was supposed to share with someone else.

And besides, the map sitting in my bedroom? That’s not the map I bought for my ex-boyfriend. That map was a soggy mess, scratched off by a drunken handyman and now buried somewhere at the bottom of a trash heap.

My map is new and untarnished. My map was overnighted and expressly delivered. My map arrived a day late for my ex-boyfriend, but maybe it was never meant for him at all. Maybe this map of the world- a map full of countries waiting to be visited and scratched off- maybe that map was meant for me all along.

Spain, France, Iceland: scratch, scratch, scratch. And that’s just the beginning.

Coming Home

August 15, 2014

I just took a shower in my apartment, and my hair feels clean- truly clean- for the first time in a month and a half.

Right now I’m marveling a bit at the normalcy of this: sitting on my couch with my porch door open, a breeze blowing through my living room, the sound of the fountain trickling outside. I woke up this morning and didn’t know where I was: I looked around my room and everything was familiar but my brain couldn’t figure it out. After a minute it came together; I was home.

For the past several weeks I’ve craved a morning like I just had- sitting on my couch with a cup of coffee and nowhere to go, nothing to do. (well, the first thing I had to do this morning was to put on my shoes and take a walk to the nearest food store to get supplies to make coffee. My car is at my parents house so I have limited options… but at least I just finished a pilgrimage across Spain so walking to find coffee wasn’t a big problem). In any case, I’ve loved this morning. I got very used to all the traveling, the packing and unpacking of bags, a different bed every night, but having some routine and comfort back is welcome.

And yet. One of the first things I did after I sat down with my coffee was to start thinking about how to get back to Europe, or how to do another Camino. It’s all just thoughts at the moment, because for now I need to be back (and I need to make some money). But my traveling this summer- and certainly the Camino- has had a profound impact on me.

There has been so much on this trip that I’ve wanted to write about, and a lot in the last few weeks (Finisterre! The Côte d’Azur! Provence! Paris! Iceland again!), and I’ll get to some of it. I also want to write more about my experience on the Camino, and my thoughts now that I’m back. So there will be more to come.

But for now, right now, I just want to appreciate that I’m back home. When I passed through customs as I was flying out of Iceland, the man working behind the counter asked how long I’d been in Europe.

“How long?” I paused, mentally doing the calculations. “Uhh, 7 weeks.”

His eyebrows immediately shot up and I laughed, saying, “7 weeks, I know. I’m lucky.”

7 weeks was a long time to be away and traveling, and I was, indeed, very lucky to take this trip, and I was very lucky while on the trip.

I think about what’s changed in that time, because mostly things look the same. I suppose that on the outside, I’m just a bit different: my hair is lighter and my skin is a bit darker (not to mention the crazy tan lines on the backs on my legs; I have a picture when they were at their worst, but I don’t know if the public will ever get to see that). I stepped on the scale this morning and I’m four pounds heavier than when I left. It figures that I can spend 5 weeks walking across Spain and gain weight: I blame the bread, cheese, and wine. And the ice cream/gelato.

So there are tiny changes on the outside. On the inside? I’m still very much the same person. But there are some changes. The light and the magic of the Camino got to me, spread through me, and started to shine out, and I think it’s going to take me to some great places.

But first, I’m going to sit here, drink more coffee, and appreciate being home.

Iceland Detour

June 25, 2014

I’m sitting at a wooden table in a cafe in Reykjavik, sipping a cappuccino. It’s 4pm, but here it could be 4am; the sky looks exactly like it did when we made the middle of the night ride from the airport to the hotel. They aren’t kidding when they call this the land of the midnight sun: I don’t think the sky was dark for one moment last night.

I’m not supposed to be in Iceland, not this long, and not yet. My 17-hour layover in Reykjavik was supposed to happen at the end of my trip, in the middle of August, and not right now, at the very beginning. This Iceland layover was only suppose to be 1 hour.

I worried about how I would get down to St Jean Pied de Port- my starting point for the Camino- after hearing about all the French rail and air strikes. My family joked that I might be stranded in Paris, or Iceland, and I joked back: “That wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world!”

And so far, it’s not. My flight out of JFK was delayed about 4 hours, not because of the French strikes, but because the Icelandair system was down. When I got to the airport, I sailed passed the long line of people waiting at Icelandair, and breezed through security. Not having to check a bag made things so easy. I marveled at how fast I made it to my gate: less than 10 minutes after being dropped off at the airport by my dad. Incredible!

But I knew something was wrong when, after another hour, there were only a few people waiting at the gate. One was a woman named Julie, and after talking for a few minutes, we discovered that we were each walking the Camino, and that we each planned to begin on the 26th from SJPP. Instantly I could understand what everyone means when they talk about the Camino spirit. It was like I already had a friend: someone to look out for me, and someone I could look out for.

After awhile, we found out that our flight was being checked-in manually and that we’d have to go back to the line, go through check-in, go through security. All over again.

I made some friends with the people I was waiting with in line. We’d walked down together and joked about how backwards this whole process was. We were the very last in line, and I was the final passenger to be checked in for our flight. We were hours behind schedule and the workers at Icelandair cheered when they realized I was the last one. The man helping me said, “This has been a nightmare, but you know, so much of the personal interaction has been lost by using computer systems. It’s been nice to actually talk to people.”

And in some ways, I have to agree. This has been a hassle, but it’s also been nice. Our flight was delayed again on the runway, we were four hours behind schedule, our connecting flight to Paris was long gone by the time we reached Iceland, once we were bussed to the hotel there was only enough time for a few hours sleep. I was put on an afternoon flight to Paris but then changed it to an even later flight because of train schedules; I’ll arrive in Paris about 24 hours later than originally planned.

But. I stood in line and laughed and joked with three young people on my flight: Emily, who is spending the summer in Vienna, doing a law school study abroad program. Luke, who is traveling to the south of France for a cousin’s wedding. Heather, who will be working in a cafe in Paris for the summer.

And I met Julie, my first fellow Pilgrim; she sent me an email while we were on the flight, updating me on our connection and the rescheduled flights. She gave me a hug in the airport as we parted ways (she was put on an earlier flight to Paris, so the next time I see her, if ever, will be somewhere on the Camino).

A smooth flight and making all of my connections would have been great, but something would have also been lost. The camaraderie, the unexpected twists, the adventure.

I’ll make it down to the Camino, and really, it doesn’t matter when. I have a lot of time to walk. For now, I get to finish my coffee (good! strong! Is Iceland known for having decent coffee? I’ll have to look into this more on my way back), and I get to soak up this beautiful Icelandic landscape and roam around Reykjavik for a few more hours. For now, the Camino can wait.

52 days. 3 countries. Suddenly, this trip has become real.

April 2, 2014

I booked my flight last night. And just before I hit the ‘confirm booking’ button on my computer screen, I could feel my heart beating in my chest, sweat forming on my palms, my breathing becoming shallow.

Man, I was nervous. I’ve been preparing for this trip for three months now: reading everything I can, writing about all of my reasons for doing this long walk, training and hiking and learning how to take care of blisters. I’ve told everyone that I’m walking the Camino, I’ve told myself that I’m walking the Camino, and yet, until yesterday, it wasn’t actually real.

Without a flight, I could back out. I could have decided that I am indeed crazy for doing this, that I didn’t want to go alone, that walking for 5 weeks was not how I wanted to spend my vacation. I could be on a beach instead, I could be in Maine, I could go back to France and write.

And all of those thoughts have gone through my head. Am I crazy for wanting to do this? Do I want to be alone? Do I want to be on a beach in Maine instead?

I always knew that the answer was ‘no’, but it didn’t stop those questions from tip-toeing around my mind. And even though I have been so certain that I will walk the Camino this summer, until now, it’s all been words. Only words, and some hikes through a local park.

But now I have a plane ticket, and I’ll be away for 52 days. I look at that number and I have some disbelief. I just committed to a 52-day trip in Europe. 52 days. Right now, it feels a bit daunting. And… incredible.

There is still so much planning to do, but for now my trip looks kind of like this: fly into Paris. Get down to St. Jean-Pied-de-Port and start walking. Walk for about 5 weeks. Arrive in Santiago, possibly on my birthday. Meet up with a friend and (maybe) walk to Finisterre. Fly/train back over to France and spend time in Provence. Return to Paris.

And here’s the final twist. In Paris, get on a plane, and on my way home, stop in Iceland for 17 hours.

I couldn’t resist! I’ve been looking at flights for months, and trying different combinations of dates and airports and airlines. Flying in and out of New York, rather than Philadelphia, was $300 dollars cheaper on Icelandair, and when I saw that I could fairly easily roam around Reykjavik and experience the midnight sun, I was sold.

There are now so many parts to this trip that I feel overwhelmed, but it’s a very, very good kind of ‘overwhelm’. I’m just relieved that I still have several months to prepare.

So I just put a giant check mark next to ‘purchase flight’. Phew. Next up: a new pair of shoes.