You've come a long way, baby

Last week was so busy that I can't really believe that I still didn't make any progress with the history essay or acquire any furniture to my room. At least now I have a duvet, took care of the moving paperwork in Icelandic, dealt in many occasions with the customer service of my Finnish bank (keys to the online bank expired and they sent the new ones without any address, unsurprisingly they never arrived) and went to a police auction.

Speaking of the latter, it was for stray bicycles they had found, a tradition that's held in Finland as well. Most of the bikes were so new and good looking that I can't believe anyone would've just abandoned them, but oh well. This resulted in outrageous prices for some of them. I went there in hopes of picking up something old and rusty for a couple of thousand, but for two hours it looked like everything would either be out of my price range or a tricycle. The median price must've been over 10.000 ISK, some were going for well over 20k. Luckily at last something I wanted came up. An adult sized oldie that nobody else wanted, so I picked it up for a thousand. I was a little concerned since it looked quite worn out, but to my delight, turns out that it works almost flawlessly. The front gears are stuck but everything else is either fixed in two minutes or working as intended.

Two of my German co-habitants also went there, but failed to show sufficient perseverance and left after thirty minutes, being shocked by the prices the Icelanders were willing to pay for used bikes. I wanted to ride away from the auction with something though, so I stuck around, and got rewarded. When I rode it home, their curiosity and patriotism was sparked by the fact that it's apparently been made by a famous East German factory. Whenever I'm leaving Iceland, I think I'll be able to sell it to them for profit.

Especially since they apparently understood that my price announcement of "eitt þúsund" ment "eight thousand."

The weekend saw a surprise visit from a friend back Vaasa, who recently came to Iceland via Nordjobb and is living and working in Borgarnes now. She brought another svensk nordjobbare with her, and I got to act as a terrible tourist guide to the Big City as they both hadn't been there yet. We strolled around Perlan, Hallgrimskirkja and 101 during the day, before going back to some Seltjarnarnes touring, which was almost as much exploration for me as it was for them. The original plan was to cook at home and then dispatch to the Reykjavík nightlife, but as it usually goes, things didn't go like planned. Eating late, watching the sun peacefully set to the sea while having a couple of glasses of wine and having conversations with a wacky mix of Swedish, English and Finnish drained the energy.

Around 1 at the night we were still determined to go, but the Swede fell asleep on the couch shortly after, and looked so happy that waking her up would've just been too cruel, so instead the two of us just kept talking. The interesting thing is that the two of us didn't know much about each other or even talked before really, despite having started the same studies at the same time almost three years ago. One of the mysteries of life, it seems. How far you sometimes need to travel to learn to know a little from someone who has always lived so near.