jersey ed

My friend Jersey Ed just showed up for the weekend. It's his second visit to Iceland. He was here for the Iceland Airwaves music festival weekend last year, and I got an email from him on Monday saying he was coming back today. It's always nice to see repeat visitors to this place, it helps to validate the whole moving-to-Iceland experience, in a way.

E and I met up with Jersey Ed and his buddy Dave down at Hressó before they went off to see some Dutch DJs at NASA. This is a big music weekend in Iceland, lots of bands playing all night at 6 different venues downtown, for 3 nights. Icelandair (bless their monopolist hearts) promotes this festival to high heaven in the Other Lands and packs their flying aluminum tubes full o' tourists to ship in for the weekend. Said tourists consume thousands of $9 beers, watch music, get happy, and hype it up to their friends back home upon return.

It's always great to see long-lost American friends again. The banter was fast and furious, and by the end E was teaching Michigan Dave how to say "Gaman að hitta þig" to any Icelandic lovelies he might run across in the clubs. Dave was taking the lesson very seriously, and had some really good pronunciation, I thought. The tutorial ended up at the end of the NASA entrance line, where earnest Michigan Dave was still practicing "Nice to meet you" to the endless amusement of the three blonde Icelandic girls in front of them. Ah, the magic of being a tourist in the Land!