(Note: This diary is being written after a return from my first week at my new job in Iceland, currently as a contractor until my work and residence permits go through. Everything you read happened one week prior.)
Diaries in this series: Iceland Calls :: The Icelandic Language :: Tvær Vikur Til Reykjavíkur :: Reykjavík, A City of Lights :: Reykjavík, A City of Drizzle and Dancing Clouds :: Reykjavík, A City of Cats and Gods :: Reykjavík, A City of a Storied Tongue :: Reykjavík, A City of Yuletide :: Reykjavík, A City of Hope :: Frá Reykjavík, Til Hjartans Heimveldisins :: Doldrums and Storms :: Til Kaliforníu, Til Iowa, Til Íslands
Maunudagur. My boss -- let's just call him "S" -- arrives at the hotel at hálf níu ("Half-nine", aka, 8:30). Any thoughts of speaking with him in Icelandic I may have had are immediately brushed aside over worries about miscommunication on something this important. But he is incredibly nice about everything, a real sort of fatherly figure. He leads me out of the hotel to an adjacent building in dark, cold, blowing drizzle, insisting that the November weather is never like it was the day before, and that today's weather is what it's always like. It is to never rain again the whole trip.
(Note: You can find an Icelandic pronunciation guide here. I'll try to work a little Icelandic vocabulary into the text where it shouldn't distract from the diary.)
I am dropped off for a security briefing (this is the airline industry, after all) with a man who was himself an immigrant, from another Nordic country. We actually manage to exchange some sentences in íslenska, mixed with English in-between -- where he was from, how long he had lived there, etc. His experience with Iceland's "þetta reddast" culture ("things work themselves out") turns out to be pretty much the same as mine. He was at one point supposed to have been kicked out of the country at the end of a permit period, but they just bent the rules and let him stay. One English-language briefing later, a couple forms, and I got a microchipped guest badge to open all of the doors except that of the air traffic control room and a few other places.
S. walks me into the building where I was to work. Naturally a place housing air traffic control has a fence, but in typical Icelandic fashion, there is no razor wire, guard turrets, sharks with laser beams, etc -- just a simple fence, only just tall enough that an uninvited person past it couldn't say, "Whoops, I didn't know I wasn't supposed to be here!"
I am given the grand tour. A building with perhaps 30 employees, and it had its own gym that could probably serve 15. And a small restaurant where two nice women cook the food on-site, and full of a sufficient quota of people doing everything from lazing around to knitting treflar (wool scarves) during working hours. S. starts the process of familiarizing me with their (very complex) systems, and then it was off to my office for me to get started. I guess you could call it a cubicle since the walls aren't permanent, but I have to tell you, I've never before seen a "cubicle" with wood-panelled walls encompassing an area larger than any office I've ever had, with a giant window bearing a view of the dancing Icelandic cloud show all day. S. apologizes for the fact that there's a (barely visible) fence in the view.
I sit down at the laptop I am being given to take home with me and quickly realize that I had more to learn than just the language and the software. Rather than describe it, have yourself a look at an Icelandic keyboard layout:
Don't let your eyes focus too much on the extra characters -- look at the non-alphanumeric characters. The three rows of symbols instead of two. The quotation mark over the "2". The backslash over the "7". The curly braces, separated from each other by the bracket. Greater-than and less than on the same key, in the far left Almost everything non-alphanumeric is shuffled. Actually, the hardest one for me to get used to is the minus sign and underscore, which are now off by one key due to the relocation of plus and equals.
~11:00: Meet with a woman from HR, who's an immigrant from eastern Europe (I'm noticing this a lot at this company). Her English isn't as good as the native Icelanders, but I'm in no shape to try to handle this conversation in Icelandic, so it sufficed. She "passed the buck" on doing most of the paperwork for my work and residence permits back to S and myself, so this would become my job for much of the rest of the next two days.
~Noon: S comes to meet me because "Of course you shouldn't have to eat alone on your first day here!" I'm too timid to talk to the women fixing the food behind the counter; I just grab a skyr and a premade sandwich that S recommends after I tell him that I'm a grænmetisæta (vegetarian). We chat.
~3:00: 1-hour conference with all of the developers and related staff in S's office. Topic: Eating the cookies I brought and talking about Iceland.
S ducks out shortly thereafter (he arrives a bit early each day, and in Iceland, an "8 hour workday" means 8 hours total (one of which is lunch), not 9 total. I finish up my day, one of the last to head out.
My evening is laid out, a series of tight connections. First I race to Keflavík ("KEP-luh-Veek") to meet with a Real Estate agent. I miraculously find him only about 10 minutes later than I planned on meeting him. In addition to going over some properties he has available out in the Icelandic countryside, he teaches me about the Ins and Outs of the unusual Icelandic real-estate system. To wit:
* There is no such thing as a credit history. Your ability to borrow is based solely on your salary and what you can provide for a down payment.
* Nobody will loan you more than 80% of the cost of a house (60% for a summer house)
* The government is in the loan business. They will only loan up to 20 milljón krónur, however (~$170k). If you need more -- and in the Reykjavík area, you probably do -- you have to go to a bank for the rest. But you still can't go over that 80%/60% total.
* You can get lower rates with an Icelandic oddity: foreign currency/consumer price indexed loans. With these, not only do your payments change over time, like with adjustable-rate mortgages in the US, but your principle owed changes as well. These sort of loans made life very painful for people when the króna lost half its value during the kreppa.
* Only square footage under a roof that is at least 1.8 meters above the floor is counted. Homes with slanted roofs actually have more floor space than is listed.
Data acquired, I race to my first Icelandic lesson with an actual teacher, in Hafnarfjörður. I circle and circle and look and look, finally finding the place over half an hour late. The teacher isn't phased. Apart from the time I freeze up for minutes on end when the teacher tries to get us to do an exercise where we do improv in Icelandic (I couldn't work both sides of my brain at the same time to both make up stories / questions and translate), I fared quite well, and even got a snicker out of a pun I made in Icelandic, playing on the homonyms fíll (elephant) and fýll (the fulmar, a foul-smelling seabird), and got to correct the teacher once on the tense of objects taken related to clothing (fara úr takes þagufall). Yeay!
I go to pay and find out I'm 1.000kr short on cash. The teacher shrugs it off, and tells me that there's going to be another class on Wednesday, no extra charge (I conditionally accept). I offer another student a ride back to Reykjavík. We seemed about on par in our language skills, but I was to discover that she had been studying for five years while I had only been studying for under eight months. So overall, a real confidence booster.
Night time in Reykjavík. The Hallgrímskirkja glows outside my hotel window, and a waning gibbous moon shines through the clouds. All is well with the world.