Hvar er Damon? (Iceland Part 1)

By the time we'd checked in at the hotel it was 2am, it was dark, and all the nearby streets seemed deserted. So the only sensible thing to do was get our shoes on and head in search of the party. Fortunately 2.30am in Reykjavik is a perfectly reasonable time to walk into pretty much any pub or bar, and in the 3 hours that followed we found ourselves most welcome in several places, even managed to see a band and got caught up while a disco formed in what should really have been a cafe. Everything wound up just in time to catch breakfast back at the hotel and get the energies up for a stroll down the sea-front in the fresh sunlight and grab a cuppa back in town with full intentions of getting day two off to a rolling start. Of course it shortly after this we had to admit to being a little over optimistic and submit to an hour or two shut-eye to punctuate the days. But regardless of this, we had arrived.

The best way I can think of to describe Reykjavik is by asking you to take picturesque English waterside town, say Windermere or even St. Ives, then imagine that is the capital city of the country, with all the facilities for entertainment and out lying industrial and commercial districts that would bring, but with the essence of the downtown area only really being changed by filling it with the ultra-fashionable youth of the land, and keeping it all open later. Quaint and cool seem to sit hand in hand as if they were childhood sweet-hearts. It's a nice place to be, and clearly a place it's nice to be seen.

As confessed Blur fans, with Alex James' book offering much of the initial inspiration for visiting Iceland, the first stop of the day had to be the Kaffibarinn, famously 'part-owned' by Damon Albarn and his director mate Baltasar Kormakur (101 Reykjavik) it seems to be the 'coolest' cafe/bar in town with impenetrable queues outside all Friday and Saturday night. Getting in there around dinner time though, it's just staff, who are quite happy to chat as you sit by the bar. Tell you about the places to go, deny the Damon myth ("he was involved for a bit, but just about 1%, all publicity, now the owners are the creators of the Airwaves festival you've come here for"), and feed you plenty of peanuts. 

But we couldn't sit around playing Britpop tourists all day and the pink bands on our wrists kept reminding us we'd come for a music festival and this was the last day of it. So a wander round, bands playing in store gigs, artists taking over empty shops to plug their wares and sell the most impressive t-shirt ever seen (to be displayed soon on a Russ near you), and all the fun of the musical fair. Culminating in 4 hours spent being incredibly impressed by the temporary, but perfect, venue set up in the Reykjavik Art Museum and enjoying Dikte, Boys in a Band, CSS and Vampire Weekend, and just how much effort people had put into their clothes, even if they didn't put anywhere near as much effort into not barging into you as they walked past, before calling it a night, tired, so very tired, but fulfilled.

And that was just the first 24 hours...