Continental Breakfast, Reykjavík, December 2018
The hotel room is a muffled womb, buffering us from the frozen dark outside. We crossed an ocean with our one-year-old daughter to hunt for the Northern Lights. She’s deaf, and although she has cochlear implants, she was always such a visual creature, a lover of lights. It had been thrilling to feel the change in atmosphere as soon as we boarded our Icelandair plane, mythological ponies on coloring-book pages, those green wisps of light waving on back-of-seat TV screens. Yet even here above the Arctic Circle I cling to one familiar thing: bottles of Starbucks mocha frappuccino I bought after we landed and placed in the hotel room’s mini fridge. This is my Linus blanket, my woobie.
I rise before my husband and daughter, dress in a shaft of light from the bathroom to not wake them up. Slip down to Continental breakfast, passing Björk coffee-table books and vinyl records on the walls in this hotel that’s too hip for us. (You can borrow a record player down at concierge. We did this; I have a video, the three of us dancing to corny Icelandic Christmas records, my daughter hearing the music, a new world of sound enabled by technology.) I set my purse on a booth seat in this subterranean nook, to save a table, not that it’s crowded. A song called “Horchata” by Vampire Weekend seems to always be playing: “In December, drinking horchata/I’d look psychotic in a balaclava.” It sounds like winter in Iceland, as far as I’ve experienced it, which isn’t very far, being only a tourist.
Specifically, it sounds like a tourist winter spent mostly indoors in Iceland, bustling from warm, glowy place to warm, glowy place: hotel to the cafe where I order a daily Piparköku Jökull (frozen gingerbread-flavored coffee drink; cashier: “You… know that’s a cold drink, right?”), hotel to Bónus Mart to buy baby formula for our daughter, hotel to a small bar where I sat alone and drank mulled wine while my husband watched over our daughter as she slept, taking turns for solo walks through the abundantly safe-feeling downtown, passing giant Christmas cats who will eat you if you do not receive clothing as a present.
At the Continental breakfast, I beeline for perfect French toast, perfect bacon. How is it always so uniformly perfect? I chunk out a glass of ice, and pull the bottle of mocha frappuccino out of my purse, like a drunk with a flask. I pour the frappuccino over the ice.
And here, before the uncertainty of how our one-year-old will take to the bracing air as we scuttle from agenda item to agenda item, before the sticker shock of menu prices for even something like a bowl of bean soup to share, before my husband drops and loses his iPhone on the ice during a daylong tour of the “Golden Circle” sights, before our tour guide drives us around to search for — and fail to find — the Northern Lights, before my shyness prevents me from asking the tour guide to stop so I can take a photo of the little white church with the neon crosses for gravestones, before my husband gets sick and it casts a pall over the rest of the somehow still-photogenic trip: everything is warm, softly twinkle-lit, hygge, perfect.
