The morning light comes in sideways here, even in August, and it’s the first thing I notice when I open the curtains. Overcast, soft, the kind of light that makes the colourful rooftops of the old town look like they’ve been painted with water rather than oil. I’ve been in Reykjavík for four days now, and the city still feels like a place I’m getting to know rather than a place I live in. But the paperwork is done, the bank account is open, and the kennitala is safely in my phone, so today feels like the first day I get to be a person here, not just a problem to be solved.
I decided to take the bus today. The Strætó network is the bones of this city, and I wanted to understand it the way I’ll need to understand the Ring Road later—not as a tourist who looks up times in a panic, but as someone who knows that the 11 stops outside the hostel and the 15 winds past the university and the 3 goes all the way out to the harbour. The single fare is about 690 krónur now, which is roughly five dollars, and the 30-day pass is around 11,600 krónur, about eighty-five dollars. I bought the pass. It felt like a commitment, a small one, but a commitment nonetheless, to this place and to the weeks of bus rides ahead before I sort out the car.
The bus itself is quiet. People nod to each other, but that’s the extent of it. I sat by the window and watched the city slide by—the low concrete buildings, the occasional turf roof, the laundry lines between apartment blocks. There’s a particular kind of silence here that I’m beginning to recognise. It’s not empty; it’s full of the weather pressing down, the sea somewhere close, the geothermal steam rising from the pavements. It’s the opposite of rush. I found myself thinking about the old Norse settlers, Ingólfur Arnarson, who chose this exact spot for his longhouse not because it was beautiful but because the steam from the hot springs meant there was geothermal heat. The city is still full of that, the hverir, the hot pots, the piping that heats the houses and the pavements and the pools. It’s a city built on top of a fire that never quite goes out.
I got off at the Old Harbour, the Grandi district, which is a strange mix of the old and the new. The fishing boats are still there, but they’re surrounded by design studios and food halls and the smell of fresh bread from the bakeries. I walked past the Aurora Reykjavík museum, which I’ve been told is worth a visit if you want to see the norðurljós without the winter, and I made a mental note to come back. The harbour is one of those places where the city feels both ancient and entirely contemporary. The light on the water, the gulls crying, the distant hum of a whale-watching boat heading out into Faxaflói Bay. I stopped at the Grandi Mathöll, the food hall, and bought a bowl of lamb soup from one of the stalls. It was about 2,800 krónur, roughly twenty dollars, and it was exactly what the weather required—thick, savoury, with chunks of meat and root vegetables swimming in a broth that tasted like the earth and the rain and the grass of the highlands. I sat by the window and ate it slowly, watching the boats rock at their moorings.
After lunch, I walked along the waterfront toward the Sun Voyager sculpture, that gleaming stainless-steel ship on the shore. It’s a beautiful thing, skeletal and hopeful, like a promise that the journey might still be ahead of us. I stood there for a while, letting the wind pull at my jacket. The city behind me was quiet, but not empty. I noticed the flags along the main street, the rainbow bunting already up for Pride week. The festival is apparently a big deal here—the whole centre fills up for the week, and the parade on Saturday runs from Skólavörðustígur down to the park by the harbour. I’m told it’s one of the biggest events of the year, and the city has been preparing for days. But today, it still felt like a secret, the decorations waiting patiently for the crowd to arrive.
I turned inland and walked up toward the church. Hallgrímskirkja is the landmark that dominates every view of Reykjavík, its concrete columns rising like basalt organ pipes, and I’d been meaning to go inside properly. The tower elevator was closed for maintenance, which was a shame, but the interior was a different kind of beautiful—bright, spare, Lutheran, with a light that fell across the pews in long, clean bands. The organ is left to speak for itself, and three people were sitting in silence, just listening to the echoes. I lit a candle for no one in particular, just because it felt like the kind of thing you do when you’re alone in a church, and I sat in the back row and let the quiet wrap around me.
The cost of living here has been on my mind all day, and not just because I keep checking the exchange rate. The soup was twenty dollars. A coffee, I’ve noticed, is about 700 krónur, around five dollars, and a beer in a bar is more like 1,200 to 1,500 krónur, ten or eleven dollars. Rent for a modest one-bedroom flat, if I can find one, runs about 230,000 krónur a month, which is roughly 1,700 dollars. It’s one of the most expensive cities in Europe, and it’s easy to see why people struggle. The tourism boom has pushed prices up, and the housing market is tight. But the wages are higher here too, and the safety net is real. It’s a trade-off, like everywhere else, and I’m still trying to work out whether it’s worth it. I spoke to a woman at the bank this morning who said she’d lived in Reykjavík all her life and thought it was getting too crowded, too expensive. But she smiled when she said it, and I got the sense she wouldn’t live anywhere else.
In the afternoon, I found myself in the Vesturbær district, the quiet, leafy part of the city where the embassies are and the streets are lined with wooden houses painted in soft colours. I’d heard about the local pool, Vesturbæjarlaug, so I decided to give it a try. In Iceland, the pool is not a luxury; it’s a necessity, a place where people meet to discuss politics and gossip and the price of cod. The pool was quiet, as it was a Tuesday afternoon, and I swam laps in the warm geothermal water while the steam rose around me. It’s a strange feeling, to be swimming outdoors in the middle of a city, the sky grey above, the houses huddled around, and the whole thing heated by the earth itself. I stayed until my skin pruned, then sat in the hot pot with a retired fisherman who told me, in his thick accent, that the cod stocks are better than they’ve been in years, but the young people don’t want to go to sea anymore. He shrugged. 'It’s not a bad thing,' he said. 'Change is never bad.'
Back in the city centre, the evening was beginning to settle in. It’s strange, the light in August here—the sun doesn’t fully set until around ten, but there’s a long, slow golden hour that stretches for hours, and the streets seem to breathe in and out with it. I walked down Laugavegur, the main shopping street, past the bakeries and the tourist shops and the bars beginning to fill up. I stopped at a café called Reykjavik Roasters, which is a local institution, and bought a coffee to take away. It was about 700 krónur, and it was worth every króna. The barista asked me how long I was staying, and I said I was thinking of making it home. She laughed and said, 'Anyone can be an Icelander in the summer.' I laughed too, but I think she was a little bit serious.
I went to the Settlement Exhibition in the afternoon—the Landnámssýningin—which is built around the remains of a 10th-century longhouse. It’s a strange thing, to stand in a room that is both a museum and an archaeological dig, looking at the stones that held up the roof of a family’s home a thousand years ago. The exhibition had a multimedia panorama that uses projections and sound to show the landscape changing through the seasons, and I found myself standing in the dark, watching the winter come and go, the snow covering the grass, then the light returning. It made me think about what it means to live in a place that has been inhabited for so long, and how the landscape itself is the most permanent thing here. The city is a young city, really—Reykjavík only officially became a town in the 18th century—but the land underneath it is ancient, and the stories go back further than I can imagine.
I ended the day at the harbour again, standing on the pier as the light began to fade. The gulls were loud, and the wind was picking up, and across the bay I could see the silhouette of Mount Esja, which the locals call their mountain. The river of clouds was moving fast, and the water was a silver-grey, and I thought about the ghosts of all the people who have stood here before me—the settlers, the fishermen, the poets, the dreamers. The city lights were coming on, one by one, and the rainbow flags were fluttering above the roofs. Tomorrow, the Pride festival would properly begin, and the streets would be full of colour and noise and music. But tonight, it was still quiet, still just the city and me, and I felt, for the first time since I arrived, that I might belong here. That the long journey ahead, the Ring Road, the jökull to the east, the Þingvellir to the north, was something I could actually do. The light would hold for a while longer, and I would walk home slowly, and the night would be brief, and the morning would come with the same softness, and that would be enough.