I don't know why, but I was surprised that the safety presentation and announcements came first in Icelandic, then in English on the plane. The airline being Icelandair, I guess this shouldn't have surprised me.
It was a very nice flight, as nice as a flight that length can be anyway. Personally, I don't sleep well on planes; this one was no different. Although the flight was overnight (departing Denver at 5:15pm, arriving in Iceland at 6:35 am), it never got dark. I assume this was because of how far north we were flying.
When we arrived in Iceland, I was greeted by a field of light purple flowers, waving in the breeze. Once inside the airport, first thing was first: I needed to find the gate my plane to London took off from. The plane would depart at 7:40. Now in a larger airport like Chicago O' Hare or even DIA, it might take the majority of that hour I had to find and get to the gate. Because of this, a wave of panic hit me. What if I couldn't figure out where I needed to be? My boarding pass didn't even have a gate number! Since I had no idea what the first sign I happened to look at said, I approached a desk in the terminal. I asked the lady behind it if she could tell me where I needed to be and showed her my boarding pass. She looked at it, looked at her computer, and told me to go around the corner to gate 31. It literally was around the corner, and when I got there, it struck me how tiny the airport was. We boarded the plane shortly, but not before I bought a postcard and got some change from my purchase in Iceland's currency.
(This is not what I got, but I did get all of these coins except the 50KR one)
Before, I would have been surprised Iceland wasn't a giant chunk of ice, but my twelve-year-old brother informed me not long ago that he learned in school that Iceland is really green, and Greenland is really icy. I wouldn't describe what I saw of Iceland to be green, but it was nice nonetheless.
