Sleeping Around (18 page)

10

‘Occupation: Mathematics student, speculative fiction author, professional encyclopedia maintainer, programmer, project leader and beer connoisseur.'

Smári McCarthy, 22, Reykjavík, Iceland

CouchSurfing.com

My head felt like it was about to explode. I don't think I could have chosen a more unsuitable country to go to with an aching head full of snot. The name Iceland doesn't really conjure up images of the sort of place that could lessen the misery of having a cold. If only I'd gone to warm and sunny Cyprus instead. Cyprus was another country on my shortlist as a potential European couch-surfing destination. Applying my criterion of going to places where I hadn't been before— given that I'd already visited 32 other countries in Europe— my choices were quite limited. In the end I chose Iceland because that was where Casey Fenton, the founder of CouchSurfing.com, surfed his first couch.

For such a small country (Iceland's population reached 300 000 in the same month that America's population hit 300 million), there were certainly plenty of couches to choose from. I sent requests to a bunch of people, including Gudmundur Thor Palsson who ‘used to be a fat pig, but now I'm a little thinner, but still a pig' and whose interests were ‘army, porn and drinking'. I tried Geiri who said: ‘If it matters to anyone, I'm gay, but my couch is beige.' I sent a request to Lluks Jón Gunnarsson simply because he lived in a town called Hofudhborgarsvaedhi. I'm not a clown dentist, so I thought I might have a chance with Theodóra Þorsteinsdóttir who said: ‘I have two phobias. I'm scared of dentists and I shit my pants whenever I see a clown. So I don't want to host a dentist or a clown . . . or a clown dentist.' I also tried ‘programming hippie drummer' Johann Fridriksson who lived with his robot Benjamin. But it was ‘half-Icelandic, half-Irish' Smári McCarthy who emailed straight back offering me his couch:

You're welcome to my couch.
I should note, however, that I'm a full-time student these days, and therefore I spend more than my fair share of time studying, so I won't always be available. And when I am, I'll probably be very intent on drinking heavily—I hope you can appreciate my situation. I'm not going to try and over glorify my liver's alcohol processing prowess, but I dare say that when it comes to this it is rather advantageous to have both Icelandic and Irish genes floating about there. So condition one is: You have to keep up with me.

Drinking heavily seemed a good idea when I accepted Smári's couch offer, but now I just felt like snuggling up in bed watching DVDs and eating Mum's homemade chicken soup. There didn't seem much chance of that happening, though. Particularly the DVD part; Smári didn't even own a television.

Aeroplane flights have a wonderful knack of exacerbating the symptoms of a cold, so by the time I shuffled through customs at the small, but incredibly shiny, Keflavík airport, my head was spinning. There was a bus waiting in the car park, but I only got two steps out of the terminal before I scampered whimpering back inside again. ‘Bloody hell, it's cold,' I gasped. Over the next few days I would say this, and I'm not exaggerating, at least a hundred times. It was that type of bone-chilling cold that, err, really chills your bones.

I missed the bus. By the time I'd put on every item of clothing in my pack, the bus had gone. Oh well, I thought, there'll be another bus along in a minute. Wrong again, Einstein. Try three hours. All the buses' departures were timed to coincide with the rather infrequent arrivals of international flights.

After finding the bank, tourist office and bus ticket counter all closed, I went for a wander to find something to eat. Feed a cold, starve a fever, they say. Except I didn't think that I'd be able to afford to feed my cold. ‘Bloody hell, it's expensive,' I gasped. Over the next few days I would say this, and I'm not exaggerating, at least a hundred times. A basic (as in the cheapest) sandwich was twelve dollars. This was in the upstairs and somewhat up-market cafe. Maybe the small airport shop downstairs would be cheaper. It was. The same sandwich there was only eleven dollars. Well, I think the thing I was looking at was a sandwich. It looked like an egg sandwich, but it was called a
sómasamloka rækjusalat
. When I read the rest of the label I realised why it was so expensive. The sandwich also contained those rare ingredients
and
(try saying that with a mouthful of sandwich).

Iceland itself looked yummy enough to eat. As soon as the bus pulled out of the airport car park, we were driving through a surrealistic lava field that looked like large blobs of melted dark chocolate. There wasn't a tree or blade of grass in sight.

Twenty minutes later we were driving into Legoland. In the middle of this barren landscape was Reykjavík. The world's most northerly capital city is a Lego-like mishmash of ancient wooden houses with bright primary-coloured tin roofs and futuristic buildings made of concrete, steel, glass and lava. The whole scene was as dramatically composed as a theatrical set: The colours of the city buildings looked all the brighter against the dark, jagged backdrop of mountains in the middle distance and their snowy tips created an even stronger contrast with a sky of the deepest blue you can imagine.

The bus station was on the edge of town sandwiched between two busy roads and a windswept field. Just to remind me that it was cold outside the cosy warmth of the bus, large chunks of ice were lying on the ground. There was only one person outside the bus terminal building waiting to greet the bus. It was Smári. The first thing I said to him when I stepped off the bus was ‘Aren't you cold?' Smári was wearing a light jacket and long-sleeved T-shirt (and pants of course). ‘No, I'm fine,' he said as my teeth began to chatter. Smári had long blonde frizzy hair tied back in a ponytail and he was wearing a black bowler hat. Although Smári had never lived in Ireland, he spoke English with a disconcerting mixture of an Icelandic accent and an Irish lilt. He sounded like the lost love child of Bono and Björk. His Irish father had come to Iceland for a holiday, fallen in love with a local girl and moved here.

On the very bracing ten-minute walk to Smári's apartment, we passed a large modern glass building. ‘That's where I work,' Smári enthused. A large sign on the front of the building read ‘deCODE Genetics Corporation'.

‘I haven't been for a while, though,' he added. Smári hadn't been to work for three weeks. ‘I work whenever,' he shrugged. ‘They know I've got study.'

‘What do they, um, do or make in there?' I asked.

‘It's a biopharmaceutical company that applies its discoveries in human genetics to the development of drugs for common diseases using DNA-based diagnostics, bioinformatics, genotyping and structural biology,' Smári explained. Okay, he may have lost me there, but he continued, ‘Iceland has become the world leader in gene discovery because of its success in identifying gene stems using the Icelandic Health Sector Database, which contains the medical records and genealogical and genetic data of every single Icelander. Iceland is the ideal testing ground for genetic research because the population gene pool is pretty much pure.' What Smári was trying to say, I think, is that the entire country is virtually one big, somewhat inbred, happy family.

‘You won't find more than eight degrees of separation in familial connections between people in Iceland,' Smári proclaimed. ‘We have a genealogical website which lists everyone in Iceland. You can pick any two names and the site will find a shared relative.'

As we negotiated our way around a series of frozen puddles, Smári challenged me to name a famous Icelander.

‘I know two!' I said proudly. ‘Björk and Eidur Gudjohnsen.' [Gudjohnsen is a former Chelsea player and probably Iceland's most famous sportsman.]

‘Björk and I share the same great, great, great grandmother,' he said. ‘And Eidur Gudjohnsen is my uncle.'

‘Wow! Your uncle.'

‘Actually no, I haven't checked him yet, but he's probably my cousin or something.'

Smári did however find some relative revelations when the site first went online. His childhood friend's great grandfather was the brother of his great grandfather.

Smári lived in ‘student quarters', a series of apartment blocks not far from the university. Outside the entrance was a bike rack full of unlocked bicycles. Smári's front door was also unlocked and he couldn't even remember when he'd last seen his front-door key. I suppose there's not much chance of theft in Iceland when you could very well be stealing from your second cousin.

I winced with revulsion when I walked into Smári's apartment. The entire apartment smelled of a heady mix of mouldy socks and rotten eggs. I actually gagged a few times while he gave me a very short tour of his apartment. It was a very short tour because there were only two rooms. The main room, which was tiny, looked crowded with stuff even though there was hardly anything in it. Squashed into the small space was a double bed, kitchen cupboards and a sink, a fridge, a stove, a small desk with a computer, a bookshelf and a couch that was smaller than José's mini-couch in Santiago. Not that I could really see much of the couch, or the bench, or the desk. Every surface was littered with empty mega-litre plastic Pepsi bottles, jumbo chip packets and empty bowls of pot noodles. On the couch lay a couple of open pizza boxes with half-eaten slices of pizza in them. Basically, it was like most ‘student quarters' I'd seen (and lived in).

‘Um, is that my bed?' I asked gravely.

‘No, I've got this for you,' Smári said as he dragged a blow-up mattress out from under his bed. Well, that was a new one for my slumber collection.

There was something else quite disconcerting about the room. Scrawled on a large whiteboard mounted on the wall and all over the glass door leading to the small balcony were the ravings of a lunatic. Well, that's what it looked like. They were actually complicated mathematical formulas that Smári had been working on as part of his course. ‘I've been working on this one formula for over a week and I'm still not close to an answer,' he said, adding another
x2 = y2
to the bottom of the mess of symbols and numbers.

He wouldn't get much help from me. I don't know my pi from a pastie. I couldn't even understand the names of most of the subjects Smári was studying at university, which included Applied Linear Statistical Models, Algorithm Analysis, Numerical Analysis and Life in the Universe.

‘One time I had a difficult formula,' Smári said. ‘And I'd worked on it for hours without any luck, so I went to the pub and got drunk. When I woke up in the morning I saw that in my drunken state I'd scribbled numbers all over the board.'

‘Did it make any sense?' I asked.

‘Yeah, it was the right answer.'

We finished our very brief apartment tour in the bathroom where the rancid smell was even more intense. And there they were. The evil-smelling culprits were Smári's socks, which were hanging over the shower rod. Smári must have noticed me wincing, because he said, ‘We're so used to the stink that we forget other people aren't used to it.'

‘Oh yeah, it is a little smelly,' I said in between gags.

‘Get used to it, because everyone's place smells like this.'

Wow, the entire country must be inflicted with foot rot.

‘It's the sulphur in the water,' Smári said.

Ahh, so it wasn't the socks. Smári then went on to explain that almost the entire country is one big active volcano that sits on a thin crust of land above a subterranean cauldron of molten rock and the result is an abundance of geothermally heated, and somewhat smelly, sulphur-rich water. This gives Icelanders an endless supply of hot water, which also heats their homes and even keeps the streets and footpaths free of snow and ice during the winter.

If only they would turn up the heating on the footpaths, because within a few minutes of leaving the apartment to walk downtown I was shivering again (Smári didn't own a car, much to my chilly chagrin). When we strolled past a frozen lake called
Tjörn
(which means pond in Icelandic), I noticed that one end wasn't frozen and was crammed with flapping ducks and swans.