Landing in Reykjavik

It was smooth sailing into Reykjavik. After a short layover in JFK Airport, we boarded the 6 hour flight across the Atlantic. Since it's a 4 hour time addition from East Coast, we landed fairly late. As we were getting close the captain comes on the speaker and says the standard "we're descending into Iceland...local time is just before midnight". I had been keeping my window shade closed up to that point to help me sleep, but I raised it to see what was out there.

Since Iceland is at such a high latitude, its daylight hours fluctuate wildly over the course of a year. It's been an interesting transition for me these past few years coming from California (which doesn't change much over the seasons) to Boston (with four very distinct seasons), to the extremeness of Iceland.

How extreme exactly? Here's what was outside my window at midnight when I was landing!
That's right - the sun currently sets right around midnight. Even more odd, it rises about 4 hours later.

Driving to our house was also interesting. All the road signs and street names are in Icelandic. While the language shares a similar alphabet to English, it does have extra letters and is totally unintelligible to those who don't speak it. It sounds kind of like German to me, but I'm told there are little similarities.

Even though we got in around 2am, the roommates didn't get home until an hour after us because they were at a party which ran late. There are 3 of them, and they're all Hungarians. We seem to be getting along with each other really well. It helps a lot that they're really funny and their English is very good. We're also hosting 3 additional students from MIT who happen to be passing through, so our 5 bedroom house is currently pretty crowded. It doesn't matter much since we don't expect to sleep a lot considering the time difference and the funky daylight hours.