Beginning of a New Adventure

The sun crawls higher along the sky with each passing day as midsummer nears; the air is warmer and the weather milder. Sitting on a sofa in a café in an orange house with "Café Babalú" painted in blue above the entrance, it's cosy and relaxing to watch the mixture of Icelanders and tourists walking past the window in either direction. I look further off towards the edge of the (what an Icelander would proudly call) "city", the tall and majestic mountain Esja (with its snow-capped top receding) sprawled along the north of Reykjavík. Its natural beauty still fascinates me today, even though I have lived in this capital for nearly two years, which makes me wonder: “How did I end up here of all places?”

We would have to go back to the year 1998, when I was nine years old and my father had just got me an atlas on my bedroom wall in Singapore. I had already been well travelled at that age, having been to all neighbouring countries and to as far as New Zealand, and my birth country, the US. That atlas enthralled me. Having had a slight distaste for living in constant heat and high humidity, I constantly found myself staring into the atlas in search of a potential “new” home. A small island labelled “Iceland” in the north of the North Atlantic Ocean intrigued me.

The next part of the tale takes place in the year 2009, when I was living in my first apartment in California. During the winter holidays, I decided it was time to take a vacation in Iceland after seeing photos an acquaintance uploaded onto Facebook a trip he took to Iceland a few months prior. As my father had decided to visit me during my break from school, I convinced him to come with me on a ten-day trip to Iceland.

As the plane began to descend, extra-terrestrial textured landscapes painted the ground below, highlighted and lit up only by the setting sun. Even as the taxi took us to the hotel, the scenery with moss-covered lava formations followed us throughout. We arrived at hotel located deep in the centre of downtown after an hour’s drive. We decided that it would be best to rest up early after the 13-hour flight, so we left our brick-walled hotel and took a stroll in the city in search of a cosy café. Within five minutes of walking, we find ourselves pulled into an orange house with “Café Babalú” painted in blue above the entrance. We sat by the window, sipping lattés and peering out the window. The snow began to fall and the snow-covered mountain surrounding the city began to fade away.