After traveling for almost 24 hours straight (if you count the time jump), I was exhausted. But you can’t just show up somewhere and go to sleep now can you?

Hello Reykjavík!

What a cool looking place tho for real. The first thing I noticed was everything seems so small. Maybe that’s why the mountains look so big. The streets are more narrow, the windows are smaller, the buildings are shorter, and my legs are touching the bottom of the tabletop. But the people are a normal size. It’s kinda awesome. Oh also there’s only 4 hours of full sunlight here – between around 11 and 3/4 in the afternoon.

KEX Rules.

My hostel, KEX, is awesome. The downstairs area I could seriously eat & drink in the entire time. And then I go upstairs to sleep. They make it pretty hard to leave actually, with one of the best craft beer lists in town, a tiny kitchen that puts out great food (especially when everything is cheaper during happy hour), and the fact that the weather is insane right now. Check it out:

The city is something different:

It’s a nice mix of older townhouse style and modern/clean designed buildings.

This is the Harpa Concert Hall/Conference Center. It’s made with this weird honeycomb-like design and so much glass. So crazy.

Working Remotely:

So far, it’s been really great. Internet speeds aren’t 100% where I’m used to, but with local development it’s not a huge deal. I’m using the Cloak VPN on both my Mac and the iPhone and it’s outstanding. I upgraded to the unlimited plan just for this month so I don’t have to worry about usages. In Iceland I think the closest server of theirs is in the Netherlands.

We had a conference call with the team over at BP Summer Programs yesterday to catch up on progress on some things for their new registration app that we recently built and launched for them and since they’re already a (mostly) remote company it isn’t weird at all. Just scheduling for time differences really.

I also tried out Sage 9 for the first time yesterday for a new project/theme – including Yarn! Seemed to be a good bit quicker than NPM, and I’m really digging being able to use ES6 and Webpack for assets.

The Beer:

Just to “get it out of the way” I took it upon myself (and actually with someone else I met at the bar looking for some drinking company) to try the craft beer bars within walking distance to check out some of Iceland’s offerings. The consensus? Good, clean, beers. Everything here is crisp as hell, filtered, and really crushable. At KEX, I tried the Bríó Pilsner and the Úlfrún Session IPA. At Kaldi Bar/Café, I had some Dopplebock that was absolutely outstanding. My favorite beer so far actually I think, too bad I forgot what it’s called. Ölstofan, I had Borg’s Skúli Red Ale – not my favorite, but still a tasty one. Finished my night drinking a few Gull’s… ALL THE BEER IS SO EXPENSIVE HERE. Everything’s expensive, but $10 for a beer blows my mind. This is the last night I’ll be drinking this many beers in one night.

Finally, Sleep.

I slept 3-4 hours on Saturday night before my trip. I basically didn’t sleep on the planes on Sunday, and by the time I was into Monday in Reykjavík I realized it made more sense just to stay up all the way and then finally get some good sleep at the end of the night. I stayed out a little later than I expected, but it all worked out. I slept like a rock.

The Metrics:

• Miles Walked: 7
• Beers Drank: 6
• Git Commits: 3