My laptop apparently has kicked the bucket, after considerately surviving one whole night on our first trip since covid times. Can I blog from my phone? Hmmm….if you can believe it, this is the first time I’ve traveled abroad with my smartphone, never having signed up for an international calling plan before.

While I don’t have a working laptop, I do have water in my ears, thanks to our trip to a public pool here in Reykjavik.

In fact, as I write this, HOB is still in the pool, having at first insisted that no way, no possible chance, was he going in one of those. Whatever, I know his ways. As soon he slid in the water he got a drunk look on his face and wanted to stay all evening.

Anyway, let’s say you also arrived in Reykjavik yesterday, and to celebrate your negative covid test and sweet quarantine freedom, you too would like to visit one of Iceland’s geothermal outdoor pools.

Look around for a sign bearing a decapitated blue head floating above two waves. Go inside.

Get a ticket from the counter and head to your gender segregated locker room. Get naked and lock all your stuff in that locker except for your swimsuit and a towel. (Don’t think about foot fungus. They don’t have foot fungus in Iceland. Too cold for foot fungus in public pools.) Put your swimsuit and towel in a cubby outside the shower room.

Wearing only your locker key on a rubber band around your wrist, shower alongside lots of Iceland ladies and cute little kids. Use the soap from giant, centrally located pump bottles. Lather up all your hairy parts and in case you are unsure which are your hairy parts a helpful sign on the shower wall demonstrates. Feel overwhelmed with desire to take a picture of that sign.

Now that your parts are lathered, you are ready to hop in an unclorinated bath with half the population of Reykjavik, global pandemic be damned.

Go outside to the steaming pool surrounded by smaller pools with varying temperatures. Locate your drunk-looking spouse. Take the water slide. Weeeeeee woo-hoo gaaaah water in ears!

Get a little bored. Go back and repeat the showering and lathering of hairy parts. Hear a sound like a groaning cow? That’s a centrifuge to take the water from your swimsuit. Use it. Go back to your locker and put on an impossible amount of clothes and a face mask, because all of a sudden there is a global pandemic again, just not inside Iceland public pools.

FOR THE LOVE OF LOKI HOB IS STILL IN THE POOL IS HE EVER LEAVING HE IS TOTALLY GETTING A FOOT FUNGUS GAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!