The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations (27 page)

“I mean,” she said, over our apology lunch, “I just don’t get why people encourage you to behave so badly. You’re great fun sober, but it’s like you feel that you need to get drink and act like a dick to keep up some image.”

“It’s not like that at all,” I said, knowing full well that it was precisely like that.

“We haff your room ready for you, Mr. Carr,” said the receptionist in Reykjavık, with only the slightest hint of an accent. “On the sixth floor. Would you like help with your bags?”

I gestured at the single small suitcase parked by my feet.

“I’ll manage, thank you.”

She handed me my room keys and I headed to the elevator. Once you’ve lived in hotels for a year—which in my case meant over fifty separate check-ins—you get the process down to a science.

In the elevator I remove my keycard from its small cardboard folder. The room number is usually written in pen on a small flap inside, which I tear off and tuck into my wallet, behind my drivers license. Always in the same place.

Between the elevator and the room, I decide on a mnemonic to remember my room number, just as a backup. There’s nothing worse that getting back late at night and having either to fish around in your wallet for the scribbled number or—even worse—having to ask reception to remind you.

Room 689. Six eight nine. Heh; that’s an easy one. With mnemonics, it helps to have a dirty mind.

I open the door of my room and put my suitcase on my bed. It looks like any other small bag on wheels, but it measures exactly forty-five linear inches, the maximum size for carry-on bags on most major airlines.

I’d dumped my old, much larger suitcase in London back in July. I was bored of waiting at baggage reclaim for my gigantic case and I knew it was only a matter of time before an airline mislaid it. Given that I carried my entire life in that suitcase, losing it would be pretty disastrous. Finding the perfect carry-on bag—small enough to fit in overhead lockers and yet with enough pockets and space inside that it would fit everything I needed—took the best part of a week of trawling the web. I read literally hundreds of reviews on travel websites before finally settling on one made by Samsonite.

While I waited for the bag to be delivered, I started the process of even further streamlining my life. I’d already been pretty ruthless when I moved out of my apartment, selling or throwing away everything that I could possibly live without, no matter what its sentimental value. I’d kept—so I thought—only the bare minimum I needed to survive: clothes, toiletries, a couple of books, my laptop, my phone and various chargers, passport …

But when I looked back at my first few months of living out of a
suitcase, I realized that there were even more things that could go. For a start, there were clothes that I hadn’t worn at all in the previous six months. I was carrying around a black business suit on the basis that at any moment I might be invited to an important meeting, a formal dinner or a funeral.

In fact I had been invited to just one formal dinner since I’d left London, but one of the perks of being a writer—I’d discovered—is that you can turn up at almost any venue wearing jeans and sneakers and people will just shrug.

Given that the way I was going the next funeral I attended would be my own, the suit could probably go, which meant so could the shiny shoes. I ended up keeping just my one pair of Converse, which are the first thing I kick off and place side by side next to the door before I start to unpack the rest of my clothes.

If you’re going to own just one pair of shoes, by the way, Converse are definitely the way to go. For a start they’re perennially fashionable, like blue jeans, but also dirt-cheap. When one pair wears out you can just throw them away and buy another; either an identical pair, or one in a different color. Which is easy to do as every shoe shop in the world sells them. Thirdly, for some reason, places that ban sneakers don’t seem to mind Converse.

Back to the routine.

I open the wardrobe and remove all of the coat hangers, throwing them onto the bed. Now I can start to unpack. First the shirts: six of them, all dress shirts, which can be made to look casual or smart, as the need arises. Five black, one blue.

I remove each one, unroll it (rolling is far better than folding) and place it on a hanger, before laying it on the bed.

Next I remove my two black cashmere jumpers—one V-neck, one polo neck—and my dark blue suit jacket. Like the shirts, these can all be made to look smart or casual.

I hang the jacket on one of the hangers and put it in the wardrobe where the folds will quickly drop out; the jumpers stay rolled and I put them on the shelf inside the wardrobe, along with my four black and one gray t-shirts. Socks: six pairs. Skimping on socks becomes annoying very quickly when you have to find a place to wash them. By having the same number of pairs of socks as you do shirts, you can always launder them at the same time.

One of my biggest clothing realizations was that I really didn’t need more than two pairs of pants: just a pair of jeans to wear every day and a second pair of light water-resistant pants that could be worn on a beach, or while I was washing my jeans. I’m already wearing the jeans and I leave the beach pants in the suitcase. I’m unlikely to need them in Iceland.

And that’s it for clothes. As I packed them all into my small bag for the first time in London, and handed the rest to the woman in the charity shop down the road from Robert’s student housing, I felt a twinge of panic. Surely I’d regret this; surely I’d realize that I was missing something from my extreme capsule wardrobe.

And yet, six months later, I’d never once found myself in need of any extra clothes. And if I did? That’s what stores are for.

My laptop and chargers plus pens and notebooks and the other tools of my trade are packed in a separate laptop bag: a sturdy leather thing but one that is still light enough to act as a day bag. On travel days, the bag also contains my leather passport wallet. My MacBook Pro laptop takes care of all my work and entertainment needs—word processor, DVD player, stereo, television; all packed into one handy device.

I don’t store anything on the laptop itself though—I have a nasty habit of losing or breaking electronic equipment. Instead I use Google Mail for my email and Google Docs—Google’s online office suite—to store all my files. If I lose or destroy a laptop, it doesn’t matter. All of
my files will still be waiting for me online when I buy a new one.

I take a similar approach to entertainment too: using online music services like
Pandora.com
to give me access to my music library from anywhere in the world,
Netflix.com
for movies and so on.

Internet experts refer to a reliance on this kind of storage as “living in the cloud,” a phrase that has always appealed to me. Most normal people stopped at documents and music but by living in hotels, renting cars as I need them and generally having no ties, I was basically living my entire life in the cloud.

The only concession I make to the analog world is books. I still like to read on paper, rather than on my laptop screen—but I have a rule that I never carry more than one at a time. Instead I’ll buy a new book, read it and then, after scribbling a short message in the front—“
hope you enjoy this book. Chapter three is a bit crap
,
but it’s worth sticking with
,” that kind of thing—I’ll leave it behind, either on a train or at an airport or even in a restaurant for someone else to enjoy. Often I’ll include my email address in the front, just to see if anyone replies. Someone did once; a man who picked up my copy of Christopher Buckley’s
Boomsday
at Chicago O’Hare airport emailed to say it had helped him while away a four-hour delay. That made me happy.

Still, at some point I’ll probably relent and buy an Amazon Kindle or some similar ebook reader that reproduces the experience of reading paper on an electronic device. They are thinner than books and I’ve become obsessed with saving space. The only other things in my suitcase are two waterproof toiletry bags; one containing actual toiletries and the other crammed full of things that I use to keep myself sane: a pack of playing cards, a couple of old notebooks, a spare British pay-as-you-go phone with global roaming for emergencies, condoms, and my one concession to sentiment: a champagne cork that reminds me of an incident with a girl in San Francisco.

I remove the first of the bags—the one containing actual toiletries—and
head to the bathroom. I turn on the shower, twisting the controls to the maximum heat setting. (A smell of sulfur immediately filled the room. I smiled, remembering that Iceland runs entirely on geothermal energy. It’s actually quite a nice smell when you get used to it, which is lucky as I’m pretty sure I’m going to end up going to hell one day. Room 689 has no bath, which would usually be grounds for an upgrade, but I was in a hurry, and the room is otherwise great so I let it go.)

I never carry shampoo, shower gel or any of that stuff. There isn’t a hotel in the world that doesn’t provide it. Same with soap and most of the other things that usually go in toiletry bags. I remove my white King of Shaves razor—made entirely of plastic, except for the thin blades: when you carry only hand luggage you can’t afford anything that’s going to upset the x-ray machines at airports—and place it on the sink next to a tiny bottle of shave gel.

Next to that goes my hair wax—again, no big bottles of gel or liquid for the x-ray—and a tiny tube of toothpaste and travel toothbrush. And finally a pair of nail clippers and some tweezers. That’s everything.

Anything else I might need—headache pills, spare razorblades, whatever—can be picked up at any shop in any town; there’s simply no need to add the extra weight or take up the extra space.

By now, the shower should be boiling hot. I head back out to the room and pick up the pile of shirts from the bed. Cramming everything in hand luggage means that they’re creased to hell but a few minutes in a bathroom full of steam will take care of that. I hang the shirts up around the bathroom, as close to the shower as possible.

Finally, I unpack my laptop bag, putting the laptop on the desk and plugging it in to charge. My phone charges via the laptop so I plug that in as well. I open the laptop and try to connect to the Internet, hoping that the Wi-Fi actually works. Finally, I remove the passport wallet from its zipped compartment and put it in the safe in the room. Along
with my passport, the wallet also contains my spare debit card—connected to a bank account with exactly $2000 in it. Along with the £50 note and the $100 bill wrapped around the card, it’s my emergency “get-the-hell-out-of-here” money.

The safe, like most modern hotel room safes, asks me to choose a four-digit access code. I close the door, enter the code—the same one I always use—and the lock whirs into place.

I’ve arrived.

I looked at the time: 6 p.m. I was meeting my guide to the city in a bar across the street at 6:30.

My entire unpacking process had taken less than five minutes, exactly the same amount of time as it would take me to repack in a few days. That’s the beauty of having a system.

I closed the drapes—it had been dark outside for hours already—took off the clothes I’d been traveling in and threw my shirt and socks in the laundry bag that I’d found in the closet. I quickly ticked the relevant boxes: wash and press, next-day return, and left the bag by the door ready to drop at the front desk on my way out. Just time for a shower to freshen up after the flight before another evening of madness masquerading as work.

I was due to file my
Guardian
column the next morning: 900 words that would justify my entire trip. The bar was literally across the street from the hotel, and so I was actually a few minutes early. I ordered a drink from the barmaid, who spoke perfect English, as everyone in Reykjavik does. I opened my notebook and began to scribble a few notes.

Apart from the fact that Bjork is from there, nobody in the UK knows anything about Iceland so I decided to list a few of the facts I’d
learned from the guidebook that I’d bought at the airport. That’ll be half a column, right there, I thought.

Fact One: the locals eat sharks and puffins. The puffin, by the way, is the only animal in the world that doesn’t taste like chicken. By all accounts it’s disgusting, but not as disgusting as shark—which emits a smell so putrid that there was a little picture of a gas mask next to it on the bar’s snack menu.

Fact Two: almost all of the energy in Iceland is geothermic. This means there’s no pollution, electricity is as cheap as water—and the water stinks of sulfur.

Fact Three: Iceland operates a visa waiver scheme for travelers that was described in my guidebook as “similar to that operated by the USA.” And, indeed, the empty arrivals hall and unbelievably lax immigration process at Keflavik International Airport echoes almost exactly that of JFK. If JFK were to be hit with an apathy bomb, planted by Stephen King’s Langoliers.

Fact Four: on Saturdays and Sundays, the bars and clubs—each within walking distance of the others—stay open until 6 a.m. This makes me suspect that the reason booze is taxed so highly is to keep British stag weekenders away. After all, it’s freezing cold, it’s dark and the locals try really hard to speak intelligible English. Take away the ridiculous cost of getting wasted and Iceland is basically Birmingham.

Fact Five: Iceland has a surprisingly large number of Internet companies for a country with only 320,000 inhabitants, roughly the same number of people as live in Cardiff in the UK or Tampa in the US. I had a feeling that there was a fascinating story to be told about the country’s growing entrepreneurial class, fueled by the scores of technically skilled, highly motivated workers being laid off by the banks.

To find out more I’d put out a message on Twitter asking whether any locals might be willing to meet me for a drink while I was in town and give me the low-down. The first to reply was Brian Suda, a displaced
Missourian now working in Reykjavik as a software developer, and it was he I was now waiting to meet. Having read all about my penchant for drink, he’d suggested his favorite bar—which happened to be within staggering distance of my hotel—as the ideal meeting place.