ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
A local man who’s still sick with the travel bug bought a round of beers last night for some new friends in a Reykjavik pub.
Mark Roland described the scene to The Advocate this morning, telling our reporter he’d only been in the country a few hours before he decided it was too cold to be wandering around outside in the cold without a pint cardigan on.
“We ducked into a pub and had a few cold ones,” he said.
“Julie started the shout, Tim got the next one and then I think Rach got the third. When it was my go, a few locals got chatting to us and they ended up pushing their table over to ours. As I’d had three pints on an empty stomach, I offered to buy all ten mouths a beer,”
“Told the bloke I wanted ten pints of Gull and a packet of peanuts, tak! Bless bless! Nex thing, he sticks the pay machine under my nose and it says 6500 or something. Or what is 6.500? I’m not sure,”
“Anyway, I got the Amex out and slapped it on the machine and put the pin in for all to see. We’re all mates here, Icelandic people aren’t crooks. Maybe their bankers. So, after it gets approved, I turn to Julie and say, ‘Jesus Christ, how much do you reckon that was in Australian pesos?’ and she said about seventy bones,”
It was at that point when Mark said the first waves of shock him.
“That’s $7 a pint if my maths doesn’t fail me. Cheaper than Sydney, cheaper than anywhere really. Even piss on this windswept rock in the North Atlantic is cheaper than Sydney. What a crook town it is. Sydney that is,”
“Reykjavik rules.”
More to come.
