After a lovely 4 hours at the Sky Lagoon, we went back to Reykjavik. It was Pride Day, and while we missed the parade itself, the city was still in celebration mode. From my own limited observations, I found a simple difference between Pride in Reykjavik and Pride in Toronto. It’s subtle and a bit hard to describe. Obviously Toronto’s Pride celebration is bigger. We simply have numbers on our side. But something I noticed in Iceland was the large number of what I can only describe as plain old (and I mean chronologically old) people. Of course, there were lots of young people too, and lots of people dressed up, and all of the rainbows and similar stuff you would expect, but there were just so many “regular” people of all ages. I know so many people here at home, who would take the position that they don’t have anything against Pride, but they wouldn’t go to it because it’s not for them. Tons of people at this Pride day seemed like the kind of people that I would visualize at the Royal Winter Fair. Everything about the festival just seemed so normalized that everybody in the country came to participate. I could be completely off base, but that’s how it looked to me. It was lovely.
The next day we woke up, packed and fly home. And that was Iceland!
