Finding Warmth and Welcome as an Immigrant in Iceland

If I approached my immigration experience the same way people approach a start-up, maybe I could optimize the amount of time it took me to integrate.

The first cell of my spreadsheet brimmed with optimism: Only 120 pools to visit!!!!

The idea was simple. I would go to every public swimming pool in Iceland and use a spreadsheet to catalog my progress. Fifty-one swimming pools could be reached from Reykjavík by car. I would wait until the summer, when the road conditions improved, to visit the other pools in remote fishing villages to the north and east. Between weekly visits and extended road trips, I calculated that my task would take two years to complete. I came to Iceland as a tourist and stayed to study and work in tourism. Traveling around Iceland was both a passion and a job.

The point of this exercise? I needed something to look forward to amid an Icelandic winter where each week ushered in a fresh batch of storms and I felt confined to my apartment. How did the locals in Reykjavík cope with the darkness? I thought swimming pools held the answer. Mainly, I sought warmth of any kind.

At my graduation celebration from university, a professor asked when I was returning to the United States.

“I’m not,” I said, taking a bite of the store-bought layer cake. “I’m staying here.”

“Oh, really?” She looked down at her coffee cup, but I caught the rise of her eyebrows.

Minutes later, a different professor asked me the same question. I told him about the travel tech start-up I was building and how Iceland felt like home. I had recently moved in with my Icelandic boyfriend; on Sundays we visited his family and ate Icelandic specialities—smoked lamb, dried fish, and open-faced sandwiches.

The second professor wished me a half-hearted “good luck with that.”

I wondered if I had committed a cultural blunder—was my staying in Iceland postgraduation an act of transgression? I tried to brush off his comment and focus on the future. I had a long list of tasks I needed to complete to get the start-up off the ground and so many swimming pools to visit.

There are 120 man-made swimming pools in Iceland, one for every three thousand residents, and they are spread out across the country, heated year-round with geothermal water, and run by local municipalities. Most pools contain some combination of the following: swimming pools, yes, but also hot tubs, cold dip pools, saunas, steam rooms—even waterslides. The Icelandic government funds these pools, which serve as public spaces that promote wellness through recreation and relaxation. Iceland follows the Nordic model, where high taxes on personal income—between 31 percent and 46 percent—support affordable health care, subsidized day care, twelve months of parental leave, and free high-quality education. I learned from a former university classmate that swimming pool cards that grant one use of the pools can be reimbursed tax free by trade unions (the Writers’ Union of Iceland and the Icelandic Association of Ceramic Artists are examples), which everyone working in Iceland has a right to join.

The first pool I visited after graduation was Álftaneslaug, nine miles outside of Reykjavík. It has the largest waterslide in Iceland, the only wave pool, and a spacious sauna and steam bath; accordingly, its elaborate construction in 2008 bankrupted its namesake town. It looked less like a public swimming pool and more like a water park.

I exited the locker room, wet from the mandatory shower, and walked toward the outdoor pools. Bracing myself against the cold, I ran to the nearest hot tub and sank in so that only my head was exposed. My arms and legs tingled as my body adjusted to the heat. The man sitting beside me was someone who appeared frequently in the Icelandic newspapers, the ones I tried to follow and read; he was best known for being convicted of bank fraud in Iceland’s 2008 economic collapse—a fitting companion for this particular pool. I watched snow drift and melt into the hot water as snowflakes collected on my eyelashes. My ears stung from the cold.

I heard the gush of the wave pool and followed a pack of laughing children into it. I let myself be tossed around by the water. The waves increased in speed and intensity, imitating the ocean that was only steps away. I should be excited about this, I thought, but I felt numb. Jumping over the never-ending waves reminded me of all the incoming bills I had to pay. I calculated how quickly our start-up’s pre–seed money would run out as the waves crashed into me. The Icelandic children, bobbing up and down like a line of yellow buoys, screamed and howled with delight.

The travel tech start-up I cofounded in 2018 came out of research conducted during the height of tourism in Iceland when visitor numbers topped two million annually. Young international travelers were looking for ways to save money and get around the country since rental cars are expensive and there are no trains in Iceland. My team was creating a platform for visitors to connect, travel together, and save costs. We enrolled in a start-up accelerator, where we pitched investors and met with industry insiders. Our mentors wanted a minimal viable product (MVP), and we wanted to launch by the summer, Iceland’s peak tourism season. We had limited funding and time.

I had a habit of listening to personal-development podcasts. The tone of these was optimistic; the messages were positive. The hosts radiated that kind of American self-confidence I used to possess, which I felt evaporating drop by drop with each day spent on the island. They spoke in absolutes: top-five productivity hacks, why everyone needs a morning routine, ten ways to get better sleep. I nodded as I followed along. Yes, I needed better habits and more discipline. Maybe if I spent more time studying Icelandic or networking with the local start-up scene, this transition from foreigner to Icelander would be easier. I didn’t need luck. If I approached my immigration experience the same way people approach a start-up, maybe I could optimize the amount of time it took me to integrate. Visiting the pools was part of that process.

Lágafellslaug was next on my list, a family-friendly swimming pool in the suburb of Mosfellsbær. I sank into the 38°C hot tub and let the jet streams pummel the tension out of my shoulders. A few feet away, a man sat in the 8°C-cold dip pool, eyes closed, his expression placid. He stayed for two minutes before slowly emerging and walking to the pull-up bar, where he completed a set of ten pull-ups in rapid succession. Two children ran up to the now-empty pool, dunked their feet in, screamed with pain, and ran to a warmer pool.

If I approached my immigration experience the same way people approach a start-up, maybe I could optimize the amount of time it took me to integrate.

A turf war broke out on the red kiddie-pool slide. Three boys around nine years old fought to get to the top of the slide; the boy in the green shorts—with all the makings of a future CEO—stood above the other two and pushed them down as they tried climbing up. There could only be one at the top.

I was distracted by a splash. A rubber ball floated toward me, followed by a toddler in bright orange swimmies.

“Ég ná því,” she said, in a high-pitched voice, meaning she had the ball.

With a smile, she tossed the ball back to me, and we played catch for a while. She spoke only in Icelandic—slowly, with simple vocabulary, which I appreciated. She told me her name and age, but mostly she said “aftur,” indicating that she wanted me to throw the ball again. I could communicate with a three-year-old. It was progress.

*

Six months and nineteen pools in, the start-up still didn’t have a working MVP. I grew tired of telling potential investors that “we’re seriously close to finishing” at the events I forced myself to attend. It felt like every start-up founder I met talked about their next round of funding and 10x growth. If they struggled behind their smiles, the way I felt I was struggling, I couldn’t tell.

My bank account dwindled. I sent out résumés and racked up rejection letters. Sometimes I received feedback like, “We need a native Icelandic speaker for this position, sorry.” Not simply an Icelandic speaker—a native Icelandic speaker.

Historically, Iceland has been an isolated and homogeneous society of Norse and Celtic origin. Immigrant populations were negligible until the mid-1990s, when Iceland entered the European Economic Area Agreement; though Iceland is not an EU member state, this agreement allows both Icelandic citizens and EU citizens the freedom of cross-border movement. This allowed an influx of foreign labor into Iceland, the majority of which is seasonal and found in the tourism, construction, and fish-processing industries. Today, immigrants make up around 15 percent of the Icelandic population, and most of them hail from Eastern Europe. Surveys show Icelanders have a favorable opinion of immigration, yet immigrants are more likely to experience wage theft and workplace violations than any other group in Iceland, suggesting a value-action gap.

At the urging of a friend, I attended a women-in-business networking event in Reykjavík. It was held at Gamla Bíó, a historic venue that used to house the Icelandic Opera but now mostly held Árshátíð parties—yearly corporate formal events with dancing and heavy drinking. Well-heeled Icelandic women wearing Scandinavian designs sipped white wine and ate chocolate-dipped strawberries while clapping for the business leaders who were receiving awards onstage. My friend navigated the crowd with ease, speaking in Icelandic. I did my best to process the conversations, but my understanding lagged like a video with sound and picture out of sync.

It was a relief to be introduced to someone in English—a consultant who mentored women in business. Midconversation, she asked me, “And when did you move to Iceland?”

My breath caught; my cheeks flushed. “Three years ago,” I said, tensing my body to prepare for the impact of her follow-up question. There was always a follow-up question.

“So why are we having this conversation in English?” Her tone was light, but her gray-blue eyes flashed with disdain.

I laughed, a defense mechanism. Trust me, if I could offer you a conversation in Icelandic, I would, I thought. She turned her back, her point made.

*

On a trip to the north of Iceland, I brought along my bathing suit with the purpose of visiting Sundlaug Akureyrar, known for its fast waterslides beloved by both children and adults. A busload of Icelandic high school students on a ski trip arrived at the pool at the exact time I did. After waiting in the long line, I made a point to use Icelandic while purchasing a ticket to the pool. The attendant, who moments before I had heard speaking Icelandic, answered me in English, pointed out the locker rooms, and said I had to follow the signs in the shower before getting into the pool.

Anyone who’s been in Iceland and visited a swimming pool knows the infamous signs, written in six languages to avoid confusion, annotating which body parts you must vigorously scrub with soap and water before entering the swimming pool.

How many pools will it take until I become a local?

In the changing room, I showed two American tourists how to use the digital lockers. They instantly recognized my accent and asked me where in the States I was from. When I mentioned that I lived in Iceland, the interrogation began. Did I love it? How could I not love it? Wasn’t I so lucky to live here?

I was, I reminded myself. Of course I was.

*

In January, the sun rose at 10:30 a.m. and set at 4:30 p.m.—if the sun came out at all. Getting out of bed and leaving my apartment took increasing amounts of caffeine, but I still went to the pools. The rows of my spreadsheet filled up: Árbæjarlaug, with its indoor pool connecting to the outdoor pool; Jaðarsbakkalaug, in industrial Akranes, with views of both a rusting sports hall and the ocean; Breiðholtslaug, with its retro vibe courtesy of turquoise hot tubs with yellow guardrails; and Sundlaug Seltjarnarness, with saltwater pools instead of chlorinated ones. Every new addition brought me closer to my goal of visiting all the pools in Iceland.

Did I love it? How could I not love it? Wasn’t I so lucky to live here?

I compared each pool against the last. Were there multiple hot tubs? A cold dip pool? Was there a steam room and a sauna? It was hard not to develop favorites that I wanted to visit again and again—pools that had hot tubs with massage jets, scenic views, and spacious changing rooms with good hair dryers.

The smell of chlorine and sulfur became linked to relaxation. Each visit was an act of shedding—shedding my clothes to shower naked with other women whose bodies came in all shapes and sizes, shedding my sense of individualism, and shedding the belief that I had to constantly be doing something and always improving. Sitting in a pool alongside Icelanders, I didn’t have to apologize over language barriers; I could just sit and I belonged.

Immigration is an act of re-creation and, in practice, often looks like overcompensation, forming and rebuilding an identity anew. As an American in Iceland, I knew that I had advantages by being a native English speaker and through the generally positive view Icelanders held of the United States, perhaps not politically, but culturally. Although I felt like an outsider, I started seeing what the countries had in common: car culture, consumerism, and Costco. I learned to manage my American ambition and give myself permission to relax, to stop worrying about the blank rows of the spreadsheet, to sit and soak in the hot tub with a community of people, all sharing the same water.

The start-up shut down before our product launched, and I stopped listening to motivational podcasts. Nine out of ten start-ups fail, a statistic so often repeated within the start-up community that it’s practically dogma. A statistic like that would suggest the system is rigged. And yet the podcasts I listened to ignored survivor bias. Any failures mentioned were in the past and were buffered by subsequent successes.

When winter turned into spring, I stopped updating the spreadsheet; my new job left me with less free time. My pool visits continued, but only to my favorite local spots. I didn’t have the same desire to visit all the pools in Iceland. I was content.