I went to Iceland for the first time. Here are 8 things that surprised me. (2024)

Nearly two-thirds of the population live in the area surrounding Reykjavik

Iceland had about 397,000 residents as of September 2023, compared to almost 40 million in California alone. Iceland has nearly as many sheep as people.

But Iceland's population is concentrated in the west of the country. The capital, Reykjavik, has about 140,000 residents – more than a third of the country's population. The so-called capital region, which encompasses and surrounds Reykjavik, accounts for more than 62% of the country's population.

While there, I visited Iceland's southernmost village, Vik, which has a population of less than 1,000. The country is full of tiny, isolated settlements like this. Few towns have more than 10,000 residents.

You can't find the chains you're used to

There's no McDonald's, Starbucks, or Burger King in Iceland. McDonald's Icelandic franchisee dropped the brand during the country's financial crisis in 2009 after the collapse of the local currency made importing ingredients that met McDonald's quality standards too expensive, according to Vísir.

You can still get KFC chicken, Domino's pizzas, and Subway sandwiches, though.

Retailers also sell a limited range of products, and you may struggle to find the fresh produce or brands of cereals you're used to, expats told me.

Only designated liquor shops sell alcohol

You might be used to picking up a bottle of wine when you're grocery shopping or grabbing a case of beer on your way home from work. It's a little trickier in Iceland, though.

Generally you need to go to a state-run liquor store to buy alcohol. Other Nordic nations like Finland, Norway, and Sweden have similar policies.

Those in the countryside have limited opening hours; even in the capital region, none are open past 8 p.m. on Fridays. You also have to be 20 to buy alcohol in Iceland, compared to 18 in most European countries.

There are fairy lights everywhere

Homes and businesses alike are adorned with fairy lights during the winter months, and they're a stark contrast to the tacky and garish ones sometimes spotted in the UK. Golden lights border windows and are draped around trees and hedges.

Many neighborhoods arrange to get matching lights, Jewells Chambers, an expat from New York, told me. "They look really coordinated but also classier."

"When it's dark for four months of the year, you just live with fairy lights on because you need a little bit more light, a little bit of magic," Sonia Nicolson, who relocated from the UK to Reykjavik, told me.

I never had to pay extra for oat milk

Some cafés and coffee-shop chains in the UK offer non-dairy milk for free, but I'm accustomed to paying between 30 to 50 pence (40 and 65 cents) extra to add a splash of oat milk to my cup of tea.

In Iceland, I never once spotted a café or restaurant charging extra for non-dairy milk. There was usually a wide choice – almond, coconut, oat, and soy. The grocery store I visited had a lot of vegan products, too.

"Iceland is surprisingly great to live in as a vegan," Chambers told me.

Iceland has no trains

Coming from England, I'm very used to traveling on trains. But in Iceland there, quite simply, aren't any trains at all.

Reykjavik has a network of buses, though expats I spoke to said that driving is the standard in Iceland. Towns outside the capital region are spread far apart, but there are several domestic airports.

Iceland and the UK share a time zone

Both Iceland and the UK use Greenwich Mean Time in the winter, though the UK switches to British Summer Time in the summer while Iceland doesn't use daylight-saving time. I found this surprising considering how far west of the UK Iceland is.

When I visited in November, the sun rose considerably later than in the UK. Iceland has few hours of daylight at the height of winter, and near-constant sunlight in the summer.

A lot of Polish people live in Iceland

According to data from Statistics Iceland, more than 20% of Iceland's population was born overseas. The biggest group of immigrants comes from Poland, making up more than a quarter of Iceland's foreign-born population, or over 23,000 people, in 2023.

This surprised me because I had expected that, based on Iceland's cultural similarities to other Nordic countries and its high living costs, most immigrants would be from wealthy countries in northern Europe.

The country with the second-highest number of immigrants living in Iceland is Lithuania, at around 4,000, followed by Denmark, Romania, and the US.