“What the hell is happening?” Sarah asked, with her trademark precision.

Beers were handed around. We took some. The initial chaos of screaming soon organized itself into song, songs that were apparently very emotional, because everyone except for us was crying as they sang in the streets. Some people had to sit down on the curbs in order to sob properly. The crowd continued to swell. There are 120,000 people in Reykjavík, and they were all on the streets, all seemingly on this street. Making it to our hotel was an impossibility now. We were in the throng, amidst some great wave of human experience, and all we could hope for was to hold on to our suitcases. As one song ended and everyone began to shout again, I decided to try it myself. I lifted my unopened can of beer into the air and shouted “YAAAAAAA!” Although I did not know what we were celebrating, I felt exultant. I loved Iceland. I loved Reykjavík. I loved these people, whose tears and sweat smudged their red, white, and blue face paint.

Eventually, we were able to ascertain that Iceland had just secured its first-ever team Olympic medal, in the sport of men’s handball. I found myself wondering what event in my home country might lead to such shared celebrations. Cities celebrate when their teams win the World Series or the Super Bowl, but the only time I’d seen any public celebrations of a national event was in 1999, when the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team won the World Cup. I was living in the small town of Moose Pass, Alaska, that summer, working at a cafe. My colleagues and I were watching the game on a tiny TV in the corner of the shop, and after Brandi Chastain scored the winning penalty kick, I heard horns honking, and then a couple of minutes later, a single voice from somewhere in Moose Pass shouted, “FUCK YES AMERICA!”

I didn’t know much about men’s team handball,* but I am willing to get excited about almost anything in sports, and by the time we got to the hotel a couple of hours later, I considered myself a die-hard fan of Icelandic men’s team handball. I wanted to rest in the hotel and perhaps watch some highlights—the excitement of my beloved team winning an Olympic medal had exhausted me—but my compatriots insisted that we go out and soak in some Icelandic culture.

The crowd had thinned considerably, and it was still early in the day, so we visited a museum where we learned that because the Icelandic language has changed so little over the centuries, their classic sagas read like contemporary literature. We saw the chess table where Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky in 1972. Later, we took a tour bus trip to the island’s interior, where endless plains of volcanic rock make it feel like you’re on another planet. Our tour guide extolled Iceland’s many virtues. “In Greenland it is always icy,” she said, “but here in Iceland the weather is quite mild. They should call Iceland Greenland and Greenland Iceland.” Then we all got out of the bus to observe a waterfall. It was fifty degrees Fahrenheit in August, and a cold rain was blowing at us horizontally, rendering umbrellas utterly useless.