Beautiful country, great experience in Iceland

Iceland was never on my travel radar, until I volunteered to help at the Reykjavik International Film Festival in 2008. I had done 2 other volunteer programs through Volunteers for Peace and was looking for a different type of program and experience. I'm a movie buff and thought it'd be fun to be part of the film festival.

The program was different that most others in several ways. Our project consisted mostly of selling tickets at the different venues, and being ushers/cleaning up during and after shows. For this reason, we didn’t work together as a large group. Nor did we cook our meals or eat together—as is common in most other work camps. Accommodation was at the local hostel.

I thought Iceland was one of the most beautiful and geographically interesting places I've ever seen. Reykjavik is a very modern city with a small town feel. The people are very stylish and insane partiers. If you like music and the bar scene, plan on staying up all night.

For this workcamp, we got off work around midnight and I preferred to have a beer and go to bed, but I was one of the older volunteers!

While I truly enjoyed this volunteer program and the workcamp leaders, and would do another one in Iceland again given the chance, this wasn’t my favorite workcamp with Volunteers for Peace. I prefer camps where everyone works together.. In this case I didn’t get to know a lot of the other volunteers because we rarely saw each other. I also wasn’t a fan of the food provided as we had to eat at Subway and a quickie-mart 'salad bar' pretty much every day. After a few days, I started buying my own food.