It's 5:30 a.m. as my brother and I felt the plane shake upon landing in Reykjavik. I looked out the window at a place I had never imagined.

We were looking at something so pure, so raw, that between the two of us, we were convinced we were dreaming.

"This can't be real," I thought. "There is no way this is real."

As we stumbled off the plane, we were greeted by an explosion of intense color and sound.  After sleeping for eight hours, both of us stopped where we were and tried to take it all in.

There were languages we couldn't place, words we couldn't pronounce, signs we couldn't read and currency we didn't yet have. We were lost, and we hadn't even left the airport yet.

We went outside to breathe and take in the frigid air, taking comfort in our ability to point at a map and wave our hands wildly to get where we needed to go.

We found a bus willing to take us to our hotel, and after coming to a mutual sense of uncertainty, we boarded the bus.

After driving for awhile, the sun started to rise over the horizon, revealing what I can only describe as the strangest thing I have ever seen.

Cross your hands in the shape of an X, close your eyes and imagine the ground shaped like hundreds of thousands of those X's.

I read somewhere that Iceland was located on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, so it's volcanically and geologically active and that obviously has torn the ground to shreds. It was like we were on Mars.

We pulled up to what we think is a bus stop. This was definitely not our hotel, though, unless our hotel looked like a bus stop that is.

We literally had no idea what was going on. We had been sitting on this bus for an hour and a half while several men in blue uniforms and white hats screamed at each other in what we thought was Icelandic.

After two buses and four hours, we finally pulled up to our hotel, which was beautiful. Like everything here, it was cold, sleek and stoic, made completely out of steel, glass and dark wood.

The front of the hotel was a single piece of glass with a smaller sliding glass window for a door.

The whole thing was extremely hard to take in with just one breath, so we took at least four. The bellman, waiting patiently outside, smiled as we pulled up. His was the kind of demeanor that just made you feel warm and important, even in those frigid temperatures.

He made his way towards the door, greeted us and swept our bags up without hesitation. As we walked in, I saw a crowd of people over by the all-glass bar.

They were blonde, rugged and wearing nothing but black.  Much like the building, they seemed cold and surreal.

We went up to our room, opened the door and inserted our key into a small slot on the wall marked clearly in English, "Insert Here." The power went on and then the power went off.  Weary and frustrated, we went to bed.

It was 8 a.m. Knoxville time, and I heard the sound of my brother cursing after taking out an airplane bottle and realizing that it automatically charged our card 800 Icelandic Kronur, roughly 12 U.S. Dollars.

He seemed pretty happy with his mistake however. We were about to get dressed and explore this unusual place for ourselves.

The streets there, like Europe, have the street names on the side of buildings. We walked everywhere we went, and the weather, while only 48 degrees, was for the most part, rainy and windy.

We went in and out of shops, restaurants and cafes.  We talked to anyone who spoke english, a number that turned out to be a lot more than we had originally guessed at.

We bought our lunch of lamb and cheese sandwiches at the supermarket, a little trick I picked up in Italy to save money, as everything here is exactly nine times more expensive than anything in America.

Still though, there was a certain beauty to this place that didn't translate into words.

It was a great first day and a great bonding experience for my brother and I. We finish our dinner of sandwiches of goat cheese, lamb and lettuce and headed out for this Icelandic night life we had heard so much about.