Saturday
I'm writing this in Reykjavik, Iceland. Sarah and I left on a European adventure to Iceland, Spain, and Portugal: a much needed adventure for her and a much needed break from my thesis for me. We left Thursday night, two days ago, and arrived 4.5 hours later. The day was just beginning and normally I would have been going crazy just thinking about the adventure possibilities, but we are both fairly sick with some kind of deadly cold, detrimented by the flight. Detrimented is a word now.
Luckily customs was nothing like it is in the U.S., and we were at our rental car in no time. We opted to rent a car because it would eventually be cheaper factoring all the bus tours we'd have to take to do all the cool stuff. I started driving, immediately learning that there is a secret trick to switch from drive to reverse, and it is not intuitive at all. Once that was figured out, we drove around treeless southwestern Iceland as natives sped past us, because Icelanders drive one of two ways: semi-retardedly, barely driving and trying to make turns from the middle non-turning lanes, OR crazed psychos driving twice the speed limit. But anyway, we drove our red Chevy station-wagon DIRECTLY to Blue Lagoon.
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| Guess where we went |
Unfortunately, our guide book told us it was open an hour before it actually was. No matter. We took a hard coma in the car until it opened.
Blue Lagoon is a large natural hot pool turned "spa." You change and shower, getting little bracelets that unlock your lockers and pay for drinks at the swim-up bar. Then you head into the hot pool... and it is fucking amazing. You can relax, get a message from a waterfall, head into a steam room, or grab a drink at the swim-up bar. We then enjoyed the ridiculous temperature differential of 45 degree air and 97 degree water. And there is this mud silica you can put on your face and look like an asshole, so we obviously did that. After a few sessions in the pool, we actually started to heal healthier. And we had enough power-naps under our belts to fight the jetlag.
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| A natural hot pool with a swim-up bar? I'm sold. |
We drove to the city, where we found our hostel right by the ocean: awesome view. Then we explored a bit of the area, including HALLGRIMSKIRKJA. It's one of the tallest structures in the city (and possibly the country? Reykjavik makes up 60% of the population of Iceland, at 200,000). The top has an incredible 360 degree view of the city and surrounding mountains.
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| Sarah presents HALLGRIMSKIRKJA (you have to shout the name) |
Also, Hallgrimskirkja kind of sounds like a dragon shout in Skyrim. Actually the Icelandic language is kind of like a mix of dragon shouts, german, and elvish.
After derping around the city for a bit, we had some classic Icelandic food for dinner: "cured" shark ("cured" is an interesting way of saying "semi-decomposed shark, having gone through the process where it is buried underground to give it that delicious 'rotting' taste we all love"). It actually caused my mouth to tingle. I wouldn't say it was "good," but it wasn't bad. More "holy fuck that's weird" than anything. Then we had whale meat (depending on how it was cooked, it was either delicious or nasty), followed by Puffin in a potato pate. My god: Puffin is so good. I want more. Too bad.
We left the restaurant and walked along the ocean to the hostel. There was a huge crowd, some of which was made up by a "Free Tibet" or "Taiwan" protest. We later learned that the Prime Minister of China was visiting (he also checked out the Geysir Geothermal area with us!). The sunset at 10:30 was both beautiful and mind-blowing in how late it was. A band was rocking out back at the hostel, which is actually an awesome place that the locals hang out at. KEX hostel is apparently a great hostel AND a nightclub.
We enjoyed the music until about midnight. It was still somewhat light out, but we wanted to drive out of the city to see Aurora Borealis. We drove out to Thingvellir National Park, where it was mostly dark (the fucking Sun STILL lit some of the nearby glaciers!). The moment we turned the headlights off: BAM - Northern Lights. Pretty faint, but unmistakeable. It was a really amazing thing to see. After a few more minutes of hoping for more of a show (which we didn't get), we realized we were exhausted and sick, so we drove back for some unrestful sleep.
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| Sunset apparently happens at 10:30pm in Iceland at the end of April |
The next morning (today) I woke up feeling like a bag of assholes. I now have a cough and a runny nose. But we pulled ourselves together for our adventure of the day: driving the scenic Golden Circle. First stop was Thingvellir National Park. We immediately realized how beautiful the entire area is in the daylight. We looked down into the valley of the site of the first Icelandic parliament from up on a cliff.
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| PRETTY |
Next up was the Geysir Geothermal area, which reminded me a lot of the Old Faithful area of Yellowstone, with multiple thermal pools and bubbling geysers. The famous geyser, aptly named Geysir, was not feeling up to spouting in our presence, but would normally be a higher eruption than Old Faithful. Unlike rule-heavy USA, Iceland lets people walk almost all the way up to the geyser. The next largest geyser (about half the size as Old Faithful) erupts every 4 minutes, so it was quite entertaining INDEED.
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| Where are we, Yellowstone? WHY ARE THEY SPEAKING ELVISH HERE?? |
From there, it was just a 10km drive to Gullfoss, an amazing waterfall pouring into a crevis cut out by a river. It was easily way more amazing than Niagara.
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| No picture can show how awesome Gullfoss is |
We then drove the southern portion of the circle, which isn't quite as impressive as the first half. A church that we skipped, a small town that as far as I know has a few sandwich places and that's it, and a crater lake that used to be a volcano until it blew itself up.
Completing the tour, we decided to see the 360 degree view from the outer top deck of the Perlan, which is a... building... in Reykjavik. We then finished our day with fantastic meat soup in a breadbowl, which is a great meal when you're sick. But now we're back at the hostel, enjoying some Icelandic beer as the Sun is starting to set... at 10:30pm.
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