Our second week of living in Reykjavik saw a huge highlight toward the end of the week, but before we get to that, let’s catch up. The week started with the weekend and we planned a little culture for both Saturday and Sunday. I was able to stay caught up with the Tour de France on both days. Saturday, we took the bus to the Smaralind Mall and checked it out. It’s a nice mall – similar to UTC in Sarasota. We grabbed dinner at TGI Friday’s – Gull Beers, Sandy had so-so grilled chicken with mashed potatoes and broccoli, and I had delicious buffalo chicken wings. We had time to kill before our movie, so Sandy took a nap and I watched more of the Tour. We had tickets to the 8pm showing of F1. We both thought it was excellent. This is another country that throws an intermission in during the show, which is a nice idea retained from days gone by. After the movie, we walked home arriving a little before midnight and of course, there was still plenty of sunlight. Sunday’s cultural outing had us taking the bus to the city center and going to an organ concert inside the Hallgrimskirkja (Hallgrims Church) – the iconic building in Reykjavik. The concert was around an hour long and it was nice, although 30 minutes would have also been nice.
Afterward, we went up to the top to see the views over Reykjavik and the harbor. For dinner, we walked to 2Guys and had burgers, fries, and Sumarol ale made by Viking Brewery – this had a strawberry flavor and was really pretty good. We then went next door and had ice cream cones before getting the bus back home.
Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were fairly low-key. We did our workouts on the trail by the apartment. We spent quite a bit of time planning our post-Iceland destination. These planning days take some effort, so we always end those days feeling like we were productive – as long as we are able to land the plane on the things we are researching. Our home here in Reykjavik has a grill for us to use, so we did a steak and baked potato dinner night, which was great. We are planning to have friends over on Friday night, so we wanted to do a test run. Tuesday and Wednesday, we made chili for dinner. Sandy found some time to catch up with Sarah and I was able to chat with Lisa from work for a little while. Other than keeping up with the Tour, we kept up our evening routines of American Idol and Frasier using our Firestick.
Now the big highlight of this week – our great friends, Kevin and Jenn from Salt Lake are visiting Iceland and they timed it so that we would all get to spend time together. We got to see them for a short time the day they arrived in Iceland last week, but now we were going to get to spend time with them pretty much all day Thursday and Friday before they headed home to Utah on Saturday.
They picked us up at 10:30 on Thursday morning and we went straight to the National Museum of Iceland. We spent around three hours there, each going through at our own pace. It’s a sizable museum that covers two floors and the displays walk you through the history of Iceland starting from the times of settlement more than 1,000 years ago (one of the youngest areas in the world to gain human population) up to the current times. There were tons of great displays, but one that sticks with me is a collection of coins that was found during an archaeological excavation. It’s made up of coins from all over the world nearly 1,000 years old – some from as far away as Africa and Asia, demonstrating the trading that took place as Iceland was being established.
Our next stop was the Iceland Phallological Museum – better known as the Penis Museum. We were hungry and we all ordered waffles before heading into the museum – one guess as to what shape the waffles arrive.
And then the museum, well – it’s probably what you would guess. It’s a huge collection of penises from many different animals – deer, mice, horses, whales, and yep – there is even a human one that was donated (with others on the donor list). The museum is done very well – lots of educational information as well as funny penis sayings, artwork, and novelty items – it’s pretty entertaining.
After that museum, which maybe took an hour or so, we were ready for a meal. We walked over to the Posthus food hall where Sandy and I had burritos and beers. Jenn also had a burrito and Kevin had Bao Buns and we also shared an order of chicken wings. After dinner, we walked over to the Harpa Concert Hall where we had tickets to a show called How To Be Icelandic in 60 Minutes.
It’s a fun comedy show that takes the audience through around 15 lessons – things like how to talk, how to walk, assume you are always right, give vague directions, music to know, etc. We all enjoyed it to finish off a great day and then Kevin and Jenn dropped us off back at home. After we were all relaxed, we looked at our plan for the next day and realized the grocery store wouldn’t be open early enough for us to shop for Friday night’s dinner, so we got ready again and took the bus to the only 24 hour grocery store in town. We were back home at midnight and went to bed shortly thereafter.
We got up on Friday morning and did a little of our meal preparation before taking the bus to the city center and meeting Kevin and Jenn for those world famous Icelandic hot dogs.
Everybody was pleased with them and we also went over to Joe and The Juice to get smoothies/juices. After that, we headed toward the tourist attraction called Perlan.
This is a neat venue built on top of the water tanks that hold the hot water supply for the city. The venue has several different areas starting with a walkthrough of the history of Iceland from the time it was geologically born millions of years ago through current times. Very interesting. I had no idea that millions of years ago, you could find Giant Sequoia trees here. Eventually the climate got too cold for their survival. There were other really interesting areas that described the glaciers in Iceland, the Northern Lights (that was a film inside the planetarium), and a great ice cave that you walk through – the temperature is around five degrees Fahrenheit.
There is a nice observation deck on top of the building and some of the best ice cream Sandy and I have had in Iceland – the blueberry rivals the blueberry I have had at a shop in Zagreb that I still think about often.
After the Perlan, we went to our apartment and had a nice relaxing dinner and visit. We had shrimp ceviche, grilled some buffalo wings and steaks, baked potatoes, chocolate cake, wine, and beer. It was such a fun couple of days and it was sad to say goodbye to Kevin and Jenn.
Saturday was stay-around-the-apartment day. Sandy did laundry for us, we had hard-boiled eggs and toast, caught up with our friend Dikesh in Kathmandu for a little while via video chat on WhatsApp. For dinner, we grilled chicken and had broccoli. And then today, the main task was to pick up the rental car by the Keflavik airport because we head back out into the country tomorrow. I followed the same routine as when I dropped it off a couple of weeks ago – just in reverse. Unfortunately, it was a drizzly morning, so my walk/run to Hafnarfjordur was five miles of getting a little more wet each mile and I was pretty soaked when I got to the bus stop. I had a few extra minutes so I found a neat little coffee shop called Pallett and had a small hot chocolate. The bus came along on time and dropped me at the airport for my five-minute walk to the Sixt car rental office. They didn’t have the same car we used last time, so they upgraded me to a Suzuki Jimny – an upgrade because it is 4X4, not that we should really need that. It seems like it will be just fine though for our journey. I was back home at 2pm. We snacked at home and then went to the grocery store to get things we wanted for the coming week. We had eggs and toast for dinner and we were in bed around 10 so we can get a good start tomorrow.