We’ve landed here in Reykjavik, Iceland (Island is how you spell Iceland in Icelandic, but it’s pronounced Is Land). After the 40mins bus trip from the airport to the city, we checked into our apartment, and went for a walk down to the shore. Here’s the view (It was windy and cold so the image might be a little blurry) –
Our apartment here is very nice, only 5 mins walk from the centre of town. It’s very spacious, has cooking facilities, excellent heating and hot-water that smells likes sulphur.(The Icelandics drill for hot-water like some nations drill for Oil. The entire of Reykjavik is heated with hot-water from a nearby geothermal power station, making Iceland one of the greenest countries on the entire planet) Our apartment also has an excellent Internet connection, even better than at work/home. (Edit: Out of all the hotels so far up to/including Sweden, Iceland has had the best Internet connection in terms of speed, reliability and ease of connection)
We attended a concert at The Harpa (it’s the large building by the sea in the 360 above, and is their main entertainment building here, it has 4 concert halls) of traditional Icelandic songs introduced in English which was very nice. We’ve been up to Pelan (a revolving restaurant and observation deck on top of the city’s hot-water storage tanks). We also went up Hallgrímskirkja (this is the main church in Rekyavik and is located on top of a hill, giving a good view over the city from the top of the bell tower, pictures included below).
Iceland is very cold and I somehow managed to lose my scarf and gloves in the hire car in England, so one of the first stops was a bit of shopping to purchase a new pair of gloves (with touch sensitive fingers so I can use my iPhone with my gloves on) and a scarf. Freya also told me the beanie I had brought wasn’t very stylish, so a new beanie was also required. Iceland have a tax free shopping scheme for visitors so most of our purchases entitled us to a VAT refund at the airport which equalled about $40 – 50 AUD total, which we then converted straight away into Norwegian Krone ready for our next stop.
Reykjavik is a nice little city and the Icelandic people are very friendly and most have very good English which helps to make you feel more welcome. We hired a car and went for a drive into the Interior (covered in my next post) which was very exciting and interesting to see some more of Iceland.
On our last day in Reykjavik we went for a drive out to the Blue Lagoon and took a dip. Apparently the silica and minerals in the water are suppose to have good healing and rejuvenation properties for your skin. After a thorough soaking, it was back to Reykjavik for one last night before we headed off to Bergen, Norway on our 8am flight.
Bless
