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June 23, 2023
We arrived at around 7 am, a little delayed, and after getting my bag, going through passport control, and a 45-minute bus ride from the airport to the city, Robin didn’t want to walk in the rain to the hostel, so we got a drop-off service from the tour bus company. But we had to wait another 20 minutes for that, because we missed the bus, and anyway we made it to the hostel around 9, deposited our bags in the storage thing, and headed to our first stop: The Settlement Exhibition. (Side note: we got the 24-hour Reykjavik city card, which paid for itself after 1.5 museum admissions.)
The Settlement Exhibition starts with the excavated foundations of a longhouse and an informative display around it about the history of settlement and the beginnings of Reykjavik itself. There was a volcanic eruption around 871, and it allows the buildings of that era to be dated. Archaeologists call it the Settlement Layer, conveniently. Then the next 2 stories are about the history of Reykjavik, which aren’t quite as interesting, except for the little model of the town in 1904 which has binocular things which play a little hologram of people doing things like lighting the gas lamps, and it plays sounds.
After that we got lunch at 101 Bistro, where some dude on TripAdvisor had the worst pizza of his life (which they proudly display on their sign). Robin got the fish & chips, and I got a cheese pizza. We traded bites, and the fish and chips were fabulous – very fresh, and the tartar sauce was made in house that morning. The pizza was also very good – it was sturdy in the middle, so you could pick it up without the sad drooping that all the pizza I’ve found in Germany does (seriously, bake it hotter, y’all). I don’t know what that guy on TripAdvisor was talking about.
Then we window shopped a little bit and walked down to the National Museum of Iceland. It was a bit disappointing – lots of medieval Christianity, not much Northmen. But they had a couple things I’d seen in pictures, like the carving of maybe-Thor and a drinking horn, and some historical clothes, plus a lot of old Bibles (mostly in Latin, as far as I could tell). I didn’t spend quite as much time looking at the displays as I might have liked, but Robin was getting bored, so I skimmed a lot.
Then we took the bus back into town and checked in to the hostel. (Robin was less keen on the hostel dorm experience, though she did get the top bunk, and the one whose ceiling was half lowered because of the ventilation, which was kinda sucky.) She showered, then we went up to the bar for their happy hour (and reasonably priced drinks, as opposed to “holy fuck everything on this island is expensive” prices) and talked some. We decided that she’d go poke around in jewelry shops and go shopping, which I wasn’t interested in, and I’d go to the pool, which she wasn’t interested in, and I’d message her at 6:30. (She didn’t have an international plan, so she had to be on wifi.)
I went to Sundhöllin pool, which is the oldest pool in Reykjavik. It wasn’t pretty or anything like that; it was functional concrete. But it was included in the city card, so I sure got my money’s worth out of that thing. Until I started planning this trip, I didn’t know Iceland had a huge swimming culture, but apparently it’s just What You Do after work or on the weekend. When you get there, you have to shower naked and wash all the “icky” parts before you put a suit on. This lets them use less chlorine in the pool, which is really nice. At Sundhöllin they have a kiddie pool at 38C, a lap pool (unknown temperature), a cold pool (10-11C), and a 39C jacuzzi on the first floor, then a sauna, and 2 hot tubs, at 39 and 42C on the second floor. All of this is outside. (There is an additional indoor pool that as far as I can understand it is used for sports teams and swim lessons and that sort of thing.) Yes, Iceland is cold. I, too, was skeptical of going outside in like 50 degrees (F) in a bathing suit, then getting in the water and getting back OUT of the water into 50 degrees. But after you’ve raised your core temperature by sitting in a nice hot bath, getting out isn’t that bad. I’m not sure I’d manage doing it in winter, though. That’s too hardcore for me.
So anyway, after I’d just chilled in varying degrees of hot pools for about an hour, I got out, rinsed off, got dressed, and texted my sister to meet me at Cafe Loki. She got a little lost, and luckily found it in time for us to get the last table that didn’t have a reservation. (It was recommended to me by 3 separate people who don’t know each other, so I’ll definitely take that as a “GO HERE.”)
I got the smoked trout and cottage cheese on rye bread, and she got some sort of traditional mashed fish with potatoes and cheese. It turns out I’m not very into smoked trout, but I ate all of it anyway, and it went well with the slab of half-inch-thick sweet rye bread it was served on. The mashed fish was bland, or at least the tiny bit I tried. Then I ordered their famous rye bread ice cream, which was oddly delicious. It was the equivalent of cookie dough ice cream, if the ice cream were way less sweet and the cookie dough was a chunk of bread that had been put through a powerful blender. I’m not sure I’m selling it here, but I would absolutely eat it again.
After that, we picked up some breakfast yogurt at a grocery store and went back to the hostel and collapsed. Neither of us managed to sleep on the plane, between the usual “sleeping on a plane sucks” and this poor toddler whose parents were VERY INEFFECTIVELY trying to keep him quiet. All he wanted to do was a) get up and move around or b) MAMA, and neither of these things were what he got. He got “shhhhh” and “calm down.” I feel slightly vindicated that my sister, who has a kid of her own, wanted to strangle the dad. It’s not the kid’s fault, after all. So I’d been up since like 6 am eastern on June 22 (10 am Iceland time), and it was about 8 pm Iceland time on June 23. Yeah. But have you ever been so exhausted that you just can’t sleep? Even with 2 benadryl, I just lay there. The loudly snoring girl in the next bed didn’t help, either (though I put in an earplug and managed to fall asleep eventually.)
June 24, 2023
After getting some amount of sleep, the alarms went off at 7 so we could get up and eat a little before our 9 am tour. (Skyr really does taste better in Iceland.) Since the City Card was still valid, we hopped on the bus for 5 minutes (literally) and got to the bus terminal in plenty of time for the trip, including picking up sandwiches from the combo conbini-Sbarro’s. Then it was off on the South Shore Adventure.
Our first stop wasn’t particularly exciting; it was a pee and stretch and snack break at a gas station about 90 minutes away (I guess Europeans aren’t used to road trips, lol). The view was nice, though, with bright green moss stretching as far as the eye could see. Then we went to Skógafoss, a waterfall which originates in Eyjafjallajökull. There’s a set of stairs you can take to an overlook, but our tour guide warned us it was steeper than it looked. You can still get good views from the ground, though, and we went partway up the hill anyway, which gave some neat half-obscured views.
The next stop was a shopping center in Vík í Myrdal. It had started raining at this point, but we were going down to the black sand beach regardless. We got thoroughly soaked, but it was worth it. The cliff formations in the distance would have been nice to see in less foggy conditions, but there’s something more magical/spooky about shapes off in the fog. This was the lunch break, so we ate our sandwiches at the cafe, then I noticed the sign exhorting one to eat only food purchased there at the tables, so I bought an obligation waffle with maple syrup, and it was absolutely worth it.
It kept raining the rest of the day, on and off, mostly the annoying drizzle-spit kind.
After that, we went to the Reynisfjara black sand beach, where signs alert you to the potential danger of sneaker waves, which can grab your ankle and drag you out to sea, where you will die. Our tour guide told us to go no closer to the shore than she was standing. The black sand was really cool to look at, and once again we had mysterious shapes in the foggy distance. There’s this cliff-cave thing that’s composed of basalt columns, which the Hallgrimskirkja is based on, and from one angle I thought it looked like a troll’s house, where the two caves were the entrances and there was a chimney from a sloped roof. Robin thought it looked like a troll.
Next up was Sólheimajökull, a glacier which has retreated significantly in the last 15 years (thanks, climate change!). Our tour guide showed us a point where when she started giving tours, you could reach out and touch it, and now it’s a valley with a lake at the bottom. There was some really cool moss, though.
The last stop was Seljalandsfoss, which is where they filmed Thor: The Dark World. You can also walk behind the waterfall, which is pretty rad – until you have to get back OUT through a bit where the wind blows a bucket of water over you. Totally worth the soaking, though. While we were waiting outside, I noticed a few people intently photographing something, which turned out to be a bird, so I got in on the intently photographing action. It’s apparently an arctic oystercatcher.
Then it was back to Reykjavik, and we piggy-backed on someone else’s dropoff and got out much closer to the hostel than the bus terminal. Neither of us was really hungry for dinner, but Robin suggested going up to the bar for a drink, where she ordered some dirty fries as a snack. Then we turned into pumpkins again after she called home.
June 25, 2023
Our last day in Reykjavik started with breakfast at Grái Kötturinn (the Gray Cat), which is named for an Icelandic saying that if you hang around in one place a lot, you’re like a gray cat. Plus the place had once housed a jewelry shop that had a gray cat in it. Super meta. But we were out and about before they opened, so we walked down to the bay and looked at the water in the crisp morning, then went back to the cafe. I had a pancake, and it was delicious. I’d wanted to look for a sweater, something mid-weight for those in-between months here in Berlin, but the shops didn’t open until 10, so we wandered up to the church and looked inside. There was an organ concert going on, which was cool, but otherwise the church looked like a brutalist version of a Romanesque cathedral. Not a dig on it, because I unironically like brutalism, but it’s not what I was expecting from the exterior. Then we killed some more time in the sculpture garden outside the Einar Jonasson Museum. Einar was the first Icelandic sculptor (after independence from Denmark?), and he had an interesting style. He worked with some of the pagan themes as well as modern and Christian ones. And while we were there, a sweet little kitty wandered in and let me pet her a lot, which was the highlight of my day ;)
Then we meandered a bit and ended back at the shops, where I spent a lot of time saying, “Well, I don’t hate it…” but because they’re so expensive, I wanted to pick one that I loved. I ended up getting a blue cardigan with a nylon lining that will be perfect for about half the year here. (I wore it over just a t-shirt to walk to the bus station the next morning, and I wasn’t cold.)
After that, we went back to the hostel, where I packed and re-packed my luggage so I could drop off my bags in the luggage lockers when I took Robin to the bus terminal, and when it was time, I deposited her (and my luggage) safely at the bus terminal. Then I decided to walk back to the hostel via the Sun Voyager sculpture, even though it was raining miserably.
At the hostel, I chatted with one of the people in our room and convinced her to go to the pool with me, and we eventually wandered down there and spent an hour or so boiling ourselves.
Because my flight back to Berlin was at 7:30 am, and I needed to get a 4:30 bus to the airport, I’d decided I’d just stay up and witness the midnight sun, but I wanted to try to nap until about midnight. Unfortunately, Snoring Girl was snoring, so I had maybe an hour of dozing between 8 pm and midnight. Then I got my stuff together and went up to the guest kitchen, where, much to my annoyance, a group of high school kids were being loud. I poked around on my tablet for a while, went out to the roof patio to look at the still-light sky at 2:30 am, and put some photos up on instagram, before heading out into the world around 3:30.
The weather was cooperative, luckily, and it was cloudy and breezy, with occasional bursts of sun, and it was, as GMaps advertised, about a 15-minute walk. On the way, there was a statue of a bear with a sign that read BERLIN 2380 KM, so I took a picture of it, of course.
Then blah blah airport bus, airport, flying, blah. I slept as much as I could on the bus and plane (and it’s now June 26, of course), and I was back in my apartment around 2:30 pm.
Musya was excited to see me, and after I unpacked a bit and got a little sorted out, I went to bed at like 4:30. I slept until about 10, played on my phone a while, then slept from 12:30 or so until 7. It was absolutely necessary.
I loved Iceland, and I absolutely want to go back, preferably with someone whose vacation style is more similar to mine, and for longer and perhaps with a rental car, because then you can decide how long to spend in each location you visit. I’d like to go to the north coast as well; I hear there’s some great wool in Akureyri. (Not that I have any need to buy yarn! I have so much that I’m not allowed to buy any unless I have a specific project for it.)
We arrived at around 7 am, a little delayed, and after getting my bag, going through passport control, and a 45-minute bus ride from the airport to the city, Robin didn’t want to walk in the rain to the hostel, so we got a drop-off service from the tour bus company. But we had to wait another 20 minutes for that, because we missed the bus, and anyway we made it to the hostel around 9, deposited our bags in the storage thing, and headed to our first stop: The Settlement Exhibition. (Side note: we got the 24-hour Reykjavik city card, which paid for itself after 1.5 museum admissions.)
The Settlement Exhibition starts with the excavated foundations of a longhouse and an informative display around it about the history of settlement and the beginnings of Reykjavik itself. There was a volcanic eruption around 871, and it allows the buildings of that era to be dated. Archaeologists call it the Settlement Layer, conveniently. Then the next 2 stories are about the history of Reykjavik, which aren’t quite as interesting, except for the little model of the town in 1904 which has binocular things which play a little hologram of people doing things like lighting the gas lamps, and it plays sounds.
After that we got lunch at 101 Bistro, where some dude on TripAdvisor had the worst pizza of his life (which they proudly display on their sign). Robin got the fish & chips, and I got a cheese pizza. We traded bites, and the fish and chips were fabulous – very fresh, and the tartar sauce was made in house that morning. The pizza was also very good – it was sturdy in the middle, so you could pick it up without the sad drooping that all the pizza I’ve found in Germany does (seriously, bake it hotter, y’all). I don’t know what that guy on TripAdvisor was talking about.
Then we window shopped a little bit and walked down to the National Museum of Iceland. It was a bit disappointing – lots of medieval Christianity, not much Northmen. But they had a couple things I’d seen in pictures, like the carving of maybe-Thor and a drinking horn, and some historical clothes, plus a lot of old Bibles (mostly in Latin, as far as I could tell). I didn’t spend quite as much time looking at the displays as I might have liked, but Robin was getting bored, so I skimmed a lot.
Then we took the bus back into town and checked in to the hostel. (Robin was less keen on the hostel dorm experience, though she did get the top bunk, and the one whose ceiling was half lowered because of the ventilation, which was kinda sucky.) She showered, then we went up to the bar for their happy hour (and reasonably priced drinks, as opposed to “holy fuck everything on this island is expensive” prices) and talked some. We decided that she’d go poke around in jewelry shops and go shopping, which I wasn’t interested in, and I’d go to the pool, which she wasn’t interested in, and I’d message her at 6:30. (She didn’t have an international plan, so she had to be on wifi.)
I went to Sundhöllin pool, which is the oldest pool in Reykjavik. It wasn’t pretty or anything like that; it was functional concrete. But it was included in the city card, so I sure got my money’s worth out of that thing. Until I started planning this trip, I didn’t know Iceland had a huge swimming culture, but apparently it’s just What You Do after work or on the weekend. When you get there, you have to shower naked and wash all the “icky” parts before you put a suit on. This lets them use less chlorine in the pool, which is really nice. At Sundhöllin they have a kiddie pool at 38C, a lap pool (unknown temperature), a cold pool (10-11C), and a 39C jacuzzi on the first floor, then a sauna, and 2 hot tubs, at 39 and 42C on the second floor. All of this is outside. (There is an additional indoor pool that as far as I can understand it is used for sports teams and swim lessons and that sort of thing.) Yes, Iceland is cold. I, too, was skeptical of going outside in like 50 degrees (F) in a bathing suit, then getting in the water and getting back OUT of the water into 50 degrees. But after you’ve raised your core temperature by sitting in a nice hot bath, getting out isn’t that bad. I’m not sure I’d manage doing it in winter, though. That’s too hardcore for me.
So anyway, after I’d just chilled in varying degrees of hot pools for about an hour, I got out, rinsed off, got dressed, and texted my sister to meet me at Cafe Loki. She got a little lost, and luckily found it in time for us to get the last table that didn’t have a reservation. (It was recommended to me by 3 separate people who don’t know each other, so I’ll definitely take that as a “GO HERE.”)
I got the smoked trout and cottage cheese on rye bread, and she got some sort of traditional mashed fish with potatoes and cheese. It turns out I’m not very into smoked trout, but I ate all of it anyway, and it went well with the slab of half-inch-thick sweet rye bread it was served on. The mashed fish was bland, or at least the tiny bit I tried. Then I ordered their famous rye bread ice cream, which was oddly delicious. It was the equivalent of cookie dough ice cream, if the ice cream were way less sweet and the cookie dough was a chunk of bread that had been put through a powerful blender. I’m not sure I’m selling it here, but I would absolutely eat it again.
After that, we picked up some breakfast yogurt at a grocery store and went back to the hostel and collapsed. Neither of us managed to sleep on the plane, between the usual “sleeping on a plane sucks” and this poor toddler whose parents were VERY INEFFECTIVELY trying to keep him quiet. All he wanted to do was a) get up and move around or b) MAMA, and neither of these things were what he got. He got “shhhhh” and “calm down.” I feel slightly vindicated that my sister, who has a kid of her own, wanted to strangle the dad. It’s not the kid’s fault, after all. So I’d been up since like 6 am eastern on June 22 (10 am Iceland time), and it was about 8 pm Iceland time on June 23. Yeah. But have you ever been so exhausted that you just can’t sleep? Even with 2 benadryl, I just lay there. The loudly snoring girl in the next bed didn’t help, either (though I put in an earplug and managed to fall asleep eventually.)
June 24, 2023
After getting some amount of sleep, the alarms went off at 7 so we could get up and eat a little before our 9 am tour. (Skyr really does taste better in Iceland.) Since the City Card was still valid, we hopped on the bus for 5 minutes (literally) and got to the bus terminal in plenty of time for the trip, including picking up sandwiches from the combo conbini-Sbarro’s. Then it was off on the South Shore Adventure.
Our first stop wasn’t particularly exciting; it was a pee and stretch and snack break at a gas station about 90 minutes away (I guess Europeans aren’t used to road trips, lol). The view was nice, though, with bright green moss stretching as far as the eye could see. Then we went to Skógafoss, a waterfall which originates in Eyjafjallajökull. There’s a set of stairs you can take to an overlook, but our tour guide warned us it was steeper than it looked. You can still get good views from the ground, though, and we went partway up the hill anyway, which gave some neat half-obscured views.
The next stop was a shopping center in Vík í Myrdal. It had started raining at this point, but we were going down to the black sand beach regardless. We got thoroughly soaked, but it was worth it. The cliff formations in the distance would have been nice to see in less foggy conditions, but there’s something more magical/spooky about shapes off in the fog. This was the lunch break, so we ate our sandwiches at the cafe, then I noticed the sign exhorting one to eat only food purchased there at the tables, so I bought an obligation waffle with maple syrup, and it was absolutely worth it.
It kept raining the rest of the day, on and off, mostly the annoying drizzle-spit kind.
After that, we went to the Reynisfjara black sand beach, where signs alert you to the potential danger of sneaker waves, which can grab your ankle and drag you out to sea, where you will die. Our tour guide told us to go no closer to the shore than she was standing. The black sand was really cool to look at, and once again we had mysterious shapes in the foggy distance. There’s this cliff-cave thing that’s composed of basalt columns, which the Hallgrimskirkja is based on, and from one angle I thought it looked like a troll’s house, where the two caves were the entrances and there was a chimney from a sloped roof. Robin thought it looked like a troll.
Next up was Sólheimajökull, a glacier which has retreated significantly in the last 15 years (thanks, climate change!). Our tour guide showed us a point where when she started giving tours, you could reach out and touch it, and now it’s a valley with a lake at the bottom. There was some really cool moss, though.
The last stop was Seljalandsfoss, which is where they filmed Thor: The Dark World. You can also walk behind the waterfall, which is pretty rad – until you have to get back OUT through a bit where the wind blows a bucket of water over you. Totally worth the soaking, though. While we were waiting outside, I noticed a few people intently photographing something, which turned out to be a bird, so I got in on the intently photographing action. It’s apparently an arctic oystercatcher.
Then it was back to Reykjavik, and we piggy-backed on someone else’s dropoff and got out much closer to the hostel than the bus terminal. Neither of us was really hungry for dinner, but Robin suggested going up to the bar for a drink, where she ordered some dirty fries as a snack. Then we turned into pumpkins again after she called home.
June 25, 2023
Our last day in Reykjavik started with breakfast at Grái Kötturinn (the Gray Cat), which is named for an Icelandic saying that if you hang around in one place a lot, you’re like a gray cat. Plus the place had once housed a jewelry shop that had a gray cat in it. Super meta. But we were out and about before they opened, so we walked down to the bay and looked at the water in the crisp morning, then went back to the cafe. I had a pancake, and it was delicious. I’d wanted to look for a sweater, something mid-weight for those in-between months here in Berlin, but the shops didn’t open until 10, so we wandered up to the church and looked inside. There was an organ concert going on, which was cool, but otherwise the church looked like a brutalist version of a Romanesque cathedral. Not a dig on it, because I unironically like brutalism, but it’s not what I was expecting from the exterior. Then we killed some more time in the sculpture garden outside the Einar Jonasson Museum. Einar was the first Icelandic sculptor (after independence from Denmark?), and he had an interesting style. He worked with some of the pagan themes as well as modern and Christian ones. And while we were there, a sweet little kitty wandered in and let me pet her a lot, which was the highlight of my day ;)
Then we meandered a bit and ended back at the shops, where I spent a lot of time saying, “Well, I don’t hate it…” but because they’re so expensive, I wanted to pick one that I loved. I ended up getting a blue cardigan with a nylon lining that will be perfect for about half the year here. (I wore it over just a t-shirt to walk to the bus station the next morning, and I wasn’t cold.)
After that, we went back to the hostel, where I packed and re-packed my luggage so I could drop off my bags in the luggage lockers when I took Robin to the bus terminal, and when it was time, I deposited her (and my luggage) safely at the bus terminal. Then I decided to walk back to the hostel via the Sun Voyager sculpture, even though it was raining miserably.
At the hostel, I chatted with one of the people in our room and convinced her to go to the pool with me, and we eventually wandered down there and spent an hour or so boiling ourselves.
Because my flight back to Berlin was at 7:30 am, and I needed to get a 4:30 bus to the airport, I’d decided I’d just stay up and witness the midnight sun, but I wanted to try to nap until about midnight. Unfortunately, Snoring Girl was snoring, so I had maybe an hour of dozing between 8 pm and midnight. Then I got my stuff together and went up to the guest kitchen, where, much to my annoyance, a group of high school kids were being loud. I poked around on my tablet for a while, went out to the roof patio to look at the still-light sky at 2:30 am, and put some photos up on instagram, before heading out into the world around 3:30.
The weather was cooperative, luckily, and it was cloudy and breezy, with occasional bursts of sun, and it was, as GMaps advertised, about a 15-minute walk. On the way, there was a statue of a bear with a sign that read BERLIN 2380 KM, so I took a picture of it, of course.
Then blah blah airport bus, airport, flying, blah. I slept as much as I could on the bus and plane (and it’s now June 26, of course), and I was back in my apartment around 2:30 pm.
Musya was excited to see me, and after I unpacked a bit and got a little sorted out, I went to bed at like 4:30. I slept until about 10, played on my phone a while, then slept from 12:30 or so until 7. It was absolutely necessary.
I loved Iceland, and I absolutely want to go back, preferably with someone whose vacation style is more similar to mine, and for longer and perhaps with a rental car, because then you can decide how long to spend in each location you visit. I’d like to go to the north coast as well; I hear there’s some great wool in Akureyri. (Not that I have any need to buy yarn! I have so much that I’m not allowed to buy any unless I have a specific project for it.)
