Monday 15 August 2016

August 14 - Reykjavik

We awoke to a wet and rainy day and it continued to drizzle all day. Forecast high is 14°.

After a quick breakfast we head to Reykjavik with no specific plans beyond hoping to find the weekend flea market in the central part of town. Given we don't have GPS or wifi this is a challenge.  Macayle is very competent is reading maps bit the language is a bit of a barrier as many of the street names sound similar and many street corners do not have signs. After a few wrong turns we end up at the Whales of Iceland Museum and as we have a whale watching tour scheduled the next we decided to walk through it. The museum holds the largest whale exhibition in all of Europe.


Eventually we found the old harbour area and end up parking underneath the Harpa concert hall.  This is a futuristic looking building and the Glasswork constructing the building looks like honeycomb. We checked out all three levels observing the views of the habour and city.



Parking at this location was ideal. It allowed us to walk around the habour area, we observed a display of maps showing the locations of all the ship wrecks around iceland in the past century. We also found the flea market which also had a local meat market in the same building.  We were given the opportunity to try fermented shark meat. Macayle declined but I was going to try it. .... but the smell reminded me of turpentine and I couldn't. ...... .

Femented shark meat samples 


Puffin meat - she wouldn't try it.
After leaving Harpa hall we found ourselves at the sculpture of a Viking ship called The Sun Voyager.
We then found a bunch of one way streets in a very expensive shopping center. We shopped for awhile and then went to the amazing Hallgrimskirkja Church and climbed up to the bell tower area. We also had the opportunity to listen to the amazing organ in the church that has 102 ranks, 72 stops and has 5,275 pipes and weighs 25 tons. 






 In front of the church was a statue of Lief Ericsson and in the background is the Lief Ericsson hotel.
We eventually got back to our abode after numerous wrong turns. However every different turn showed us new sights. We had some supper and watched Netflix and planned out our next day.

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