Last week, my parents came to visit, and with the aid of their rented car we got to go to some pretty nifty places.
When they got there on Sunday, we drove the Golden Circle, which was challenging to accomplish in the limited daylight hours, but we got to Gullfoss just as the sun was fading. One interesting difference from when I saw it back in September was the geysir—the air was so cold that you could barely see the water shooting up when it erupted because of all the steam.
Once I got out of class on Monday, we drove out to the Blue Lagoon. The Blue Lagoon has a reputation for being a tourist trap, but it's not very busy in the winter, and, unlike your average tourist trap, it is actually amazing. The “lagoon” is a man-made pool in the middle of a lava field, fed by water from the output of a nearby geothermal plant. The water is very warm, even hot, and filled with silica and sulphur, which are apparently good for the skin. Because of the mineral content, the water is an opaque, pale blue, giving one the impression of bathing in bantha milk. There are also boxes around the edge of the lagoon filled with light-gray silica mud to put on your face, which I could compare to the mud Buffy puts on her face in that one scene in “Restless,” giving this paragraph an extra-high nerd reference content (yesss). Or I could just say that it was a very nice facial. We drifted around the lagoon for a glorious few hours, and it was definitely one of my favorite Icelandic experiences!
Tuesday we indulged our collective literary-nerd interests and drove out to Snæfellsjökull, the volcano made moderately-famous by being the gateway to the Center of the Earth, according to Jules Verne. I’d skimmed through the first half of A Journey to the Center of the Earth since arriving to re-read the bits about Iceland. (Thanks, Project Gutenberg! You are an endless source of distraction.) This was entertaining, as the Reykjavík of 1864 was little more than a village, yet the descriptions of Icelanders’ personality and culture was familiar to me from both my Folklore class and actual experiences. Anyway, we didn’t see any dinosaurs, but the Snæfells peninsula is just as beautiful and dramatic as the rest of Iceland.
I think this and the next two photos are from around Hvalfjörd, which we drove around on our way to the tip of Snæfellsnes, where the volcano is.
Snæfellsjökull
We also saw this wicked cool lava formation:
Local folklore says that the elves use it as a church.
Before the Norse settlement, Iceland was home to a small group of Irish monks, who apparently went there for the solitude so they could meditate in peace. (If that’s what you want to do, then Iceland’s a pretty good place to do it.)
One of the few relics they left behind was this well. If it was really built before the settlement, then this well is over 1,100 years old. What’s that on top of it, you say? Oh, just a whale skull. No big.
The remainder of the week was spent doing things in Reykjavík. We went to the Culture House to see the manuscript exhibition (so cool!), the Saga Museum, and Reykjavík 871 ±2. The Saga Museum has life-sized silicon figures representing the characters from key saga stories; as you walk through the exhibit, you listen to an mp3 player narrate the stories, taking you through the history of Iceland (according to the sagas, at least). I was a little skeptical of this one going in, but it was actually very interesting and cool. There’s almost a ridiculous amount of blood and screaming—all in the name of authenticity, of course.
View of Reykjavik from the Saga Museum
I just really like taking pictures of sunsets.
My parents at the top of the Saga Museum!
Reykjavík 871 ±2 is a wild, futuristic exhibit surrounding the foundations of a longhouse excavated a few years ago. The house is one of the oldest signs of settlement found in Iceland, and the name of the museum refers to the estimation of its date. All around the excavation, you can see ghostly figures going about their lives in a cyclorama representing what the Reykjavík area looked like in the 9th Century. (Spoiler Alert: it looks like a whole lotta nothin. By which I mean, it was green and beautiful and almost completely devoid of people.) By touching buttons, you can illuminate particular features of the house, and touch screens allow you to learn more about the Viking Age, and what daily life was like during the period of settlement. No description of this museum I’ve ever read fails to compare it to Star Trek. So: think of it as part holodeck, part tricorder, except the technology isn’t THAT good yet, except it’s actually still incredible and more history museums should look into doing this kind of exhibit.
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