Dateline: Sunday 23rd July, 2006
For our second day in Reykjavík we walked down to the harbour and then into the flea market. There was only the usual sort of bric-a-brac, but we did get a nice cake thing to share.
We walked toward Ingólfstorg, via the Rammegeðin store. It’s really hitting home how pricey this country can be! We didn’t buy anything at Rammegeðin, but at the shops on Ingólfstorg, Monica bought herself some wooly hats. Once again we walked south, past Alþingi and Domkirkja, past Tjörn and Frikirkjan í Reykjavík, we headed up to Perlan.
Perlan sits atop a hill to the south of Reykjavík, and looks for all the world like a giant silver mammary gland pointing at the sky. It’s built atop the city’s geothermally heated hot water supply. At Perlan there is an artificial guyser, and a restaurant built into the glass dome (a cheaper café is also there).
At one point we were on the viewing platform at Perlan, looking out to the artificial geyser, chatting to a pleasant-seeming American woman. A guy climbed over the barrier to the geyser with his girlfriend and stared into the hole of the geyser. The American woman got quite agitated at this point, but from where we are there was nothing we could do. Besides, the signs are pretty clear that the thing uses superheated water, and that approaching it too closely might not be wise. I said something like ‘I view it as a form of natural selection’, Monica was amused – but the American woman took it very literally and just walked off. I think she must have been offended at the use of the term ‘natural selection’ – not at my apparent inhumanity (being on the viewing platform, all I could’ve done was yell, and that would be ignored – and I notice that she took no further action herself).
After exploring Perlan, Monica wanted a swim, so we moved down to the Nauthólsvik Geothermal beach near Perlan, she decided it was too cold there, so we hot-footed it across town to the Laugardaur pool (which may have been geothermally heated, but looked boringly like a regular pool to me).
We went back to the hotel via the sea wall, taking some evening photos as we went, and at 10pm were ready to go out for a meal – it was still light out (obviously), and the sun was up – so we didn’t imagine a problem. How wrong we were. The restaurants near the hotel closed at 10pm – in the summer Reykjavík could be a 24 hour city (perhaps the centre is?) – but near our hotel it was virtually impossible to get food. We ended up with a takeaway pizza, very nice – but even that was hugely expensive.
Good things about Reykjavík so far? Lots of light, friendly sort of place. Bad things: Hugely expensive, difficult to get a sitdown meal in the evening, and service can be slow.
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3 Comments
Two days and you haven’t mentioned the smell yet??
Gosh.
We really didn’t notice…. should we have? Of course, we did notice when visiting more geothermally active sorts of places (and when running hot taps).
It’s a lot less nowadays since instead of all the hot water being naturally hot, much of it is now spring water heated by natural steam. So it’s not that pervasive.