Welcome to Iceland!

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Welcome to Iceland; country #57 for me. Super excited to be here, and holy crap is it windy! I checked the weather before I left and it forecasted rain, rain, rain and a bit more of rain. Oh, did I mention the gale force winds :-)? Yup - for once the weather forecast was very correct! It's not temperature cold - highs of +5 to +9 Celsius, so when it stops raining and blowing winds you actually get quite hot very fast, but when the nasty kicks in it is, well, nasty!



I arrived bleary eyed and super groggy after a red-eye flight (yes red-eyed is the perfect name for them). G Adventures had set up arrival transfers for us with Grey Line and as soon as I left the arrivals section they were right in front of me and a bus was leaving in 10 minutes. Perfect. They don't mention that you do a bus change at the bus terminal, much to then mass confusion of very groggy tourists who struggled to understand what the driver was saying to us all. But once that got sorted I arrived at my hotel shortly after 8am to find out that my room was not ready yet (check in is 1pm which is surprisingly early but they were full and no one had checked out yet.) As I tried not to fall asleep in the lobby someone did check out early (single room) and the staff were kind enough to tell me one hour I could get it. So I went for a walk.

And holy crap was it cold. I had brought layers, but had no idea just how bitter the wind was here. Despite being +5 it felt like a -20 wind and I managed to stop in a lobby of a small mall and add another layer. Now I looked like the Michelin Man but could stomach being outside. I did a stroll along the main tourist street from start to finish (mostly closed still on an early Sat morning) and talked to the tourist shop about getting money exchanged (not till Monday when banks open). One thing I really noticed was how much construction is going on. Iceland completely crashed in 2008 and while they are rebounding back enormously; I have learned that some of the sites I saw were remnants from the crash; businesses/people just walked away from sites and are only now starting to build up again.

Walking around with my head against the wind I noticed that this place reminded me of Ushuaia, Argentia for the quaint shops and intimate feeling, and St. John's for the buildings and colour and Greenland for the designs of the windows. It was really interesting and of course Newfoundland has quite an Icelandic settlement, so seems some of the architecture ideas came over as well! Another thing I noticed - people do random u-turns whenever they want here. Traffic does seem to move well, but these random u-turns are just weird. Waling along and all of a sudden a car is driving around you in reverse to go back where they came from. And this has happened several times already and I've only been here a day and a half!

Reykjavik is a small city, biggest in Iceland and easy to navigate. It has some small streets that are not grid like however you have water to the west and it's fairly easy to figure out where you are in reference to that. Plus they have a giant pond called Tjornin to the east (I think that's the directions) so again, hard to get lost. And when you are walking you can tell when the tourist section ends, so you just turn around (unless you are me and want to explore a bit more local feel).

I did go back to the hotel and slept for 5 hours, so only had a couple hours to walk around some more, and decided to try and sleep early so I had a full day the following one. Well, fell asleep at 8pm and woke up at 10:30AM the following day. Holy doodle I seriously can not remember the last time I slept that long. I was/am fighting a flu bug so that's probably part of it, but other than the 1 hour wake up at 2am I slept soundly (and Joel's text woke me up once!). Impressive and obviously tired.

So today I"m off to explore heaps of things, the National Museum, Cafe Haiti (apparently best coffee in Iceland), and the Harpa Musical Hall plus the old water front area as well. And yes, I have LOTS of layers!

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