Here she is with her footsies in "Swell," the artsy footbath mentioned in a previous post. I tortured the poor jetlagged lass by making her walk for an hour and a half to the lighthouse and back. Her response? "This should be my morning run tomorrow." Lunatic.
On Friday we went to Hafnarfjordur, where there is something called "The Elf Garden". It is where the "huldufolk" (elves) gather. We saw so many of them, but they didn't show up in our photos!
Here Zoe is being tickled to death by some of them:
And this is me, following a bunch of them like will-o-the-wisps. I wanted to know me faaaaaate.
Chasing after elves exhausted us, so we collapsed in a sunny meadow filled with wild flowers.
After exploring the cute seaside town a bit, we returned to central Reykjavik and went to the geothermal beach. We also went to the top of the big dome in eastern Reykjavik. IDEAL photo location. I'll post them on Facebook soon!
The next day we went to the Culture House, which was EXCELLENT. It was set up thematically so that one section was looking DOWN on the land of Iceland, UP to religion/spirituality, INWARDS towards Icelandic culture, etc. I found this crucial chart of Viking hairdos in the "MIRROR" section.
Later in the afternoon, we headed to the Reykjavik botanical gardens, very near to Orthanc, from my second post. There were beautiful flowers like this:
And fantastic specimens like this:
We ate lunch in their greenhouse cafe:
JAM-PACKED DAY. We then went to Blaa Lonið, the "Blue Lagoon", one of the wonders of the world. You can vaguely see the colour of the water behind us in this dorky selfie.
We spent two full hours in the warm water, covering ourselves in silica, squeezing past fat tourists into the steam room, and turning into prunes. It was delightfully warm, unlike the next day, which was BITTERLY COLD.
We went pony riding! With the company "Eldhestar," which means Volcano Horses. We spent three hours riding around mountains and meadows. The only issue was the wind - our guide told us afterwards that they usually only experience winds like that in winter... which was why we were chilled to the bone. It was worth it, though! And Zoe had the wise idea to put on the offered bright orange rain gear as extra protection against the wind. So though we looked like puffy convicts, we were a bit warmer.
Zoe got a plain brown horse. I, on the other hand, was given this delicate flower.
This horse did NOT want to go as fast as the others. I think his thought was "I'm too prettttyyy to go faaaaaast." Everytime we went into a "tölt" which is the unique gait of the Icelandic horse, he happily started doing the funny little quick trot, but MUCH slower than everyone else. It was still oodles of fun, though. We saw Ingolfsfjall, the mountain named for Iceland's founder.
Note the hair of our guide's horse in the bottom left corner!
SO MANY PONIES
After going home, eating traditional fish stew, and hopping in a "heitur pottur" to warm up, we went to go see the movie "Rams". GO SEE IT. It is highly, highly recommended. It's about two brothers who come together after not speaking for 40 years in order to save their sheep....but it's way more interesting than that sounds.
You may wonder why this post reads more like a little kid's diary, and that's because I had to write it all in Icelandic first (We had to write about our weekend for class). Sadly I don't know any interesting vocabulary, but at least I made up for it with lots of fun things to talk about!
Tune in next time for an exploration of Icelandic manbuns! (the ones of their heads)
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