Thursday, July 26, 2012

Reykjavik, Iceland: Puffins and Whales

I am going to take several posts to describe our trip to Iceland.  Since I am still going through photos, I thought I would post a few from our first day in Reykjavik.  We arrived in Iceland at 6:30 a.m., fresh from a sleepless overnight flight.  We took a short nap in our hotel room before we decided we had better get up and adjust to the new time zone.  We stumbled out of our hotel room to wander around the city before our whale watching tour.  Reykjavik has a population of about 100,000.  Downtown is small, charming and very pedestrian-friendly.  The National Cathedral was very close to our hotel, so it provided an reference point for navigating.  


We managed to find a restaurant serving smoked fish on flatbread ( much better than that sounds, really) for lunch.  That was our introduction to great Icelandic seafood and to Icelandic food prices:  A fairly simple lunch cost $30.  It turns out that is pretty reasonable for Iceland (let's not talk about dinner).  We managed that cost by trying to eat fish (the cheapest option) and by simply being out on trail for 9 days.  That being said, the food we had was universally very good.


In the afternoon, we headed out for a whale watching tour.  I talked a little about it in a previous post, so I'll just move on to pictures (click to enlarge):


 The National Cathedral.
The pipe organ in the National Cathedral.  Both times we stepped inside, we were lucky enough that an organist was rehearsing.
 The Reykjavik Concert Hall as seen from the harbor.
 A puffin! (Michael took this photo)
 East of Reykjavik on the whale watching boat.
 The Snæfellsjökull volcano on the Snæfellsnes peninsula northwest of Reykjavik.
On the way back to Reykjavik

1 comment:

  1. very cool! can't wait to see the rest of the trip!

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