Saturday, September 11, 2010

Day Three - Reykjavik

Another day in the city! A few of our plans fell through, but we still had fantastic day! After breakfast we went to Cafe Paris to meet up with a super nice girl, Regina, who I met on the travel forum virtualtourist.com. She was such a huge help in planning our trip -- since she lives in Reykjavik and has travelled extensively around Iceland, she was an expert and I would have been a bit lost without all of her tips. We visited with her for a little bit and then parted ways.

At this time it was raining pretty hard. We were bummed, but it's what we had expected for the trip. The day before had been so lovely - blue skies and sunshine all afternoon -- so we were spoiled and wished for nice weather again. We braved the rain and walked briskly to the harbor to check out the weekend flea market. There was a lot of cool stuff and it was fun to walk around and see the second-hand sweaters, dried fish, old vinyl and military wear (fun fact: Iceland does not have, and has never had, a military).

It was still raining when we left the market so we took refuge at Hornið for lunch. Hornið is a sweet Italian restaurant where we watched them make our pizzas, sat by the huge windows and watched the weather go from pouring rain to blue skies and sunshine yet again! How did we get so lucky? We were told by the guys at the Indian restaurant that we'd probably only get a couple days of sunshine our whole trip (so I guess we've used those up already!)

Our plans fell through to get to the open air museum (not enough time to catch the buses we needed in order to get there by the time it closed) so we just explored more and bought a sweater for me and a few other fun things. We tried to buy a sweater for Will, but of course the wool was "too scratchy". :)

We passed a cute cafe, Kaffitár, that we just had to stop in and visit. I ordered a Swiss Mocca and it turned out to be the best mocha I have ever had. It was heaven. Then, it was back to our hotel for some jumping on the beds and then a bit of a rest.

In the evening we went back to Hallgrimskirkja in time to go up to the top of the tower. The views of the city were amazing and the inside of the church was stunning. While we were in the top of the tower, the clock struck 5 o'clock -- it was deafening and fun. We also took tons of photos and really fun video in front of the church, which was fun and embarrassing at the same time -- score!

On our way to dinner we stopped to watch some British guys film/photo each other doing tricks on bikes which Will was pretty thrilled with. We ate at Kaffi Sólon which is mostly bistro-type food and had an amazing cake for dessert that was good and slightly weird. It was a Skyr cake (skyr is a type of yogurt), which was sort of like a cheesecake (a yogurt cake?) on crust that I could not figure out (it had nuts and chocolate and...who knows?) with an apple compote-type layer in between. Yum.

After dinner it was back to the hotel for us and a very tired kid (he kept trying to lay down on his bar stool to go to sleep). It's a Saturday night, so of course the street is full of people going nuts again. :P

Pictures? Here you go!





William's favorite thing about hotels.

In front of our hotel.




Inside Hallgrimskirkja.


View of the city from the top of Hallgrimskirkja.



Levitating.

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