Getting Lost (on Purpose) in Reyjkavik

Greetings from Reykjavik! Today was an excellent, long, and busy day. Landing in Iceland was surreal - seeing the lights approach (it´s dark at 6am) stirred up strong emotions, like "I can´t believe that I´m landing in Iceland!!!"

Started the day with breakfast at the hotel, where I befriended Hans (from Denmark) who is visiting his girlfriend. Hans said that he used to live next to a furniture store in Denmark named "Vestergaard´s", which is the original spelling of my name. See, I knew I was famous somewhere... I would later run into Hans and his girlfriend downtown. Reykjavik is a small city (around 200,000 people), so that kind of thing is not uncommon.

After breakfast I hit the streets. It is cloudy today, however I was able to grab some decent shots of some of the colors of the city. They love to paint the building sidings with bright greens, blues, reds, etc.

From atop Hallgrim´s Church

After wandering around the city and deliberately getting lost, I stopped off for a couple hot dogs at this non descript joint which overlooks a parking lot. They supposedly have the best hot dogs in the world, to which my initial reaction was "yeah, right". However, after downing two of them with some special sauce, they just might be on to something...

Then I trekked off to the "871 +/- 2 Settlement Museum". In 2001, while undergoing construction, remains of a Viking settlement were found, which they date back to A.D. 871 +/- 2, hence the name. These are the oldest settled remains known in Iceland, which they made into a museum, complete with multimedia interactive exhibits. I enjoyed this a lot, as I think seeing old archeology like this is really cool...
Back to wandering through the city, where I came upon this place with all sorts of neat stuff. Nothing was in English, so I wasn´t sure if it was a museum, or a store, or what. But it had some neat and kind of scary looking marionettes...


And I stumbled across this tucked away little photography store. No, "Fotografti" is not "photography" in Icelandic, they´re just trying to be clever, I think.

Next stop was the National Museum of Iceland. It had lots of Viking history, but it also had a collection of photographs from the early turn of the 20th Cent. This photo below caught my eye. This was back when men were men.

On my way back from the museum, I walked past the City Hall (on the left). How many of us can say our City Halls look like this?

Stopped for an afternoon drink at "b5", a bank turned bar.

Below is the Reykjavik Watch Co. I had my heart set on one of these watches - they are hand made in Iceland. Unfortunately, labor here is very expensive and one of these beauty´s is about US$2,000. So, I think it will have to wait.

So I had a great first day here! I booked a couple excursions for the next two days. Tomorrow I´m off on a Jeep excursion of a glacier, where we will explore such things as lava caves. Can´t wait!!