After finding out it would take 90 minutes to drive to a town that could get us on a 4-hour, ~15km, bus ride to get to a location that would allow us to hike 2 hours to get close-ish to Eyjafjallajökull (which is covered by a glacier, so you can’t see much anyway), we decided we should do something else the next day. Oh, and it’d be super expensive.
Reykjadalur was recommended to us by the night clerk at the hotel. He told us it was a favorite of locals, so we gave it a try. We hiked out about an hour and got to a hot river where we could take a dip. Over the years, people have piled rocks strategically along the river to create dams where little pools could form, decreasing in temperature moving downstream.
Ian and I wandered around a bit and found where 2 rivers interesected to feed the stream. One was a hot river and one was cold, so you could stand in the pool with your feet in water differing by ~60 degrees.
When we got back to town, we decided this was a good day to try some Icelandic hotdogs. After some effort, we were able to find Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur, the most popular eatery in Iceland.
The casing was much more elastic than American hotdogs, more like sausage casings, but were similar in flavor to hotdogs. The big difference was the toppings available. They had ketchup, sweet mustard, fried onion, raw onion and remolaði, a mayonnaise-based sauce with sweet relish.
After hotdogs, the group split up for the afternoon. Cassia, Sune, and Julia went shopping in search of an elusive Icelandic sweater. I headed over to the National Museum for free Wednesdays! And Ian got some quiet time back at the hotel.
The National Museum was mostly history of Icelandic culture. Each time period had a main display that showed an artifact that played a significant role in their history. Since I had only an hour before they closed, the people at the info desk recommended I focus on those and look more in depth at the exhibits for the time periods around the items that caught my interest. Definitely worked as a good strategy for me.
After the museum, I finished up my postcards and headed into downtown Reykjavik to get them mailed off. The people at the post office were very friendly and told me a bit about their postal system. They have teams of carriers for each region, typically delivering mail within 3 days of send date. The rural carriers deliver mostly to intersections, so all residents on a rural road would have to go to the junction to collect their mail. Occasionally, routes will be closed due to weather, but most of the year, they are able to access the populated areas.
The international stamps I bought for outside the EU were pretty cute too. I got frogs and waterfalls — and they were old-timey where you have to moisten the stamp before it will adhere. I then got into a linguistics discussion with the other teller and a French woman until the post office closed.
I spent the next hour slowly making my way back to the hotel, taking pictures of pretty much anything that caught my interest. Some of the buildings and statues only had placards in Icelandic, so I looked them up later.
I made a stop in the Kraun Design Gallery because they had a picture of yarn outside and I wanted to know what it was. They had a photo exhibit of Iceland’s role in WWII, a yarn exhibit that was closed for the day, and a super-expensive arty store.
After that, met up with everyone else to have dinner at Fish Market. The food was fantastic, but the visit was a bit odd. We didn’t have a reservation, so they said that we could have a table, but would have to be done in an hour and a half for a reservation that was scheduled. We agreed to the terms, were seated, and put our orders in. We got our appetizers relatively quickly, but then waited an hour before our waitress came to tell us our entrees were getting started. This was about 10 minutes before our deadline, but the restaurant was still relatively empty. We explained the agreement to the waitress who was completely uninterested. The hostess eventually came out and let us know that we were not going to be held to the deadline.