Today, I'll be describing my flight to Iceland, and my very first day, spent walking around Reykjavik while waiting for my bus to Vellir, the farm in Hveragerdi where I would spend the majority of my vacation.
First off, I would like to clear something up : before I went to Iceland, I had expected something similar to Yellowknife (which I visited for work last summer), a Northern community with a rocky, forested natural setting.
This is not the case. Reykjavik itself looks like a typical Dutch town, of all things (Well, generally Northern European, but my first thought was of the town of Brunssum, in Limburg, so that is the example I will use), and the countryside of Iceland is virtually barren when it comes to trees. The nearest they come to forested land is patches of "trees" that a Canadian may call worthy of a hedgerow.
It is worth noting that they are trying their best to rectify this by planting more forests, more on that later.
The major landmark in Reykjavik is Hallgrimskirkje, the massive cathedral at the town's centre (as far as I could tell; it is almost directly North of BSI, the main bus terminal, and halfway from the water to the South to the water to the North, so it seems central enough). The most defining feature about it, I would argue, is its incontestably modern architecture.
See here :
The contours of the spire (if that is the correct word) are the part that catch the eye the most. If they look like they are made of concentric pillars working their way up to the top, well then they look exactly like what they are. The gaps between those vertical lines serve as windows for the wings of the church itself.
Of course, while you are there, you have to climb to the top of the spire, and take a look around. What you see then will be your first hint that you are, to paraphrase the cliché, not in Limburg anymore :
The city is surrounded by magnificent ridgelines, and is, in fact, not even close to the size of what we from the West may consider to be a typical city.
That impression will stay with you if you, as I did, decide to wander around the town itself afterwards. Everything has a small-town kind of feel, streets are small and cozy, and the food, well...
I felt like I was cheating when, in the middle of Reykjavik, I stopped at a location called Le Bistro, clearly styled after a French Café and not anything remotely Icelandic. However, the food I had there, a meal called the Farmer's Breakfast, was delicious and also included what I would find to be the most typically Icelandic food available : Skyr. (Seen at the lower left of my tray in the picture)
Skyr is a strange substance. While some will tell you that it has the consistency of yoghurt, they would be right half the time, but also not cover nearly all of the complexities of the dish. Basically, Skyr is a cheese product, that comes in some variation on a creamy consistency. It can be flavoured with outside substances in all sorts of ways, and can come with different degrees of cheesy flavour under all that. I'll have Skyr several more times on this trip, so expect more on that, but suffice to say that this particular Skyr tasted somewhat cheesy, had a consistency almost like thick yoghurt, and was topped only with granola.
The Skyr I had afterwards, however, was in a dish they cleverly titled Skyramisu, and was artificially coffee-flavoured, with a fluffier consistency. Aha! Already with the variation!
In any case, once my brunch had been satisfactorily introduced to my digestive tract, I headed out onto the town, with the intention of visiting the National Museum and the Culture House.
I'm sure you will be disappointed to know that, on the Winter schedule, basically all museums in Reykjavik are closed on Mondays, bringing my exploration to a bit of a crawl. Instead of visiting those, I did a lap of the town, visiting the University Park and City Hall on my way back to the bus station.
I hope you all enjoyed this, and please feel free to tell me if you did (or didn't), and tell me why, so the Dark Ages can continue to please!
Thanks very much, and I look forward to our next post, which will be (for real this time) my second post on Combat in UARPS.
Bless bless!
