More wandering around today, though I picked a different direction.

Found a monument to Civil Disobedience, which seems very Icelandic.

 

And a tiny little park, which I mostly photographed because I could see a particular building and it amused me to take a picture …

… of this building …

… because of this piece of music.

This is down by what I found out later is the Town Hall, and it’s in recognition of the Unknown Bureaucrat.

I followed a pond/park set up, which gave a view of the Hallgrímskirkja; Eventually I hit the edge of the domestic airport, which isn’t all that interesting, so I headed uphill towards the aforementioned Hallgrímskirkja.

It was Sunday, so I didn’t go in to take a look, or ride the little elevator up the spire.
That seemed … massively disrespectful?

I did run into Emanuel the room-mate outside the church, and we wandered back to the hostel together.
I did pause to try to get a good shot of the church down the road, though I’m not sure this qualifies as anything other than “OK”.

The rough-hewn bollards save the shot though, so I’m pretty happy with those.

Somehow I managed to come to Iceland without a waterproof outer layer, so despite the eyewatering prices I summoned up my cash nerve and bought something.
It turned out cheaper than I was expecting, to be honest, to the extent that I double-checked with the folks that I’d understood the price correctly.

Sometime before that I ended up wandering through a market of sorts (Emanuel mentioned it) – Many Icelandic Wool Sweaters, a number of book vendors, and what looked like a recruiting booth for the Pirate Party.
I was vaguely tempted by an Icelandic Version of “The Hobbit”, but it was hardback, so quite heavy, and about US$25.

Dinner-pasta was odd; Some folks from Quebec saved me some cooking by giving me the half-jar of pasta goo they’d not used, which was nice. (They were leaving in the morning)
Then we were invaded by the French, in the form of a school group, and it got really loud.

I escaped to the lobby, where I ended up chatting with

• A woman from Portland who’d just finished the Camino, and was attempting to photograph her Pilgrim’s Passport.
  She’d enjoyed it, and pointed me at a Facebook group to investigate.
• A woman from San Diego/Taiwan who’d travelled through Scandinavia, and had seen the Northern Lights outside of Tromsø, in awful weather where the only cloud free spot was clear because it was exposed to the brunt of the wind, and they were given survival suits to wear over their cold-weather gear.

The French loudness spread when they set off the fire alarms by cooking.

And then again an hour later.