Today’s thing, because yesterday was a Sunday, was Hallsgrimskirkja, seen here lurking behind a tree.
For all that it looks like the figurehead of a ship in that shot, the statue isn’t connected to the church; It’s a statue of Leif Eriksson, given by the USA in honour of the 1000th anniversary of the Icelandic Parliament.
The interior, and indeed the exterior (with the possible exception of that doorway), are … minimalist.
Stark, one could say.
Given that the Church is the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Iceland, it makes sense.
It makes less sense that the pipe organ looks to be set up to fire upon the altar, possibly in the event that the Bishop suddenly comes over all Roman Catholic?
The wee shop sells tickets to ride up the spire.
Also postcards, but I didn’t think to photograph those before I sent them.
The elevator takes you to a space below the observation level, and you walk up some steps.
Up at the top there’s a door, and it’s there to keep the warmth in and the wind out, because Holy Cran are you exposed up there.
The views, I think, can do the talking for this next bit.
Hadn’t realised I’d caught the shadow of the spire until I was picking which images to keep.
Eventually I came back down, and wandered back towards the hostel, in search of lunch and anything or anywhere warm, though I did pause to capture this little offence against both God and Man.
It’s Iceland.
You cannot go scuffing your feet through the fallen leaves as you drink your Pumpkin Spice Latte because there are not that many trees, and any fallen leaves end up in Sweden thanks to the high winds.
On the plus side, there was the troll here, and a cat which I didn’t manage to photograph, who ambled across the pavement and vanished down where the guy in the brown outfit is looking.
On the way back, I swung past the statue of Ingólfr Arnarson, Iceland’s first settler, and thanks to some pink lipstick applied during a Pride Festival, a supporter of LGBTQIA+ causes.
And here, photographed mostly out of novelty, is a plane coming in to land at the domestic airport, Reykjavíkurflugvöllur.
Yes, they really do come in that low.
Also, the white building with the grey roof to the left there is the Prime Minister’s office, and a tour guide who was there at the time mentioned that the PM was in, because that’s the PM’s vehicle in the car park.
I found my warm thing, and lunch thing, and tried a Nutella Crepe in a place where they, oddly, were closing at the unusual time of 2:38 in the mid-afternoon. This tuned out to be because of protests to do with equal pay rates for women, 2:38 being more or less the time when women effectively stop being paid.
I only discovered this after the fact, and didn’t notice any protests at the time.
Besides, thanks to the rather nice crepe & coffee, I was wondering how to say something in Icelandic; Ég þarf insúlín.
Little Red was carefully placed in the gear swap box today.
A useful day-pack, but too small for my purposes, and I didn’t want to be lugging around an unused bag any longer than strictly necessary. Gear swap seems the best place, as I’m petty sure someone can find a good use for a 15 litre pack.
The plan had been to make some dinner, but there’s a group of 20 French High School students staying at the hostel, and they tend to monopolise the kitchen when they’re in there. And by “tend to”, I mean “It’s damn near impossible to do anything at all”, so I wandered off to a place that did submarine sandwich sort of things, Hlöllabátar, a little kiosk/diner in the square near the hostel.
Not sure why I took a picture of what I’m guessing is a stormwater chamber lid, but that’s what happened.
Maybe it was the lettering?
Probably happened on the same outing as this photo of Reykjavik at night, in a spot right on the edge of downtown; Most of the restaurants and bars are behind me.
I’d been sitting in the lobby when I was given the heads-up by the woman from San Diego that they’d just seen the Northern Lights down at the harbour, so I grabbed my jacket and headed off, telling some folks along the way.
The location was less blurry than this in real life. Either my hands were too cold to hold the phone steady, or maybe it’s just not so good at night photography.
We (myself, Aaron from Mexico, & David from Canberra) weren’t 100% sure that the faint white misty streaks off to the north were actually the lights, and not cloud, or just our imaginations.
Fortunately, the damn things show up much better in camera images, so after some tricky balancing of a DSLR on his wallet, Aaron got some proof that we were not, in fact, imagining it.
Streaks of white mist, or cloud, or imaginings, do not show up green on a digital image; The white in the bottom left is the lights of the port.
We saw some movement & twisting in the white, and maybe some tints of green where it bunched up.
No photos – My cellphone saw nothing.
So that was a pretty good end to the day, and it wouldn’t have happened had I not become fed up with sitting on my bed using a stool as a desk, and moved down to the lobby.