May 23rd
We landed in Keflavik, Iceland at 6:15 am on Monday morning. It was an uneventful flight and most of us got at least a little sleep on of 5 ½ hour flight. Once we got luggage, we hit the ground running. First, we had a few formalities to take care of, like picking up our rental car and navigating us to our hotel in Reykjavik.
We found a great, non-traditional hotel right in the downtown area called
OK Hotel. As we pulled in around 8:30 or so, we quickly learned that this would be a unique place since if felt like a mystery to figure out how to get into the hotel, find a phone, called a secret number to talk to someone for them to tell us to come back later cause it was too early to check in.
We had signed up for a free walking tour at 10am so we didn’t have time to stress too much about not getting into our rooms or getting cleaned up since we were hungry and running out of time before our first tour. So we did a quick change in the secret lobby bathroom and off we went to find a quick breakfast. We found a breakfast place called
Grai Kotturinn (The Gray Cat). It was adorable and exactly what we were looking for. It was perfect. So we grabbed one of the few tables, grabbed some menus and tried to figure our language and conversion tables. As first, we were super excited that it was super cheap until we realized that we had the decimal in the wrong place and all of a sudden we all remembered all the websites, blogs, and travel books talking about how expensive Iceland was. After quickly panicking for a minute, we decided to just jump in, ordered breakfast and enjoyed laughing with great friends.
It wasn’t long before we were off and running to make it to our
City Walk tour on time. We were quite surprised at the large turn out and ended up in group with almost all Europeans. It was great! We learned so much about Iceland during our hour tour and I would HIGHLY recommend taking a walking tour of Reykjavik. This town and country are so interesting and fascinating.
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| Parliament House |
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| Back of the Parliament House |
We learned about how their politics work in Iceland while hanging out in the lawn behind the Parliament House. There was really no security anywhere in sight.
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| Domkirkjan (an old church beside the Parliament House) |
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| Monument to the Unknown Bureaucrat |
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| Tjornin (The Pond) |
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| Víkurgarður - Historical Park |
In this park, we learned about religion in Iceland and how they do not use last names and how their naming system works.
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| Elf Rock - they believe in trolls & elves in Iceland and take it very seriously |
After our time walking around the city, we went to check out the famous hot dog place,
Baejarins Beztu Pylsur. The place wasn’t even as big as a small moving container but they were pumping out some hot dogs. It felt a little like the Soup Nazi episode on Seinfeld, one wrong move and you weren’t getting that hot dog. It really wasn’t that bad but it was kind of intimidating but we walked away with hot dogs so that was good.
Our quick snack gave us the energy to continue through the afternoon, check out shops, walking through town and taking way too many pictures of all of the sights. Reykjavik is full of amazing graffiti which was really surprising but we loved it!
We would stop at different coffee shops (
C is for Cookie &
Café Mokka) for pick me ups and to warm up. It was colder then I had expected.
In the later afternoon, we got tickets to head to the top of
Hallgrimskirkja. It is the largest church in the center of town and it had fantastic views from the top. It was a little grey and rainy while we were up there, but you could still see the entire city from the top.
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| The Organ in the church |
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| Almost at the top |
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| The view from the top |
Our last destination before everything started to close up was
Harpa Concert Hall. It is made to look like fish scales so it was so neat to walk around and in to see the architecture inside and out of this pretty building.
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| Do you see us? |
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| How about now? |
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| The view from inside looking out at the Old Harbor |
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| The Old Harbor and black stone beach |
With the sun setting and it getting chillier, we decided to jump into a bar,
Kaldi, for happy hour and plan out our evening.
We set off with a few places in mind for dinner but with ever menu we saw we worried we might be heading back to the hot dog stand for dinner since everything was SO EXPENSIVE. After a few set backs, we found
Reykjavik Fish Restaurant. It was a great little dive with creative, fishy décor and good seafood dinner that didn’t break the bank. It was a great find that we just happened upon. The best way to travel.
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| Check out the real fish skin lights |
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| potato & fish dinner |
The night ended after we stopped for dessert at
Saeta Svinid and ended up getting pretty loop from our lack of sleep.
It was a great first day and such a fun little town to explore. Tomorrow we plan to head north to explore for the day.
