Iceland ahoy!

It was early Sunday morning in Reykjavík, and peering slightly blearily out of the apartment window, for I had not slept well for over 48 hours,  I was immediately cheered a little by the sight of a beautiful sunrise. I had until early afternoon to explore this pretty little city by myself, before getting the bus back to the airport, and I resolved to get out as soon as possible, to see as much as I could. It is lovely to travel with company, but there is something special about being able to follow one's own whims and just wander about aimlessly, that can be extremely pleasant. I had few places that I definitely wanted to see, and was happy to just look around, but before doing anything I needed a coffee.

Something that struck me about the little bit of Iceland that I visited was the high density of American visitors. Siting in a café on Bankastræti, a little later that morning and having dumped my bags with the nearby tourist information office, I looked around at my fellow patrons. Even at this early hour, there appeared to be one or two native Icelanders, but six or seven Americans. The day before, when visiting the Blue Lagoon, Americans had again made up a vast majority of bathers. Of these, a large number appeared to be too squeamish to follow the hygiene instructions about showering naked, or even at all, before entering the water. I have nothing against Americans (and love New York dearly) but some of the Americans in the café this morning, particular the younger, more excitable ones, were more than a little annoying. Two American girls, for example, appeared to find almost everything extremely funny, a situation that was made worse by the fact that one of the girls had a loud shrill laugh that sounded almost exactly like a swannee whistle.

A little fortified by coffee and a cinnamon bun, and keen t be on my own, I wandered out again into the cold morning. There had recently been a fall of snow, and I turned up the hood of my jacket against the cold, as I walked up a slippy path to visit a great statue of Ingólfur Arnarson, one of the founders of Reykjavík. Down by the waterfront, the glorious Harpa concert hall was looking particularly spectacular in the bright sunlight, and I decided to potter over to have a look, which proved easier said than done, on pavements as slippery as an ice rink. Opened in 2011, Harpa's glass facade reflects the sky and, at night, as I had first seen it a couple of nights before, a light display that dances across the panels resembles the northern lights (which, disappointingly, I had not seen).

Further along the waterfront, I paused at the Sólfarið (Sun Voyager) sculpture, shown above, by Jón Gunnar Árnason, although I found myself getting irritated by people who were standing around the work of art. The Sólfarið sits on a plinth that just out into the water, and was surrounded by visitors who were ignoring it and taking pictures of the view, and seemed not to notice or care that they were getting in everybody else's pictures of the sculpture. I started to wonder whether people were behaving unusually rudely, or if, in my sleep-deprived state, I was just being unreasonably judgmental.

Putting the waterfront behind me, I walked back into the city and up the hill to one of the places that I had been anxious to visit: Hallgrímskirkja, the largest church, and one of the tallest buildings, in Iceland. I arrived just as the doors to the viewing platform were closing, but contented myself with looking at it from outside. Looking both natural and space age (construction began in the 1940s, but was not completed until the 1980s), it is an undeniably iconic structure, and one that towers over the city, being visible from many places.

After this, I wandered back into the city streets and had more coffee. I peered into a few shops, as ever finding myself most happy in a couple of lovely bookshops (in one, I bought a CD by Ólafur Arnalds, an Icelandic composer whose work I have loved for some time; in the other, along with another coffee, I bought a pair of socks). After I while, I began to realise that I was exhausted, but just walking and walking, possibly powered by too much caffeine, and that I would soon have to make my way back to the collection point for the bus to the airport. I had enjoyed my visit, but resolved to return, someday, and hopefully to explore more widely, and on substantially more sleep.