Dennis & Aimee's Big Gay Paris Adventure

Ok, I know I've been promising, but here it is. My trip to Iceland.

It started with a 3 hour plane ride on Iceland Air which seems like a fine airline despite the fact that the ticket counter is nearly impossible to find at CDG airport in Paris.  On the bright side, Terminal 1 is being re-worked, so it's not so heinous as it used to be. I was excited to see the view from the plane as we drew near. So barren and beautiful:



Upon arrival in Iceland, which is an hour before Paris from a time-zone perspective, I had booked a bus to take me directly to the Blue Lagoon, which is a surreal spa/hot spring. I can't really explain just how incredibly weird this place was. It was cold and windy outside, maybe 45 degrees and 15mph winds. The lagoon, however was as warm as a hot-tub, and much larger than I expected. There was steam rising up from the water which frequently made it impossible to see the other side, and the water was a nearly opaque baby blue color.

Here's where the steam was relatively clear:


And here's when it got *really* steamy:


After bathing, but before the bus came back, I walked around the grounds of the lagoon, because I was curiuos about the terrain. From the bus, it looked a lot like the black lava of Hawaii, but if you caught the right angle, every piece of lava was covered with moss on one side. The green mossy sides were beautiful, like a fairyland of tufts and crevices.


I also took a picture of the water afterwards, close up, to show you the silica deposits on the rocks. That's what makes the water so opaque looking. They collect the silica clay and use it for body scrubs and whatnot. (I bought a scrub and brought it home, and I love it!) It's soft and slightly abrasive.


I really enjoyed that part of the trip. What a great welcome into Iceland! The bus came back two hours later to take me into Reykjavik, which is small and low and very colorful. One person got off of the bus at my hotel with me, and he asked if I was traveling alone. I told him I was, and we decided to have dinner together after we got settled. To my great joy, he was an astronomer who used to work on Hubble at the Space Telescope Center in Baltimore, but now teaches Physics in Rochester NY. I peppered him with questions throughout dinner, where he graciously taught me about his particular area of study, which is the jets that are formed from the accretion disks around black holes. I was so pleased that he didn't mind my questions. How often do you get an astronomer to yourself?

After dinner, we walked around looking at the town by night, and hoping for a glimpse of the aurora borealis. We saw the pond in the middle of town, and beautiful stars, ducks, restaurants, statues, harbors and buildings, but no aurora. I headed off to bed just after midnight, but I stole another peek outside at 1am just in case maybe I'd get lucky. But no dice. Here's my cute little room at the Hotel Reykjavik Centrum, which was perfectly located, and really pleasant:


The next morning I enjoyed breakfast at the hotel and then braved the rain to walk around town. Many of the houses are sided with corrugated metal, and painted in beautiful colors. Some more rustic, than others -- I took a liking to this one:


It poured most of the day and I got completely soaked twice. Once I walked toward the coastline, just to see what it looked like. I have to say, it was a tad anticlimactic, but maybe that was because my pantslegs were soaked even with the umbrella:


So I went back to the hotel, dried off, drank some tea, and headed out again, this time towards town. I found a store that was open on Sunday and went a little crazy buying sheep products, including the entire skin of a black Icelandic sheep, which has hair longer than my own. I also got an awesome scarf thing made from lamb's tail hair, which is so soft and curly it's hard to describe. Everything else in Iceland is expensive, but sheep products are cheap! After the shopping I found a restaurant for lunch which was, um, unique...


The night before I'd been sorely disappointed. I had all of these restaurants I wanted to visit, only to discover that they were hosting a food festival the weekend I was there. This sounds like a great feature, but in fact, it meant that everywhere I wanted to go was booked for dinner both Saturday and Sunday nights. That made Sunday lunch all the more important. Reykjavik boasts a vibrant dining scene filled with treaures from the sea, and it'll be worth going back again just to sample more of their fare. At Club 101, I ate seared scallops on mushroom risotto, and one of the scallops was a lovely pale pink, which I'd never seen before. It was delicious.

I wandered back to the hotel and took a hot shower and a nap, then crept out for a few more photos before bed. It was foggy, which made everything look very mysterious:


Also, there was a tree outside of my hotel window that was covered with fiber optic lights that swayed and bounced in the lightest breeze. I thought it was amazingly beautiful:


My flight was at 7:50 the next morning, so I got to bed relatively early. I enjoyed my 48 hours in Reykjavik, and I look forward to returning sometime, next time with Dennis, so I won't be as lonely. (He was off skiing in Colorado, but I couldn't get enough time off to join him.) It's extremely expensive (it's one of the 10 strongest economies in the world, based largely on their fishing trade) but everyone was friendly and welcoming. Plus, I still have all of those restaurants to try!

I'll leave you with the same parting shot I got as I left:


(Also, it's not cold, I *swear*!)
A.