Day 1: Reykjavik Iceland

Jenna Knox
Sep 24, 2017
3 min read

We started off the day by waking from our Airbnb to the city center. Little did we know at that time, we would end up waking 11 miles throughout the day We had a great time exploring the city and walking until our feet were burning. We didn't plan out much of what we wanted to see, so we just kind of wandered for a while. We eventually would remember something we wanted to see and wander in the direction we thought it was. A couple of times we wandered in the wrong direction and walked quite a distance, but it was all part of the adventure. By the end of the day we saw the things we had hoped to see and got to experience a pinch of the culture of Iceland...and a lot of the tourism culture as well. Our list of favorites for the day:

Hallgrimskirkja church - I kid you not, we probably took a few hundred photos of this church. It was one of those places we just kept returning too and every time the lighting changed we had a strong urge to take more pictures of it. To be honest they probably all look the same too

Sun Voyager - a popular Icelandic sculpture down by the harbor. This was one of the instances where I thought i knew where I was going and we ended up wandering in the wrong direction. But the wandering was beneficial because it lead us to our next favorite on the list!

Vladis ice cream! - in preparing for this trip I read a lot of blog posts, searched a lot of Pinterest pages, and followed new instagram accounts, all helping me gather information on the beautiful sites to see. One of my favorite bloggers, and possibly the most expert iceland traveler at this time, is @lifewithaview on instagram. One of the many things she mentioned that was added to my list of things to accomplish while here, is to get ice cream from Vladis. If you know me, you will know that I am always up for ice cream. Yes, even when it's 50 degrees outside. So when we saw the Vladis van we knew it must be close. We got a small cup of chocolate orange ice cream to share, and sat outside freezing our fingers off as we ate our ice cream. It was cold but delicious 😋

Harpa concert hall - this beautiful building has a glass exterior that reflected the beautiful cloudy sky surrounding us. This is also where we finally asked where the sun voyager was and got directions from a friendly Icelandic gentleman.

Kaffi Brenslann - a quaint cafe that had delicious warm drinks and yummy hot sandwiches. We gave our feet a break while we fueled up and people-watched for a while.

Interesting findings of the day:

Black licorice is very popular here. We learned this the unfortunate way by biting into a chocolate bar that had black licorice running through the center. We also found it was the most popular flavor at Vladis Ice Cream shop.

The cats here are very friendly. I'm keeping up my profile of being a "crazy cat lady" by making cat friends in other countries. Multiple furry friends just pranced right up to us while we were walking today. Don't worry Jackson, your still my number one.

Sometimes grass doesn't just grow on the ground, it also grows on some rooftops here.

Street art, murals, and graffiti cover many of the walls of Reykjavik.

We met a very chatty woman today. Her name happened to be Cathy. Now every time I say "Chatty Cathy" I will be thinking of an actual woman I met while abroad.