After a few years of spending Christmas break in sunny Florida with friends and family, Jason and I decided that we should go somewhere different! Iceland in winter? What’s the worst that could happen?! 😉 Our direct flight from Seattle was pretty low key and easy and we landed in Iceland at like 6 in the morning. We planned on spending the first week in Reykjavik exploring the city and the local attractions. Our hotel was conveniently located a few blocks from the HallgrÃmskirkja church and a few more blocks away from the waterfront. We explored pretty much every inch of Reykjavik by foot. It was exhausting, but there’s so much to see!
I’m going to go ahead and start this post off with the cool vehicles I saw! (they’re my favorite!) Most of the cars were generic diesel grocery getters. I didn’t see a single hot rod or motorcycle and only a single Subaru WRX tearing up the snow with all wheel drive shenanigans.. However Iceland is famous for their “super jeeps” or crazy lifted vehicles with huge tires that give them flotation in the soft snow. I’m hooked.
Needless to say, I had a lovely time looking at all the new, diverse, and interesting rigs people drive up here. (Lets just say that I have a thing for their semi trucks…) Our rental car was a Dacia Duster… Similar to a RAV4 or subaru. It was a little manual transmission diesel with 4wd. Kind of a nice little car. If they sold them in the states I’d be very interested in one. We named her LaDasha. 😉
Aside from the vehicles, my favorite part of staying in Reykjavik is the prevalence of street art, murals, and graffiti. It was so much fun to wander around and find random art on the back of a building or graffiti in hilarious places. I took so many photos that it deserves it’s own post! (Give me another few hours, ok?)
The city itself is very conducive to just wandering around. It’s full of interesting stores, museums, art installations, and just a general feeling of coolness. I’m not generally a fan of cities, but Reykjavik was pretty special.
One of the popular landmarks in Reykjavik is the Sun Voyager sculpture overlooking the water.
Sun Voyager was essentially envisaged as being a dreamboat, an ode to the sun symbolizing light and hope.
In 1986, the district association of the west part of the city funded a competition for a new outdoor sculpture to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the city of ReykjavÃk.
So there you have it! It’s a neat sculpture and was on my list of things to see while here in the city.
I usually turn all of our vacations into photo-taking excursions and this one was obviously no different. However, with only 4 hours of daylight each day I shot a lot at night. The sun was low on the horizon all day long so even at noon, it was never truly sunny. As a photographer it was both a blessing and a curse because the lighting went from “blue hour” to an hour of sunrise to an hour of sunset and to another blue hour and then darkness again. So the interesting lighting conditions coupled with the snow (which I’ve never shot in and definitely changes the lighting dynamics…) and a new camera meant that I was fiddling with my settings quite a bit! It was a fun and interesting challenge! I brought my laptop with the intention to edit and sort and upload and blog during my downtime when it was dark. This would have worked out perfectly if I had also remembered to bring the charging cable for the laptop. I have now been editing photos for a solid 3 hours and still have over 1000 to go. Just stopped for a pee-break and had a thought about how the white balance is off in my bathroom and if I could just move the slider to the right and warm up the colors a bit it would look nicer… I think it’s time to take a break from editing and do some typing! 😉
In short: Reykjavik is awesome and anyone flying to Europe needs to do a stopover here.