iceland!

i have wanted to come to iceland for about 5 years... i don't know why but it has always been on my list, and now i am finally here!  given that icelandair had the cheapest flights to and from stockholm my way home seemed like the perfect place to come.

i arrived in kef yesterday afternoon, now many people fly through kef to other destinations in europe - but clearly not too many get off in iceland... after the transfer area which was quite large i got to the baggage claim area which was smaller than the one at the good old manch-vegas airport... i was shocked - this was supposed to be a capital of a country!!! the size shocks just kept coming...

for those of you unaware here are some iceland facts.  the population of the country is 317,000 and 2/3s of the population lives in reykjavik... so that means that the population of reykjavik is about 200,000 but downtown reykjavik is about the size of downtown concord (a town with 40,000 in population) with fewer large buildings... CRAZY!

anyhow, so last night i walked around reykjavik and got myself some dinner... although iceland's currency has been greatly devalued it seems to have had little effect on prices here... although hotels are incredibly reasonable food is even more expensive than it was in stockholm!

the city is beautiful, i can see the ocean from my hotel and there are all sorts of little brightly colored houses.  this morning i did some blogging and emailing and then got up had breakfast and walked around the downtown, i bought my customary print and found the 66 north hat that i had been wanting since stockholm... otherwise no shopping for me...

this afternoon i went on a horseback riding trip.  icelandic horses have been bred in complete isolation so they look really different kinda short and stout and very furry and when they run they go kinda sideways. anyhow it is quite cold in iceland and VERY windy but the horseback riding across the lava field was quite fun... however the pics are pretty bad, it is not easy to shoot with a slr while riding a horse- sorry :(

there is currently a volcano erupting in iceland - it started on march 21st and is apparently quite a big deal... i guess everytime this small volcano has erupted in the past it has triggered a HUGE volcano next door... so people are thinking that might happen again soon the last time it happened in 1783 BAD THINGS happened... so obviously i wanted to go see it - but also obviously since i didn't know about this until yesterday all the tours were booked... oh well

so tonight i am going to go get myself some icelandic fish and chips - repack my bags and tomorrow i am going to go to the blue lagoon before the airport back to boston!