We’re here! It’s not as cold as you might think!

Wow, we had the most amazing weekend of wedding, family, friends and fireworks. A lot of people stayed through Monday night, and we had a fun time spending Fourth of July with them and watching fireworks together. Then Tuesday was a whirlwind of errands and packing as we got ready for our red-eye flight to Reykjavik.

Fortunately, everything went smoothly and we landed at 6:30am in Iceland. We navigated with no problems to our hostel, and spent the day walking around and getting to know the city. You can see some photos below to get a taste of the area. It has a very small feel to it, since the population is only about 200,000 (for comparison, Boston proper is about 600,000), but it still has most of the cultural features of a larger city. We managed to see the symphony building today, a brand new gorgeous glass structure right on the waterfront.

We started off by just walking around, and this cemetery was the first thing we found. It looked just like a fairy tale cemetery. Surprisingly, the graves weren’t actually that old. We didn’t find anything earlier than about 1850.  It was incredibly beautiful and peaceful.

You can get a feel for the beautiful city from these shots around the central lake, called Tjörnin. Good luck pronouncing that!  All the words in Icelandic are a gajillion letters and way too many that we don’t recognize!

 

We had an amazingly delicious pizza (that’s arugula on top!), and we found a relaxing place to lay out in the sun while it was shining through the clouds.

This church is one of the landmark sites in Reykjavik. It’s stark and simple, but the architecture feels very powerful. Sam fell asleep!

We went to this nice little cafe to warm up with some hot chocolate. It was really similar to the 1369 Coffeehouse in Cambridge. They had this cool wall that you could write on with chalk, so Caroline commemorated our wedding in a heart.

On the way back home we walked by the beautiful new symphony. We thought we’d just peek in, but amazingly the front door was open. We started walking around and tried to make our way into the main hall just to see it. We went down a lot of back hallways and wrong turns, but we finally made it in!  Inside, a guy was tuning a piano, so we were very quiet!

  

On the way back, Caroline noticed this statue, which is sort of famous, at least enough that it looked familiar to us. So we took a picture to wrap up a great first day! Tomorrow we are going on a tour of the amazing nature features on the island – geysers, waterfalls, hot springs and more! We will post again shortly. In the meantime, leave comments since we’d love to hear from you!

Sam and Caroline