Nothing Smells Quite Like the Water in Iceland

Hello everyone!

I don't even know where to begin, Evan and I have been SO busy! I'll start with Saturday.
We left for the airport around 7:00am and got through security very quickly. The flight to Toronto was about 1.5 hours long, and we were stuck in Toronto for 7.5 hours! My options when choosing a flight were a 1 hour layover or a 7.5 hour layover, and I am so glad I chose the 7.5 hour option- we would have missed the flight if I hadn't! It turns out that we had to not only switch flights but also switch terminals, which is a mess when you have no idea what you're doing. After searching a long while we found where the train was to get from Terminal 1 to Terminal 3 (oddly enough there is no Terminal 2) and boarded.

When we got there we looked for the ticketing booth for IcelandAir in order for us to get our boarding passes. After pacing the ticketing booths many times (there are so many ticketing stations- we were getting worn out looking) we asked a worker in the Caribbean Airlines ticketing station if there was anyone to help us, and he said we would have to wait until 6:00 to get out boarding passes- it was 3:00!! Luckily for us there was a restaurant outside of security that we ate lunch at (unfortunately changing terminals means going through customs and security again) and the IcelandAir workers arrived at the ticketing booth about an hour early. The flight from Toronto to Iceland was long, but the plane was very comfortable and had a lot of movies to choose from to watch. Evan and I both fell asleep watching Harry Potter 7 part 1 and slept for most of the flight.

We arrived in Iceland around 7am and we were let out of the plane right onto the tarmac then walked into the airport. We felt like celebrities- I didn't know airports actually did that, I have only seen it in the movies! We had to go through security again when arriving at the airport, which we thought was really odd. Some people were very irritated about it because our plane was late and they had connecting flights that left in 10 minutes. It went very quickly though.

From the airport we took a bus to Hafnafjordur, the city we rented a room in. We had about 45 minutes to spare so we drank a cup of coffee and got cash from the cash machine. Their money is so much prettier than ours! It was difficult to get used to the weird exchange rate too, 125 Krona = $1

 The bus ride was about half an hour long and it was so amazingly beautiful. Iceland has no trees but the terrain is made up of dark igneous rock and wildflowers. Most of the wildflowers are purple, there were fields of the same purple flowers nearly everywhere you went. I've never seen anything like it. We saw plenty of yellow, orange, white, and red flowers as well.

It started pouring outside just before we got off of the bus, so we quickly ran to the nearest awning for shelter. Luckily Evan had a rain-jacket and I had brought an umbrella. It slowed down a bit so we made our way to our house (we rented a room in a local's house). The streets are incredible, the sidewalks and roadways run along small canals that weave their way into a large canal. The large canal has islands in the middle with grass, trees, and flowers where ducks seem to hang out.

A canal along the sidewalk

The first day we basically just explored Hafnafjordur and tried to fight off jet lag. We went for a walk to look for lunch, and it began pouring again so we ran into a little coffee shop that served some food too. None of the food looked good to me, so I ended up eating cake for lunch. The cake was incredible! Evan ordered this weird spicy chicken and vegetables pastry served with sour cream which he seemed to like. He had a black coffee and I ordered a latte- which they serve in a glass cup!

 Fighting off jet lag was basically impossible since our room had light tan curtains and it never gets dark there. The sun sets at 12am and rises at 3am, but it never actually looks like night. We attempted to make a curtain that would actually block the light, but it didn't help much. The room was small but nice, the only other downside was the water. I described it as smelling like burning hair and old eggs. It was very hard for us to brush our teeth and shower in that. Evan said he tried to keep soap on him in the shower at all times so he wouldn't have to smell it as much! We were mainly just happy we had hot water.

Our attempt at blocking the light

The next day we decided we wanted to see puffins, so we looked online for the nearest place we could go. I found a place online that is a bird observatory so Evan figured out how to get there and we were off. We had to take the city bus to Keflavik then take another city bus to Gardur, but we ended up getting on the wrong bus and going back to Keflevik airport. So when we got to the airport we asked the tourist info desk for help and the woman told us we should take an airport shuttle to Keflavik then take the 5:15 city bus to Gardur, then take the airport shuttle back to Hafnafjordur at the end of the day. It was only about 3:00, so we decided we would just walk to the bird observatory!

It was a beautiful walk, the road was surrounded with wildflowers the entire way, and we walked by the ocean for a while. There were huge pastures with dozens of horses, and when we walked up to their fence they all walked over to us. Both of us just couldnt believe the flowers there, they just sprout up in the rocks everywhere!

These flowers were in all of the pots along the streets in Gardur

The weirdest thing happened when we were walking, birds kept attacking us! At first there was a seagull that was circling above us and kept diving down at us. We thought it was a little scary but mostly funny, because he wasn't very close to hitting us. Later on there were these swallows that were seriously trying to get us! They got within a foot of our heads! Evan was yelling to duck and run! We were freaked out but laughing the entire time because we felt like we were reenacting the movie The Birds.

One of the gulls diving at us

When we finally got to the coast we found no cliffs and no puffins, which we had a bad feeling would happen. We did find a beautiful white sandy beach on the ocean where plenty of ducks and other birds live. Not finding puffins was a bummer, but overall we had a great time and saw a lot of the countryside. After sitting and walking around the beach for a while we took a city bus back to Keflavik and ate dinner at a place called Panda. We decided to try Icelandic style Chinese food- it was delicious!

The beach and bird observatory

After dinner we walked to the airport and took a shuttle back to Hafnafjordur and got home around midnight. We had to get up around 4:30am the next day to get on a bus back to the airport at 5:30am. The flight to Amsterdam went smoothly, which I will write about soon! Amsterdam has been amazing so far. Will write again soon, sorry about the massive post!