So, we have spent the last couple of days seeing sights in Reykjavik. Yesterday was planned, but today due to bad weather (it wasn’t as bad as yesterday but still wasn’t good) our glacier walk and Northern Lights tour was cancelled so we had another day in town.

Yesterday was cold, but rain had started to melt the snow turning it into slush and ice patches. The wind though made things very unpleasant, and around the waterfront it was so strong we were nearly blown over.

Anyway, we still had a wander, visiting the Settlement Museum – a small museum built to house an archaeological excavation of the first known house in Reykjavik (more interesting than it sounds), the Harpa – the concert hall/conference centre on the waterfront, and the main shopping street which led to the Hallgrimskirkja, a large modern church. Oh, and there was some shopping along the way.

Today we visited the National Gallery, the Culture House (a small museum which did a great job turning a wide range of odd objects from the bigger national collections into something coherent and interesting), went for a walk on the waterfront and then back to Harpa to thaw out, and along the way saw more of the various sculptures in the little parks in the city, including the Sun Voyager , a very modern representation of a Viking longboat beside the water.

It was still icy in places, slushy, and windy – just not as much as yesterday. John wasn’t in as much danger from lumps of snow falling from steep pitched roofs today though – he narrowly missed a couple of direct hits yesterday: I promised I would dig him out but he wasn’t impressed!

Reykjavik is full of tourists – lots of chinese in particular, but also brits and americans. It is an easy place to be an english-speaking tourist as nearly everyone here learns it – alongside icelandic and either danish or norwegian. None of the ‘kiddies can’t manage multiple languages’ stuff here!

Anyway, here’s a bit more of Reykjavik than we necessarily wanted to see: tomorrow we head to Akureryi in the north of Iceland. Fingers crossed our tours there proceed. There will certainly be snow❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️❄️