After a late night of searching for the Northern Lights Mena and I woke up late and asked the hotel concierge a good place to eat breakfast.
“There is a place down the street that has a good brunch. It’s a very artsy type of place.”
Perfect!
We made our way to the restaurant. It was a dim cubbyhole of a restaurant that was so small I felt like were all sharing the same air. A mother and daughter were waiting in front of us. They were seated at a table with some other Icelanders. A table near the door opened up. The waitress hadn’t cleared off the table and didn’t look like she was going to do so.
“Can we sit there?” I asked. She nodded.
Okay, I thought to myself, then are you going to clear the table off?
It didn’t look like clearing the table was going to happen anytime soon so Mena and I just sat down. The waitress passed by several times and didn’t take any of the plates off our table. She took our order (bagel with Icelandic smoked lox, cream cheese, onion and tomato) and still didn’t clear our table off.
“If she puts our food on the table with other people’s dirty dishes I am just going to clean the table myself.” I said to Mena.
Fortunately our vapid waitress cleaned our table before she served our food.
(Note – in all the guidebooks they say that the people of Iceland are some of the nicest in the world. I think the truth is a little more nuanced. The men are really nice; the women seem to be stand-offish and even rude).
The food was good and fresh, but expensive. Two bagels with a scant amount of lox cost us over $30. I think I mentioned if before, but because of Iceland’s climate they have to import a lot of food and consequently lots of their food is expensive.
Afterwards Mena and I decided to take it easy and just walk around Reykjavik and see what the city had to offer. Walked through the streets – there is a noticeable preponderance of fashion and cold-gear clothing stores. Staked out some places we might want to eat at later in the day – large variety of eclectic eateries: Japanese, Nepalese, Chinese…etcetera. We saw a skate park completely covered in street graffiti. We walked through town (it didn’t take long) and then made a left and walked along an industrial highway back towards Hotel 101.
As we walked back I was again struck with how mystical it feels up in Iceland. It truly is hard to describe – it felt, to me, like I was in a movie setting (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) or from an Anthony Bourdain ‘No Reservations’ episode. It felt and looked different than any other place I’d ever been. We crossed over the highway and walked along the rocks lining the Norwegian Sea. The rocks were large and man-made and lined the ocean nicely and evenly so that it was easy to walk along the top of them (while Mena reprimanded me the whole time, ‘Get off there! You’ll twist your ankle!’). The water looked cold and clear and blue. It stretched as far as the eye could see until it met the base of large, blue and snow-capped mountains that stretched upwards until they kissed the sky.
The wind was beginning to blow as we walked back and tiny white caps formed in the sea – blue little waves with white tops paying homage to the great mountains in the background. We walked along in the cold talking and laughing and soaking in the scenery. We took pictures on a stainless steel Viking boat, in a huge construction boom and on a narrow pathway that led into the frigid waters. We walked to the main port in Reykjavik and looked at Icelandic Coast Guard boats and scientific vessels that scanned the ocean floor, all under the watchful eye of a guard.
Being Americans we naturally had to eat lunch at Subway before heading back to our hotel to figure out where to go next. We decided we’d attempt to walk to the Reykjavik lighthouse (Mena loves sailboats and light houses). We were led by my steady hand through the winding streets of Reykjavik and, of course, became completely lost. I’d made a wrong turn and brought us to the regional airport instead of the lighthouse. My bad!
It was starting to get really cold so we decided to head back towards the hotel. We took a different route that led us to a large partially frozen pond. It was lined on one side by a two lane road and on the other side by squat, colorful houses and a Parliamentarian-looking building. It reminded me of Trúc Bạch Lake Stephen and I saw in Vietnam. Trúc Bạch Lake was located just outside Hanoi and it felt empty and deserted. The Lake in Vietnam was covered in a flotsam of dead fish with glassy eyes and garbage. The lake in Reykjavik wasn’t covered in garbage but it had the same lonely, abandoned feeling. It was frozen but was covered with a light skimming of water. Rocks that people had thrown, ostensibly to see if they would break through, lay scattered along the top of the lake.
“I am going to try and walk along the surface.” I said to Mena.
She looked at me with a, if-you-even-think-of-doing-that-I-am-going-to-smack-you look and I stopped my little charade.
We walked along the lake taking pictures of the beautiful symmetry the reflection of the houses in the ice created. We saw ducks and swans swimming in the far corner where a steady stream of water had created a sanctuary for them to swim. The ice definitely didn’t look thick enough to walk across and I had, of course, been joking when I told Mena I wanted to walk along it – but wouldn’t you know as we got closer we saw three teenage boys walking along the surface. To add injury to insult one of them was wearing a SHORT SLEEVE SHIRT. Mind you, I was wearing two pairs of wool socks, tights, jeans, an undershirt, two long sleeved thermals, a jacket, a scarf, two gloves and ear warmers.
He stripped me of my masculinity J
We went back to the hotel and decided to head to the spa in the basement. We relaxed in the hot tub, in the natural steam room (which smelled faintly of eggs) and then relaxed in our room. For dinner we did some research and decided to go to Buddha Café because of all the great reviews it received. We couldn’t find it on Google Maps so we decided to head down the main street in Reykjavik to see what we could find.
We hadn’t walked 100 hundred yards when we fortuitously stumbled upon none other than the Buddha Café! It was a Japanese restaurant. Mena and I were voracious and we ordered soup, an appetizer and main courses. The soup was delicious and as we were waiting for our main course, a young waiter with a “Take It Easy!” tattoo on his forearm told us, in a deeply officious tone, that he was deeply sorry our entrees were taking longer than expected. He gave us a shrimp appetizer as penance.
When he walked away Mena and I looked at each other.
“We haven’t even been waiting that long.” I said.
She agreed.
The food was great and after we’d eaten our entrees the waiter came over again.
“Dessert is on the house because you had to wait so long for your entrée.”
Mena and I chuckled – if the Indian restaurant in Oval, London had the same mentality our whole mean would have been comped! We bumbled back to our hotel with heavy bellies and were soon asleep.
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