Finally here

Thursday afternoon

I sat down in our hotel room here at the Black Pearl this afternoon to start to write and thought to myself "this hotel has the most uncomfortable seating I've ever experienced". But then I remembered a hotel in Cleveland that far surpassed this one. Which isn't to say these chairs aren't bad. They look like chairs, but they're not, really. I think they're really upholstered end tables with backs and arms.

Not a chair, June 2016

Aside from that, the room is great - it's actually a one bedroom apartment with a full galley kitchen. Very neat, very clean, Scandanavian modern.

The trip was long. I wrote about the car ride to the airport. We then sat on the taxiway for a while because Obama was in New York yesterday and screwed up ground traffic at JFK. We also sat on the taxiway after landing here because the plane parked at our gate left the gate way late. Then we had to wait about 45 minutes for our luggage. But it was smooth sailing after that - we got to the hotel about 9:30, and they let us right into our room.

After unpacking a bit (actually, we just opened our suitcases) we went out to look for breakfast and see some of the city. We had eggs and pancakes in The Laudromat, which is not a laundromat. Hit the spot!

The main drag here in the old city is restaurants, gift shops, outdoor clothing shops, and shops that sell those really cute Icelandic sweaters. They're cute, but the wool is as smooth as sandpaper. At the top of the hill is Hallgrimskirkja(1), which probably is the most photographed site in the city. I took the obligatory pictures, but they're nothing special.

Hallgrimskirkja, June 2016

Sally returned to the room to rest, and I went the other way from our hotel to the Old Harbor area. Which is a real working harbor, with boatyards doing repairs and restorations, whale-watching expeditions embarking, and lots of cute restaurants and gift shops for the tourists.

The elf thinks he's funny, June 2016

 

(Later that evening ... ) We just got back from dinner a few minutes ago, and it's still light outside. Its about as bright as it was at noon. It's 11:15pm.

(5:30am ...) The fancy, electronic, programmable lights in our bedroom just came on. Despite me getting up and turning them off about ten times, they reignite in about 30 seconds. Glad we didn't obsess about getting the blackout drapes sealed tight.

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(1) Icelandic, being a Germanic language, uses compound words that are hard for foreigners to interpret until you catch on. In this case "kirkja" means "church", and this one is named after a clergyman named Hallgrimmer Peturrson(2).

(2) "Peturrson", of course means he's Peter's son. But you'll note the honor of the church naming uses his first name. That's because Icelanders are known by their first names; the second name is not carried across generations but merely separates (a little) the many Hallgrimmers. The phone book (when there was one) was sorted by first name.

 

Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans