Reykjavík to Oslo

Well, we certainly haven’t been holding up our end of the blog this time! We got another chance at the light-show on the church on Sunday night, mostly viewed from the comfort of Café Loki’s upstairs dining room.  The view was somewhat obscured by the rain and snow hitting the windows, but after our dessert of the best skyr in Iceland, we got a few more pics, taken at a different part of the program.

On Monday, we went to the Settlement Exhibit, an underground museum built around the oldest remnants of the Reykjavík farm. The actual name of the exhibit is “871 +/- 2”, after the year the farm was established. Icelandic museums are usually extremely well-conceived, and this one was no exception. Informative signage combined with multi-media displays give a very complete experience. Sheila’s favorite was the map of the complex that was a 2x4-meter touchscreen. You put your palm over a caption for greater detail.  Or maybe the “how to build a longhouse” one, where tracing your finger through a circle maze on a table changed the viewing-angle and time-frame of architectural drawings on a screen on the wall.
Then we went to a tiny studio where 3 guys have started a business making bow-ties, called Nek by Nek.  Gudjon met us there, and, since they had sold out of all their ties at Christmas, made one on the spot in about 45 minutes. The three of them work very much on a “when I feel like it” basis, and the shop is only actually open for a few hours on Thursday evenings.

We’re still getting used to the time change, and our flight to Oslo required that we be at the airport at 5.30 in the morning, so we went home and took a nap.  The mascot of Erik the Red Guesthouse, Raggi, decided he wanted a nap as well, and popped in through our open window.

When we went out for dinner (Café Loki, again!! The meat soup is so good, and that rye bread that I’ve made a few times, and of course the skyr…), we commented on the unusually warm temps….no wind at all, and snowing lightly.  Unfortunately, when we got up at 3 so as to be waiting outside for the FlyBus, conditions had changed a bit.  Snowing hard and blow-you-over gusty winds. Didn’t give us much confidence in an on-time flight…or in the whole idea of flying, for that matter.
Edda had packed us a lovely breakfast—juice, yogurt and muesli, ham and cheese on coarse rye, and our favorite, smoked lamb (hangikjöt) with brie and pears on a lighter rye. We had plenty of time to eat it while we waited for the winds to die down.  The pilot managed to find a period of calm, so the take-off wasn’t too bad, and we got to Oslo almost on time.  Only to find ourselves trapped by two sets of locked doors at the top of the jetway….it was a good 15 minutes of us all standing in basically a glass box, unable to actually contact anyone to open the doors.  This did NOT improve our rather low opinion of Gardemoen airport…  We’re looking forward to the more relaxed pace of train travel tomorrow.