Wandergliding: Iceland's National Museum on St. Paddy's Day

As I’m writing this, catching up on the past few days, I’m 30,000 feet above the Atlantic, halfway between England and Iceland, looking down on a mostly complete layer of cumulus cloud 20,000 feet below with specs of ice visible on the water....sweet. I began the day with a bit of blog writing in the hostel and then bid farewell to Silke as she was off to the local airport in Reykjavik for her flight to Greenland. As I was clicking away on my keyboard, in walked a cute blonde woman (yet another?!?). It was obvious that she had just arrived and knowing that one often feels a bit confused and/or overwhelmed when arriving in a new place, I said hello. She reciprocated the greeting then questioned whether I worked in the hostel. After setting her straight, I found out that Sissy (that’s her nickname, real name is Franziska) is originally from Germany but is currently living in Vancouver! She works as an “imagineer”, creating visual concepts for primarily international clients. The project she’s working on right now is for an aquatic playground, that can be packed up in the winter, for a ski resort in Korea. We chatted for an hour or two before deciding to venture out to the national museum. This after I mistakenly got Sissy all excited about going to see a more "interesting" museum. I mentioned in a previous posting about flipping through a book called "50 Crazy Things To Do in Iceland". Well one was "Donate your Penis"...I had to read on. Turns out that there's a phallological museum in Iceland but unfortunately it's on the other side of Iceland...sorry Sissy. We did have a good giggle about it though...

We grabbed a bite to eat at a bakery and then walked about 15 minutes to the museum, which was located right by the University of Iceland. One bonus was that it was free admission on Wednesdays. It wasn’t an overly large museum, two floors, and a large portion of it was religious artifacts from times gone past. In 1000 AD, Iceland collectively decided to adopt Christianity (not sure exactly how that works.."Okay everyone, believe in Jesus now!"). The best part of the museum was a hands-on section where you could try on some different costumes. I donned a proper Viking helmet complete with chain mail and held a sword and shield for a few pics. Sissy took it a bit further and put on a woman’s riding outfit from the 1800’s and then convinced me we needed to take a picture somewhere else in the museum with a more suitable background. It was a dark blue, velvety type overcoat/dress but it was the tall, round, rigid hat with a cloak that made it unusual. Wandering around the main area of the museum with this costume produced more than one funny look from other museum goers. We did manage to get a few sweet shots and I even had to have a go with the hat!

Some artifacts:

Dave the Viking:

Sissy getting spooky:

My turn:

Sissy acting out Hansel & Gretel:

Somehow this was museum worthy...not sure if I'd eat it:

We headed back to the hostel as Sissy’s jet lag was kicking in. We picked up a few groceries and planned on a pesto pasta dinner. We opted to not go for this for dinner:

She napped for over 2 hours as I organized some pictures on my computer, did a little blog work and relaxed a bit. Being that it was St. Paddy’s day, we decided to head out after dinner to see how Icelanders celebrated this event (Iceland is only one letter away from Ireland). We were looking for the Dubliner pub I had seen earlier but we ended up in a different watering hole (I don’t think I even looked at the name) as we liked the music that two guitarists were producing. We luckily found a table right in front of them and grabbed a couple of cheap Kilkennys (only 450 krona versus the usual 8-900 on other nights). A couple of Icelandic women, Osk and Kolla, asked whether they could share our table...of course! They were in their mid-20s I figured and quite friendly. They knew one of the guitarists and were able to give us some good insight into life in Iceland. We stayed until closing time and then as we began walking home, we made plans to meet up with them the next night.

Cheers!