Last day in Iceland

Heading off the aiport this morning, London bound with Amanda! Yesterday was another packed active day seeing the Geysir, Gullfoss waterfall and stopping near the Silfra Rift again to see another view point of where the tectonic plates separated. We have been getting a lot of exercise on this trip so far which is probably good because we have been having a massive crepe every night after dinner (even though the crepe is big enough to be it's own dinner), we randomly started this thing where one person will start running and we will all join in and race to wherever we are going and we also love climbing everything in this city, whether it be tectonic plate boulders or cliff ledges.

Here's Krysta writing some postcards in KEX.

Just taking a look at Asia from North America

-A

Caving and Silfra Rift

These were a few pictures from yesterday I didn't put up because we took them later when we were heading to "second dinner." We have a thing where we like to go to dinner twice here in Iceland. I jumped so high I cleared Amanda. This picture was completely coincidental and we were quite proud of it.

This was the amazing crepe I ate at second dinner with hot fudge frozen strawberries and fresh banana (so far London and Iceland crepes have surpassed the Parisian crepes I've eaten)

Today on the way to the cave adventure we stopped in the middle of nowhere on the side of the road where they had these huge drying racks with millions of fish, it smelt amazing....ha ha. It was pretty cool because apparently they send the fish heads to Nigeria and then there they grind them into fine powder and use it for soups.

This was the caving adventure we went on...I already forgot the name of the lava cave we went to but it was really fun. 2000 years ago the volcanic eruption happened and there was an air bubble that created tubes and when the lava flowed over it this formed (something close to that anyways). At the end of this cave we also saw a dead sheep that has been anazlyzed and has been there for 200 years.

Here in Iceland they believe in hidden people-or trolls or fairies-there were a few names for them we heard, I'm not sure what the exact name is. The story in summary is basically Adam and Eve had 4 children and God decided to come visit so he could see the children. This caused Eve to get all nervous because the kids were covered in dirt and grass from playing so she told them to go wash off in the river. When God showed up, Eve noticed that two of the children were just playing  in the river but were not clean so Adam went out and told them to hide behind a rock. They then told God that they only have two children. The other two children became the hidden children and people to this day still believe that hidden people live in rocks. This makes for very twisty roads in Iceland because anytime there is a rock in the middle of construction they have to call in people to talk to the rocks to make sure no hidden people are in them. If they determine that they are they have to make the roads around the rocks. This was lunch break when Sean decided to show us how well he could jump...but ended up looking like he was one of the mysterious fairies. 

Then we headed off to the Silfra Rift where the two tectonic plates of North America and Asia separated. To prepare for the 2-4 degrees celcius water we got suited with a teddy bear suit, which is a sleeping bag with arms and legs and then covered in a dry suit. The only thing that gets wet are your hands and head, which are only covered in wet suit material. By the end your hands are freezing! But it was worth it. I also made a werid movement in the water at one point and broke my dry suit seal so I got a bit of a leak and that definitely made my body a bit cold. The visibility was amazing and Krysta captured some great videos on her GoPro for us. The water is apparently so clean that it is comparable to bottled water so we gulped it up and I don't know if it was just the coldness of it or what but it tasted amazing and so fresh. I even filled up my water bottle with it after...so I will let you know if anything happens to me in the next few days ;)

 

This is my favorite picture from the whole trip, the snorkel selfie haha

This is the harbour in Reyjkavik that we walked by later that night.

-A

Blue Lagoon

We have been awake for 36 hours now and had a pretty packed full first day. We headed straight from the airport to the Blue Lagoon, which was probably the best decision ever because it is so refreshing after a long flight. A lot of people say it is too touristy and not worth it but we really enjoyed it and spent about 3 hours just bathing in it. At first we were worried about getting our hair wet because a lot of forums we had been reading and even the Blue Lagoon website said your hair gets covered in silica and makes it extremely stringy and destroyed, but we just lathered our hair with conditioner, left it in and put it in a bun. After probably 8 minutes of being in the pool we couldn't control our excitement and basically had dunked 90% of our hair in the water so we just gave up on that and enjoyed the rest of the time dunking our hair. Maybe it was the leave in conidtioner but none of us feel like we have dry hair, so I would say go for it! We also enjoyed the silica mud masks that are supposed to make your skin extremely smooth...I don't know if we felt any benefit but it was still fun!

Trying to Re-inact the ad

Use these rocks on the side for a nice foot scrub, we basically gave ourselves a free spa treatment

Make sure to take a little walk around the Blue Lagoon too before you get on the bus because there are some nice little walking paths.

We spent the rest of the day getting settled into our hostel, KEX hostel and then went out exploring the town. Amanda and I went to a restaurant and got burgers since we wanted a massive hardy meal from not eating all day...one word of advice, if you order burgers here and you are from Canada make you that you specify that you want it well done...I bit into my burger and it was bleeding, so we had to send it back and ask for it to be fully cooked (the new ones still were slightly pink so we just ate around it). We will probably get traveller's diarrhea come tomorrow but good thing we are pharmacy students with all of our drugs we packed!

Tomorrow we head off to snorkel and go caving so hopefully we can get some rest tonight but our hostel has live jazz playing tonight so that's probably unlikely.

-A

Reykja...what?

Today 4 classmates and I are heading to Reykjavík! I have been waiting for this day for 6 months now and it is finally here! It has taken me the full 6 months to be able to spell this city correctly :). This year Iceland Air opened a direct flight from Edmonton to Iceland to bring tourists in on their layovers to Europe, which is great for me because it made my flight to Europe super cheap AND now I get to visit a cool new country. 

This is the beginning of our month long trip for our pharmacy course in Italy.

This is Amanda and I with our sexy double backpack look. We definitely overpacked.

Sean and Krysta ready to go, waiting for Amanda and I to pick up the pace.

Amanda flashing her Krona...she is going to get robbed

-A