May 10, 2016: Arriving in Iceland

We all left Denver on Monday May 9th for Iceland. Two students left around noon and flew to New York and then onto Keflavik. The other 5 students and myself flew directly from Denver to Keflavik.

Frozen lakes in Canada just before reaching the Hudson Bay

Luckily, the planes arrived within 10 minutes of each other at 7am. Iceland is 6 hours earlier than Denver so it felt like 1am. We all passed through customs quickly and found all of our luggage. The car company met us at the airport and while I filled out rental paperwork, the students grabbed coffee.

I had planned on grabbing breakfast for everyone at a local grocery store in Keflavik but it didn't open until 11am. Instead we all got a pastry from a local bakery.

 We drove to Reykjavik (40 miles away) and headed to the National Museum of Iceland. This is a wonderful museum for a good overview of Icelandic history from the 9th century to present. It has some amazing artifacts including the small statue of Thor (approximately 3 inches tall holding a hammer) and numerous brooches to hold female viking cloak together (approximately 5 inches in length and typically of some copper alloy). These artifacts were from the 11th century and found in burial sites.
Every student has an individual topic they are researching for this class and I asked that they try and find a connection between their topic and the history of Iceland. Every student was able to find some connection given the diverse coverage of Icelandic history at the museum.

In the museum is a typically household bathstofa where the family worked, eat and slept. This particular bathstofa was lived in up until the last 1940's. It only measures approximately 10 feet by 12 feet.








While we finished up the museum, a few students grabbed another coffee at the coffee shop in the museum. You will notice one student is already taking a nap.

After the museum we headed to Perlan (The Pearl). It is a huge water storage facility on a hill overlooking downtown Reykravik. It can hold over 5 million gallons of hot water and has an observation deck overlooking the city and a nice cafeteria.
We all had lunch of soup and salad while overlooking the city.

Again, another student takes a nap while waiting to get into the van.

We drove to our youth hostel where we will stay for the next three evenings.

 At this point, I took some of the students on a walking tour of Reykjavik. This included viewing the huge relief map of Iceland in the city hall.



We walked up Laugavegur (the old wash street now the main shopping street) and then over to the harbor to walk back towards the youth hostel.

This sculpture is titled 'Sun Voyage' and was installed in 1986.

We walked to Harpa, the concert hall and conference center on the harbor. It opened in 2011 and has wonderful glass windows. Again, the students took a short nap.

When we left Harpa, we saw a reproduction of a viking ship in the harbor.

The plans for this evening include grabbing a quick dinner (ice cream and hot dogs seem to be very popular), maybe watching the first evening of Eurovision and turning in early to catch up on sleep.