Sauntering Vaguely Downward

With apologies for jumping back in time to before the Harpa concert, I went to meet my travelling companions at their hotel around mid-day. From there, we walked up the Sculpture and Shore trail to the departure pier of the ferry to Videy Island, which is a three-minute journey from that particular bit of Reykjavik coastline.

Videy Island is home to artworks and ruins, as well as hosting Yoko Ono's "Imagine Peace" cylinder. It is lit from October to December, between John Lennon's birth and death, and for a few days in spring. The island is a wonderful place to walk and just admire the scenery, particularly Snaefellsnes peninsula, on a clear sunny day. We were lucky enough to have one of those during our trip on a Sunday, as the ferry doesn't run except in good weather on fine weekend afternoons in winter.

There are a lot of photos from the shore walk and the ferry trip below the cut. It took me some time to curate them, which is why this entry is appearing after the one about the concert at the Harpa.



Viðeyjarstofa House on Videy, viewed from the opposing shore.

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We grabbed a hot chocolate from the visitor centre before hopping on the ferry back to Reykjavik. So to recap, on International Women's Day, we:

• spent the entire day with other women
• took a ferry ride to see a work of art by a famous woman
• drank one of the best hot chocolates ever made by anyone, but in this specific instance, by a woman
• put vodka in the hot chocolate on the ferry ride back, because we could, and if you are judging us, we don't care
• saw a chamber music concert with a majority-woman quartet, that featured the premiere of a piece by a woman composer
• ate fish tacos (fnaaar)
• patronised a bar run by women

I did post to my journal about the penis museum, which counteracts these points somewhat, but otoh all the penises have been detached from their dead owners, soaked in formaldehyde, and subjected to ruthless public scrutiny. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Post-penis museum, we went to do a bit of shopping at the Kolaportið flea market. This was a curious mixture of overpriced tourist gubbins, authentic junk, local produce, jewelry, and genuine Icelandic jumpers (hard to find amongst the tourist gubbins). One of my companions and I bought jumpers for our kids, as well as acquiring baked goods and cheap, pretty hand-crafted jewelry.

Tuckered out after our exertions, I toddled back to my hotel for a luxurious mid-afternoon zizz, a rare pleasure. Eventually I levered myself out of my pit to get ready to go to the Blue Lagoon. I ambled down the road to my companions’ hotel and we had a drink (beer for me, mimosas for them) in the lobby before the bus arrived.


We spent the bus ride goggling out the windows at the golden hour prior to sunset.



Thanks to slemslempike’s tip, I hired a swimming costume, which cost me all of £5 as opposed to the £40 buying a new one would have done, assuming I could even find one in March in the shops in Reykjavik, which I couldn’t.

We gathered our slippers and robes and headed inside to shower off and change. The showering-off is taken very seriously. You must strip off completely and scrub down, and put conditioner in your hair and leave it there to try to prevent it from turning to straw (top tip: it doesn’t work). Only then may you don your swimsuit and head into the lagoon waters.

A brief history: the Blue Lagoon is not a natural geothermal spa. It’s formed from the weirdly luminescent effluent of the nearby geothermal power plant. A plant worker who suffered from psoriasis was the first to discover the healing qualities of the supersaturated alkaline waters, and the first iteration of the Blue Lagoon was born, a casual affair that was neither temperature or depth-controlled, and was in fact rather dangerous. In the intervening decades, it has morphed into the much safer and more formalised tourist hot-spot that it is now, and has also grown considerably since the plant continues to operate (and provide much of Reykjavik’s power).

We had two face masks - I went with the standard mineral exfoliation, followed by the algae mask, which was very cool and soothing - and a couple of drinks. The first was the girliest option on the menu, strawberry sparkling wine, and the second, a skyr smoothie. We swam lazily about in the sparsely populated lagoon, easily avoiding Facetiming strangers. Half an hour before the lagoon shut, the one companion who’d brought a waterproof case for her camera dashed quickly back in to the lockers and retrieved it to snap a few photos.These are below and behind the cut.


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After a long, soapy shower, my skin felt amazing and my muscles pleasantly achy from all the walking and swimming. My hair, on the other hand, was and remains a haystack, despite the mandated conditioner application. It was entirely worth it. I fell asleep on the bus home, and stumbled happily into bed, where I slept for nine solid hours.

I picked up a bottle of Reykjavik vodka in the airport, which cost a tenner and is probably fire water but so long as I drink it cold and with the neighbouring bottle of lemon soda, I'm sure it will be fine.

I used a lot of forms of transport today to get from home to a hotel in Reykjavik - see subject line. It took 11.5 hours in total. I could probably have made it shorter by not flying from Luton airport but it was so much cheaper than flying from my local regional airport that it was worth it. Or at least it will be once I’ve got this vodka lemon thing down my neck and shut my eyes.

Tomorrow I have to buy a swimming costume because this numpty forgot she was going to the Blue Lagoon tomorrow night with my mad American doctor friends whom I haven’t seen in 15 years. We meet tomorrow morning at the Iceland Phallological Museum, because where else do you start a tour of Reykjavik with a bunch of urologists?

Stories have a life of their own. They grow, just as children grow, and perhaps we forget the small thing they once were. But we nurture them just because we respected what was there in the beginning. -- Gudrid Thorbjornardottir

The Sea Road is a version of a saga of an Icelander, a visitor to the New World that the Norse called Vinland, centuries ago. It's beautifully told in the voice of a wise, honest and keen-sighted woman. She evokes both suffering under harsh conditions and the exceptional pleasure to be derived from moments of comfort and ease with equal facility. She makes the reader understand how "[t]he greatest blessing any human being could know is to be assured they will always have food and drink," reframing the renowned peripateticism of Scandinavian people with this practical aim in focus.

Gudrid is a solitary, contemplative girl. She loses her parents rather young - her mother to a fatal illness and her father to indifference. With the guidance of her foster mother, she develops the wariness required by a life spent primarily surrounded by men. The thread of her romantic narrative is inextricably entwined with that of her adventures, and she forges bonds with her partners in a way that a woman who has never been learned to make friends with other women her own age must do to keep away loneliness. (This part of the story spoke loudly to me.) She steps in to direct the journeying parties when necessary, a voice linked to but always independent of her husband's. The story never romanticises hardship brought on by climate, disease or violent human behaviour. Gudrid describes them all with pragmatism, sensitivity and humour.

anthrokeight recommended this novel to me because the narrative begins in Snaefellsnes, the mountain in whose shadow I spent most of my recent Icelandic holiday. Though Gudrid spends only her childhood there before moving to Greenland and eventually Norway, the sense of it - the toughness imbued by years of deprivation and the graft required to scrape a living from a largely barren land - never leaves the story. I found it gripping. It's my habit to highlight on my Kindle the passages that resonate with me. In this case, I found it difficult not to highlight the entire book.

( One more passage that reflects on both my journeys this year. )

Oh yes, it's Akranes. Again. When can I go back?
*tips hat to feylike for the post title*