Jetlag is a bitch. My circadian clock is all screwed up. I didn’t adhere to the sage advice of sleeping on the plane when traveling from west to east, so that meant that I was wide awake until 8am Iceland time (or 1am Vancouver time). And only gave myself a brief 4 hours of zzzzz’s, so I wouldn’t sleep the day away.
I was down at the tourist centre by 1230pm and as want to do whenever I’m in a new European city, bought a 24 hour city card so I could go exploring on the cheap. The Reykjavik city card offers free entry or discounts to a bunch of cultural attractions and I planned to ambitiously power through as many as I could since I’ll be traveling outside of Reykjavik the next few days. Plus Reykjavik is not New York, London or Paris, so the cultural artifacts are not extensive and entirely possible to see in a given day.
I started off at the Einar Jonsson sculpture garden. This hidden gem is a stone’s throw from Hallgrímskirkja Church and located just behind the Einar Jonsson museum. Here you can rest and view bronze sculptures by Iceland’s first sculptor.
I headed back to the Hallgrímskirkja Church, fully intending on paying to go up to the church tower and take in the view of the city, however, the church was prepping for a funeral and because of that, both tower and church would be closed to the public in the afternoon. And as there was no one manning the admissions counter, I took the elevator when no one was looking and snuck up to the tower. For a quick look. It was nice having the entire tower, not to mention, the view to myself.
Next stop was the National Gallery of Iceland and the National Museum. Here are a few pieces I found interesting:
This technicolour pop opus by Parisian artist, Erró, is titled Topino 2001 and is an homage to Stanley Kubrick.
This murder of crows piece is giving me serious Game of Thrones vibes. Which is also filmed in Iceland. This is called There Was a Flight of Ideas from artist Hula Hakon.
After checking out the settlement exhibition and the culture house, I ended the day at Harpa Concert and Conference Centre. This building is beautiful and is a recipient of the prestigious Mies van der Rohe Award for Architecture.
If you’re a fan of Netflix’s sense8 (like I am), Harpa is featured in the episode where Riley is attending her father’s performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major (Op. 73). Yup – it’s the episode where this exquisite movement triggers all the Sensates’ memories of birth.
Also bonus fun fact: the sense8 wrap party was also held in the lobby of the concert hall.
I didn’t get a chance to join the tour, but Harpa is a must-see if ever you’re in Reykjavik. And I definitely recommend watching sense8. Both are totally awesome.
View more photos of my trip on my Flickr album.
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