Hello Iceland!

Welcome to Iceland!

I can’t believe I’m here. Iceland has been at the top of my to-go list for years and I’m finally here.

The flight with Icelandair was fantastic, and although I wasn’t flying on their Hekla Aurora plane with the Northern lights in the interior of the cabin, (no matter how much I tweeted at them to make it so), I was a pretty happy air traveler. Oh, and Kingsman: The Secret Service is now my new favourite movie!

We landed at Keflavik airport at the break of dawn and as I was traveling via Flybus to Reykjavik, I was awestruck by the morning sky, the topography and scenery. The lava fields and just how green the country is had me stunned with its otherworldly beauty. Not too hard to do as jet lag was setting in.

After checking into my AirBnB on the west side of town, I walked the 10 minutes to the city centre aka “the 101” to get the lay of the land, in particular the two high streets, Laugavegurand and Skólavörðustígur.

The latter leads up to the magnificent Hallgrímskirkja Church. Or Minecraft church as my friend Mike calls it. As the gay pride week just took place a couple of weeks ago, a rainbow still adorned the street – the street leading straight up to the church. Got to love that!

Reykjavik feels like a quaint, seaside town, because it is. It’s a really easy city to navigate around and it’s chock-a-block filled with cafes, restaurants, tourist shops, clothing shops and grocers. I hit up the 10-11 grocery store to stock up on breakfast, lunch and dinner stuff, as Iceland is known to be on the expensive side – in terms of shopping, dining out, doing stuff. But even groceries are rather jaw-droppingly expensive. OK! I have a feeling I’ll be eating a lot of sandwiches for lunch and dinner.