The other day we hung out with Kristín and some of her friends again, and wandered around town. We ate at "American Style", a restaurant that mostly seems to serve hamburgers and sandwiches. As for being American style, it was alright except for two things. There was a "Healthy Style" something-or-other being advertised, and the back of the booths, where you sit down at, were really short compared to what I'm used to.



Here you can see the back of everyone's heads.



Later Snorri and I went to The Pearl, a museum. You can go to the top and walk around, but the weather was rainy and super windy. There were some statues of jazz players I think it was, outside the entrance.



It has a fake geyser outside. It went off about every five minutes.



Inside, we paid 1000kr (about 8 USD) or so, and got a little mp3 player and headphones. Snorri had Icelandic and I had English, and it was an audio tour through a museum exhibit about vikings and old Iceland. It basically talked about famous people and events.



You can check the photobucket account for a lot more pictures.



At some point we went to the grocery store, and they were having "American Days". As far as I know, they also have Danish days and... some other kind of days, but I think this picture sums it up nicely. They sold a lot of American products and had more America-related decorations than stores in America have.

On Friday we left to go camping for the weekend. Snorri's family rented a cabin about four hours away from their house. Along the way we stopped at a convenience store and I tried a sandwich made of chicken and eggs.





This is part of a bridge that used to be in the area. There was a huge flood from the nearby glacier and the bridge was destroyed. They lifted this out of the mess and put it here just as they found it.

The cabin was really nice. It had a porch, three bedrooms (one with bunk beds for Snorri and I), a bathroom, a television, dishes, a tea kettle, playing cards, a bookshelf with books in it... all sorts of things. On the wall by the bunk beds were small shelves that you could put glasses or a plate on, so I could reach over on the top bunk and put my glasses there, and then Snorri could put something on the same kind of table at his own level on the bottom bunk. The yard around the cabin had a sandbox, swings, and some play toys for children. There were other cabins in the area, and a lake.

There was a "village" within walking distance, at one point Snorri and I walked down to the convenience store and bought a couple things, so it wasn't too far away. We didn't do anything else in the village.



Höfn was featured in a Japanese television show, because at one point it was where the only Japanese person in Iceland lived, or something like that. Someone had been telling me that I should go there and find her and take a picture as proof, but we didn't go to that town.



"A visit to Iceland, a travel log from 1834". There are drawings in the book, and you can see differences in how Iceland was then compared to now. There's an English version too. This was found on the bookshelf in the cabin, and since we didn't take any books home with us, Snorri went to the library later and checked it out. They had the English version too but for some reason you weren't allowed to check it out and take it outside the library.



We went out to see the glacier. It was warmer than in the capital, even though we were right next to a lot of ice and water. It used to be that you could walk up the glacier from where we were, but by now a lot of it had melted so part of it was blocked off by water.



This is the path towards the glacier.







This is the glacier.

There was a building that was part gift shop and part museum. A movie was playing about the glacier, I assume, and there were equiptment from a British climbing team that had been found a bit over fifty years after the team had died on the glacier. There were pictures and explanations about different kinds of things.



These are the same kind of sweaters I bought at the flea market for 9500kr (about 76 USD). From what you could buy at the gift shop, the cheapest sweater in my size was either 12000kr($97) or 12500kr($101), I forget which. They went up to/past 20000kr ($160).



We went to this area, which is basically a bunch of ice floating in the water. A tourist guide said that two James Bond movies have been partially filmed there. There were some tourists going in a boat around the water, they all wore orange lifejackets. One employee would go ahead on the planned path to make sure there were no problems, then come back, and then the actual boat with the tourists would go. The boat was on wheels and so it simply drove into and out of the water, and parked in the parking lot a ways away. The tourists didn't even have to walk anywhere!







We went to the beach!



The sand is black because of volcanic activity. On the ride back home I noticed that from the car, if I saw water with the black sand, the water would look grey a lot of the time.



This is from the ride back home.



We stopped on the way back home and walked behind this waterfall. We changed into rain boots (except Snorri, who didn't have any) and walked up a sort of half stone, half mud path. The path directly behind the waterfall was mud. Then the path on the left side was mostly rocks, until a certain point where it turned into wooden steps, and then there was a wooden bridge.