Thursday was a travel day, focused on airplanes. We did go back to our traditional pattern of Asian for lunch, getting a surprisingly decent pair of curries at the Berlin Airport.
Icelandair turns out to be in Terminal C. Sadly, most of the good services are in Terminal A. If you wind up taking Icelandair out of Berlin, note that the food court with the decent options requires following a long maze of twisty little passages, but sufficient tenacity will be rewarded.
European exit rows work a lot better when you know in advance that you can't put anything under the seat in front of you, and realize that you need to grab everything you'll want before you sit down.
Reykjavik -- well, Kate and I have been debating it. I think it's kind of like Manhattan; hotel rooms are too small, and everything costs vastly too much. That's the bait-and-switch of flying Icelandair: the airfare is quite reasonable, but if you do a layover you will pay through the nose. (She argues that, in Manhattan, is is possible to find cheap food. Not so much here: even the Chinese restaurant is $30 for a dinner entree.)
Our hotel is the Alda, and on the one hand it's quite nice: new, well-appointed, clean and all that. OTOH, our room is a poster child for the word "cozy". The photo on their website is not a typical double room -- in fact, this is one of the most compact rooms I've ever stayed in. There's one small chair, and nothing even pretending to be a desk.
Really, the size is best exemplified by this photo of the shower. If that looks like two doors closed in the corner, you have it basically correct. You build the shower stall by opening both doors out to a 90-degree angle -- at which point it is now impossible to use the toilet. It works quite decently, but boy, they are maximizing their space usage to a degree I have rarely seen elsewhere.
Dinner Thursday night was at Kol, mainly on the grounds that the description from the concierge sounded good. And it is good -- but man, it's insanely expensive.
It's high-end, and slightly pretentious. We wound up just getting appetizers and drinks: my seafood bisque was fabulous -- rich and complex, if a tad salty -- but a smallish bowl ran something like $25. It was tasty enough for our anniversary dinner (yesterday was the 5th anniversary of our wedding, although not our marriage), but between jetlag and insane prices, I'm afraid that it wasn't quite what we might have wished.
Today (Friday) featured fairly sucktastic weather -- cool (low 40s, which I would expect from Iceland) and staggeringly windy (ditto) but also constantly drizzling (not surprising, but not expected per se). So we didn't wander as much of Reykjavik as I'd hoped, although we did get to at least see much of the core tourist district.
Note to self: my fedora blows off my head very easily, which probably explains why basically nobody on the streets of Reykjavik wears hats like that. But if I pull my windbreaker's hood over it, and tie it down, it looks entirely ridiculous, but actually works quite nicely.
Once we were sufficiently cold and wet, we made a beeline for the National Museum of Iceland, which proved to be the main focus of the day: we spent almost three hours there, and could have spent more.
On the one hand, this museum is run much more "on rails" than most. The core of the museum is two floors, and it is all arranged roughly chronologically. You start at the front of the first floor, which talks about the initial discovery and colonization of Iceland in the 9th century. The next section talks about the Christianization of the island, then the various political evolutions. You get to the far end of the first floor around 1400 AD, go up the stairs, and come back via the second floor, ending with independence (via a truly magnificent bit of legal rules-hacking, in which Iceland argued that they had made a personal contract with the King of Denmark, and since it was no longer a monarchy they were no longer bound to it) at the beginning of the 20th century, and then a mad rush at the end of "here's all of the 20th century stuff that you already know" in a fairly concise display.
But for all that, it doesn't feel like walking through an IKEA store: it's chronological from one end to the other, but each floor is several exhibits wide, and laid out very organically, so you can choose the order in which you explore everything. And there are touchscreens every now and then, with in-depth history lessons that provide the grounding in political and social history of the things you are looking at; Kate and I stopped at pretty much all of these, and enjoyed listening to the lessons.
It's a really fun museum: a very well-thought-though lesson in Icelandic history and culture from the very beginning up to the modern day. If you ever find yourself in town, I strongly recommend a visit.
Finally, dinner tonight was at the Old Iceland Restaurant. No, they're not trying to recreate authentic historical dishes -- the food is really quite modern and chic. But far more than Kol, they are focused on specifically Icelandic food.
This was the meal that I'm going to treat as our anniversary dinner: it was very expensive, but not as eye-wateringly so as Kol, and felt more like a perfectly-assembled meal. It being Iceland, I had the lamb, and Kate the cod; each was fabulously constructed. The lamb was heavily seasoned, with a perfect crust on top of lamb that was rarer than I would ever make at home, but good enough to warrant that, served with a fabulous beetroot sauce (and mind, I don't like beets) and roasted potatoes. Kate and I both share the religion of "save the best for last" when it comes to good food, and I found it downright difficult to figure out which bit was best.
We followed that up with a lovely thin brownie, swimming in butterscotch, with a bit of muesli and fruit and a scoop of vanilla ice cream -- absolutely heavenly.
Old Iceland doesn't take reservations, and has absolutely zero space for waiting, so you should prepare to put your name in and make yourself scarce for 30-60 minutes. But it is absolutely out-of-the-world -- my single highest dinner recommendation from this trip.
And tomorrow, we come home. Fingers crossed, that hopefully won't be interesting enough to write about...
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
