Thursday, August 21, 2008
Iceland was awesome! Here a bunch of pictures from the trip. They include the Blue Lagoon, which is a semi-artificial hot spring (created by the runoff water from a geothermal plant), a whale-watching trip (Minke whales and white-beaked dolphins), Reykjavik itself, the Gulfoss waterfall, the hot springs and geysers at Geysir, and the Thingvellir National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site that's actually the intercontinental rift between the North American tectonic plate and the EurAsian plate (you can walk from Europe to America!).

Aside from the sights, we met really awesome people. On Friday Adam, a coworker of mine who tagged along, had arranged to meet with the team that creates a world-famous video game. He had told me he would contact them to see if we could meet up to which I had said "yeah, right, they're gonna drop everything and meet us just 'cause we're nice". Well, they did :) We had an atrociously expensive dinner and all hit it off so they invited us over to a house party, after which we all went out and got wasted. I do mean wasted, kids. I got home, somehow, at 6AM, after having consumed red wine, white wine, Brennivin schnapps, dessert wine, beers and rum and cokes. I had to stay in bed the whole next day (the giant jacuzzi in the hotel came in handy!), but it was fun nonetheless!

Few things to note about Iceland:
  • It's cold, even in the Summer
  • It's fucking gorgeous
  • People are very nice but don't always speak the best of English, even though they make it look like they do
  • Everything is atrociously expensive ($9 for a beer at a pub, $20 for a martini at a semi-swanky bar)
  • Their money is cute - looks like Monopoly money
  • Their food is nothing to write home about (whale steak? really just a gamey, chewy steak)
  • They drink - a lot
  • Their hot water smell like sulfur (comes straight up from the very deep underground where it's heated by lava)
  • Their cold water tastes like Evian



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