That night, an Icelandic friend of mine, Thorunn, picked me up from Reykjavik with her car and her friend to take me around a bit. Noticed that everybody is paying by credit card for even the smallest little things. After eating out and watching Tokyo Drift in the movies (cinema entry kr800, price of 2006, good thing in Iceland they don't dub, all movies play in English with Icelandic subtitles), they took me to Seltjarnarnes, a town on the edge of the Reykjavik peninsula.
The lighthouse in Seltjarnarnes. We couldn't walk further as around that period birds lay their eggs on the pathway. The photograph was taken at 1:16am, the midnight sun giving us a bit of twilight and that was as dark as it could get! Seltjarnarnes is the smallest Icelandic township by land but amazingly it became the world's first town where every citizen had access to fiber optics in 2007!
Reykjavik has a beach! Oh yes! It's the Nautholsvik geothermal beach, south of the city. We drove there just a bit before 2am and witnessed beautiful clouds and colors when the sun was preparing to come out again, still daylight though. Just because its geothermal it doesn't mean the water is really warm, average temperatures are between 3°- 5°C in the winter and 12°- 15°C in the summer. So I couldn't believe it when I saw a completely naked guy bathing there, while I was freezing!
Thorunn and her family would host me for a few days, even being late at night we went to the camping, packed everything and we drove to Hveragerdi, a town 45km east of Reykjavik, on route 1 (ring road). We made a stop at a house at some point and Thorunn told me it was the residence of the President of Iceland. When they were kids they would drop by his house to ask him all kinds of questions (!!). She recalls that Bill Clinton had visited once and he was going around without bodyguards (?!). Iceland has one of the lowest criminal rates, for example in the year 2006 (which I visited) there were no murders at all! She tells me the jail in Iceland is like a proper hotel, its actually so good that some of the inmates who are foreigners don't want to leave!
My ice cream, although the weather was very cold (for me at least). Bits of snickers and other chocolate gave it a nice flavor. Icelanders seem to eat ice cream all year round.
*All photos taken with a Canon Powershot S1 IS, 3.2 megapixels, my 1st digital camera.
Additional information
GPS coordinates for places in this post, click on them to be redirected to the exact point in google maps. Click on the names to be redirected to their official websites (if applicable). Seltjarnarnes lighthouse: 64°09'53.0"N 22°01'18.2"W
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