An Artist Lecturer's account of Iceland

So it's the last day (we're leaving the apartment at 5.30am tomorrow) and it has rained all day which has made for a gloomy last day feel. Also half the things we intended to do ended up being closed after we walked there in the rain (it seems nothing opens before 11am at the earliest here anyway especially on Sundays)...
Hey-ho it has still been a good day and we have still seen loads and soaked up our last bit of the wonderfull Reykjavik...

We stumbled across this place after finding that the Viking Maritime museum doesn't open until 1 (we got there at 11!). Not sure of what it actually was or if it is still running but it had the Iceland Academy of the Arts logo on it and these interesting images on the windows...

No-one at the academy mentioned it and it is not on the art galleries map but the images were interesting so I will have to research when I get home...

Next we headed over to the Settlement exhibition/museum in the hope that that was open earlier than 1pm, and indeed it was...

The exhibition was built around the discovery of an early settlement long house, which you can see in the photograph above. Around the exhibition walls many articfacts discovered on the site were shown in plastic casing with explainations to what uses they would have had during early settlement, there where loads of information boards and several digital screens showing ghostly animated vikings...

It struck me early on that this exhibition used loads of new technology such as digital screens, projections and interactive video playback methods to make it much more engaging for all age groups. I was particularly impressed with the interactive projected model of what each area of the longhouse would have been used for as well as touch areas that provided more information on; the kinds of food they ate, how they travelled, what clothes they wore and how mant of them could have lived there.

There was also a section visable from the street level through a glass window casing which looked fantastic from underneath whilst it was raining...

From the Settlement exhibition we headed back to dry off briefly, grab the laundry and head to the Laundromat Cafe for one of their amazing smoothies and a couple of hours wait for Taz's washing to be done.

Now we're all packed up ready for our early departure back to London Gatwick for lunchtime and ready for Taz to continue her travels around London for 3 days on an art student field trip before finally heading back to sunny brummy (to sleep)!

This is our last post, we hope you have enjoyed reading our travel blog and perhaps learned something about the wonders of Iceland, to leave you with one final note, we would recommend to anyone to visit this fantastic place and to complete your stay, why not stay with Apartment K they were wonderful in everyway (and no they didn't pay to say that).

We headed out today to have a whirl at the public transport and take a bus...

...across town to Virka, apparently one of Europes biggest fabric shops selling a huge variety of fabrics for quilting.....

and we met this charming dog statue I had to photograph and upload...

I was interested in going to Virka to see what wide variety of textiles the students could actually access to support them in making textile based artworks, I was pleasantly suprised, it did have a huge variety-much more than I expected. As Alma from the academy had informed me about how remote the country was I was interested to know to what extent the students art materials would have to be imported and how this could impact on their development. Off the main street in the Old part of the city there was an extensive art materials shop (not cheap mind you) but I picked textiles as this is one of my interests and something I thought could be harder to source (as most of the clothing production here seems to be wool jumpers).

We then took a really long walk......

over to the Pearl...

where we not only met this charming fella...

But took a walk around the balcony outside the Pearl having a fantastic 360 degree view of the city and the mountains surrounding. The Pearl is Reykjaviks geothermal water storage facility. They have 5 water towers (one of which now houses the Saga museum) and in the centre they have built a glass dome which houses a viewing platform and a revolving restaurant (which we couldn't afford).

Then we continued walking back to the apartment for a well deserved rest and saw this fantastic pink car along the way,

We were hoping to head out on a Northern Lights Hunt via boat from the old harbour but yet again they have cancelled due to bad weather conditions (ie too windy or too cloudy) so that was our 4th attempt and last chance. So maybe we will get lucky staring from the balcony tonight but maybe not

So today we hopped back on the netbus at 8am for the Southern Iceland Tour.

In the morning we visited Eyjafjallajökull (don't ask me how to say that) the volcano which caused all the flight chaos in 2010 when it erupted, and then we went onto the waterfall Skogafoss...

then we went to the tongue of the glacier Solheimajökull...

In the afternoon we drove to the black beach Reynishverfi with its basaltculums...

Amazingly the sand was jet black and to add to the weirdness of the scene it was covered in pristine white snow, very surreal...

Have you ever seen a black and white snow/sand angel???

Once again the Blue man had to jump in there and grab the spotlight...

and finally on the way back we saw the Seljalandsfos waterfall...

You could walk behind the waterfall if the weather was warm enough but from the look of the steps/ice sculpture I'm guessing it wasn't warm enough...

However by this point it was -4c and we didn't stay out of the van for too long.

This day has been most like what I expected of Iceland...mostly because we saw alot of ice but also because it snowed alot and then the sun kept coming out and the sky would turn blue and it was just amazing.

Tomorrow we visit, 'the Pearl'. You will have to check back tomorrow to find out what that is...

After meeting Alma and the other staff at the Iceland Arts Academy they gave me a list of galleries they recommeneded I visited before I return home. This included ASI Art Museum...


Which had an interesting exhibition showing the paintings of two sisters that always paint themselves into their paintings and often paint themselves painting one of their other paintings in a painting. Yes thats a lot of painting! But what i mean is that they play with the picture plane to allow the viewer to see some of their other works in progress within many of their paintings. They use beautiful bright colours that contract and pop really making elements of the subject matter stand out, another interesting thing I noticed was that one of the women usually paints herself with vibrant red hair which infact in real life is darkbrown.

Next was the i8 gallery near the old harbour...

Then onto the Living Art Museum, which is a non-profit artist run institution that puts on, "progressive exhibitions" whilst also archiving the activities of the artists involved.

We went to the National Gallery of Iceland but they wouldn't let us take a camera in so I wont put any photos up from there. We did also pop into Spark Design Space which was the gallery/shop space of a fantastic design collective. We weren't really supposed to take photos in here either but I sneakly got this one because I really liked the drawing in the drawer...

What I love about Reykjavik though is that you dont have to even go into an art gallery to see art...

...even the blue man got involved...

In other news...the weather here is so changeable, it snowed and settled and then melted and disappeared 3 times today! (I'm talking proper snow as well none of that feeble English rubbish).

Yesterday we headed out of Reykjavic on the grand golden circle tour with netbus. We were picked up from our apartment at 8am and after collecting other avid explorers/tourists we headed out of the city on a mini bus watching the landscape change as we went. The further from the city we got the more snow capped mountains we saw, rolling planes of rock, moss and snow and many of the Icelandic horses.

Which interestingly enough have five gaits (walks/runs) one of which is the tölt a run that is so smooth that in contests the jockey rides holding a glass of beer or champagne which has not spilt a drop by the end of the race.

We were driven over a mountain pass called Hellisheidi to the Greenhouse village of Hveragerdi located in the southern farmlands and saw all the greenhouses powered by geothermal power and heard all about the vegetables they grew there. Then we stopped breifly to look at an earthquake centre in a village that had much damage after a earthquake hitting 6.5 on the richter scale occured. Fortunately no one was seriously injured or killed but one of the cracks can be seen to this day, preserved under this really funky purple glass floor.

We had a brief stop at a volcanoe crater and had some fun taking loads of photographs, the reddish rock seemed to really make the landscape extra photogenic, this red rock is the iron that rose to the surface during the eruption and its aftermath.

We then had time for lunch and to explore the Geysir area and got to watch the most active hot spring, Strokkur, spouting steam up to 20 meters high, it was a fantastic experience, the suspense waiting for this bubbling hole in the earth to spout. As can be seen in the photographs below, the entire area was steamy as the hot steam rose up through the ground with the water, casting a mystical feeling around the place.

(It looks like the tourist board and rangers of this area are wise to Green Men visiting the site and causing problems, fortunately The Blue Man is still able to experience this wonderous natural site).

The Blue Man enjoyed a quick bath in the waters reaching temperatures of 80-100c.

Something I found interesting was that during the 1800's one of the geysir's (it is called Geysir and is the reason all hot springs are called Geysirs) started to become less active and the locals were so concerned about what this would do to tourism that they started trying to cheat nature and throw rocks into the geysir to force it to continue to be active, they even threw soap down there! Not sure what effect that would have ever had but maybe they were into bubble partys, needless to say that geysir hasn't been active for awhile now!

Next we travelled through the highlands to visit the majestic waterfall Gullfoss, 'Golden Falls', in the glacial river Hvita. Named Golden Falls because on really sunny days a strong rainbow can be seen cast across the falls, here there were many notice boards telling about one of the first environmentalists in Iceland who fought to protect the falls as a site of natural beauty and not harness it for another hydro power plant.

The Blue Man found an area covered in rock stacks at the top of the waterfalls which he couldnt resist to climb.

We were then taken alongside the lake Thingvallavatn and continued through the rift valley between the continental plates to Thingvellir National Park, the site of the first Icelandic parliament. The most amazing thing in the national park was seeing the fissures in the earth, where the two tectonic plates have moved apart and a deep crack has been created in the earths surface. The water here has come directly from the earth and the geothermal waters making it beautifully clear, and is one of the top ten dive sites in the world. I can certainly see why..

We walked through the park seeing the north american tectonic plate...

and then heard the guide tell us all about the history of the parliment that met there for 2 weeks every summer to resolve issues the icelandic people might have. What was also interesting was hearing about the lawspeaker-a person that had to memerize all the laws because there was no written word at that point and so that the people could live peacefully, this person was considered very wise.

After looking over the national park from a viewing platform, we headed back home to our apartment.

Oh... and somewhere during the day we also saw a smaller waterfall with an interesting feature at the side of it....

any guesses to what it is???

You're miles off..... its a salmon ladder!!!

p.s. Also it was my birthday all day today and the blue man didn't even get me a cake!