Phot-o' the Day: Walking on Skólavörðustígur toward Hallgrimskirkja; Reykjavik, Iceland

This is the view walking up Skólavörðustígur in downtown Reykjavik, Iceland. (Yes, I did cut-and-paste that street name from Google maps. There is no way my English language keyboard could do even half the letters in that word. And that's one single street name.) At the end of Skólavörðustígur, and in the center of the picture, is the ultra-modern Hallgrimskirkja, the "kirkja" at the end being the Icelandic word for "church," and the "Hallgrims" at the front referring to an Icelandic poet of that name. It is nominally a "cathedral," but I'm not sure how religious it really is.

Reykjavik is a small town, as European capitals go. The population of the city is a little more than 120,000, which means than it is home to about one-third of the total population of Iceland. So, by Icelandic standards, it is a megalopolis.

Visited June 2016.

From High Atop Hallgrimskirkja

Hallgrimskirkja

Hallgrimskirkja is a Reykjavik landmark.  It is visible from all over central Reykjavik due to the fact that it is (a) rather tall, and (b) emplaced on a rather high point in an otherwise flat (ish) Reykjavik.  So it's like a tall kid standing on a chair for the class photo.  The combined effect is to overwhelm the surrounding environment.

The most dramatic view is the one you see walking up Skólavörðustígur.  I don't know how to pronounce that.  I don't have a clue how to render using only the alphabet we use in the English-speaking world.  I cut and pasted that from Google maps.

When you get close, the shape of the exterior (frontal view) resembles that of a large church pipe organ.

I'm guessing that observation is not original and, with this being a church, the effect was intentional.

And it does have large pipe organ.

It is a Lutheran parish church, still.  So we have saints in statue form.

It also had this interesting art piece hanging on the back wall.  I know fish are fraught with Christian symbolism.

But this does not look particularly religious to me.  Cool, yes.  Way cool, in fact.  Religious?  Christian religious?  Not so much.

The main attracting of Hallgrimskata is the tower.  An elevator ride to the top costs a mere 900 krona, about eight U.S. dollars.  We stood in line for the elevator and did not see that there was a charge for the elevator until we got to the front of the line.  There was a very small sign telling us to go to the nearby gift shop to buy tickets.  Other people also would not have seen the sign until they got close to the elevator, as we saw other people doing what we were doing:  standing in line, getting out of line and walking to the gift shop, and coming back with tickets in hand.

I thought about pretending I did not see the sign and seeing what happened when I got to the tower summit, but after the notorious Salvador Brasil Flash Photography Incident(TM) in 1997,* I don't play games with the rules inside a church I'm visiting.

Tickets bought and a ride to the top of the tower and these were the views from the summit:

This was the northwesterly view, down Skólavörðustígur.

This was the northeasterly view.  The Hotel Skuggi would be somewhere in this.

And this was the view to the southwest.

This view looks out to the old Reykjavik airport, which is sort of like Reykjavik's Houston-Hobby or Dallas Love Field.  It's the little domestic-only airport that Southwest would use if it flew around Iceland.

* Footnote:  The notorious Salvador Brasil Flash Photography Incident(TM) of 1997, if I've not mentioned in blog posts past, happened back in the good ol' days of film photography.  I was in a brief ornate old church, São Francisco church in the historic Pelourinho district of Salvador.  Pardon me if you've heard this one before. But, essentially, I was in a beautiful old church, by myself, no one around, snapping pictures. I saw a sign that even with my limited Portuguese I understood to mean "no flash photography." Well, no one was around. I could feign ignorance if asked. So I continued to snap pictures with a flash. No one ever did ask me to stop. Fast forward to end of the trip. I get home. Take the five rolls of film I shot in Brazil to get developed (remember that!).  One of the rolls got ruined. The one I shot in Salvador.  And that roll was not ruined UNTIL THE EXACT POINT I tool pictures in São Francisco church. And that is why I always follow the rules in churches.

Icelandic Arrival

It's called "the Sun Voyager"

The day started in 100-plus degree Las Vegas and ended in Reykjavik, Iceland, where it was cold, wet and windy.  How cold?  Forecasted highs in the low 50's.  That's Fahrenheit, not Celsius.  But it felt more like Kelvin on the coast.

It actually wasn't that long of a day.  A five-hour flight from LAS to JFK, followed by another five-hour-ish flight from JFK to Reykjavik Keflavik.  I got no sleep on the airplane because, well, I was on an airplane.  So I coffeed up before getting the rental car and immediately drove a little south of the airport to my #1 destination in all of Iceland:

The Bridge Across Two Continents.

To the left, Eurasia.  On the right, North America.  Or, more specifically for you aficionados of plate tectonics, the "Eurasian Plate" is on the left and the "North American Plate" is to the right.  It was helpfully explained here, in this diagram welcoming me to Eurasian landmass.

What is particularly interesting about this location is the fact that you can see the visible effects of the ground cleaving as the Eurasian and North American plates pull apart, as you can see from this view from the bridge:

A long long time ago, there was no gap in those rocks.  But the plates are pulling apart here.  You can see from this shot of the bridge.

And this is why there are earthquakes in California and Japan.  Seriously.  The plates are pulling apart in the Atlantic, as North America moves away from Europe.  (There's a political metaphor there if you want.  But I don't want.)  Meanwhile, on the other side of North America, the plate that is moving away from Eurasia is bumping up against the Pacific Plate, causing earthquakes in California and Alaska.  The Pacific Plate, in turn, is getting it from both sides, as it is getting bumped into by Eurasia as Eurasia moves away from Eastern North America.  The result of that is earthquakes and Japan and, basically, that whole ring of fire thing.

Over-simplified, yes, but as you can see from the dumb-founded look on my face above, that's all the complexity I can handle.  With only 20 minutes of sleep that night, I can handle the fact that there's a bridge.  But where are the two continents at?

I think the ground is black because all the rock is volcanic.

This picture actually does make me look like I'm having a good time.  Which I was.

It was an awesome site.  I kept stopping at parking areas because I was warned that it was not very well-marked.  I stopped the rental car (some sort of Ford) here to see if there were any bridges or continents.

The was only a lunar landscape and this weird pedestal.

It appeared to be marked to track the planet Uranus.

The sleeplessness was starting to take its toll so I decided to head into Reykjavik to find my hotel.

Which I did.  The Hotel Skuggi, which translates from Icelandic to English as "the Skuggi Hotel."

My room is "European" sized, very clean and comfortable, but strangely lacking a chest of drawers.

It's located on the quiet street bearing the Icelandic name of Hverfisgata.

Speaking of bears:

One of the souvenir shops had these giant plush polar bears in front.  This most definitely is where I will go to buy my picture postcards.

And, of course, on the walk about town, I saw the Sun Voyager.  Is it a ship?  Is it a whale carcass?  Or is it just a little of both?