Our vacation home is about 20 minutes away from the center of Reykjavik. We have been there a couple of times. We went to see the Hallgrímskirkja - the church in the middle of town that looks like it's made from ballast columns. From the tower you can see most of Reykjavik. Vivian and Evan looked around interestedly.
Then we walked down the first street we saw and stopped at a coffee shop and fed our faces with the biggest cookies I've eaten because we had gone to the top of the church tower - though we rode up there in an elevator.
Then we drove around randomly till we ran into a park. In one corner of the park, completely hidden by trees we found a small playground. This is odd because there aren't many trees or children in Iceland.
You can drive for a hundred miles and not see a tree around here. But it rains and everything that doesn't move is covered in green. Grass or moss. Jo asked me if I knew why. I said that it was because all of Iceland is above the tree line. When you hike in the mountains, if they are tall enough you eventually notice that there are no trees. Just "alpine" meadows. That's what all of Iceland looks like so it seemed to me like a reasonable explanation. At 1:30am last night Jo googled it and sent me an email. At one time Iceland used to be covered in trees but the settlers chopped them all down. Wow - you think you are in the lap of nature and then, bam, you suddenly come to learn that you are in an environmental disaster zone.
The trees in the park were carefully planted. They have a plaque which says the city planted 400 trees in the park.
We came back to the park another day - at night. The two pictures above - of the climby thing, and the one below of the kids in front of a lake were taken sometime between 9:30pm and midnight. We were sitting around at home and the kids wanted to run around so we went to the park in the middle of the night. I love this daylight-all-the-time thing as much as the kids do.
In front of the church there's a statue of Leifur Eiriksson - the first European to have landed in North America. This lump of bronze was presented by America to Iceland in 1930 to mark the 1000th anniversary of the Leif's arrival. Vivian and Evan were completely uninterested in him or any comparisons I made to Columbus. But they happily played around at base of the statue.
Then we walked down the first street we saw and stopped at a coffee shop and fed our faces with the biggest cookies I've eaten because we had gone to the top of the church tower - though we rode up there in an elevator.
Then we drove around randomly till we ran into a park. In one corner of the park, completely hidden by trees we found a small playground. This is odd because there aren't many trees or children in Iceland.
You can drive for a hundred miles and not see a tree around here. But it rains and everything that doesn't move is covered in green. Grass or moss. Jo asked me if I knew why. I said that it was because all of Iceland is above the tree line. When you hike in the mountains, if they are tall enough you eventually notice that there are no trees. Just "alpine" meadows. That's what all of Iceland looks like so it seemed to me like a reasonable explanation. At 1:30am last night Jo googled it and sent me an email. At one time Iceland used to be covered in trees but the settlers chopped them all down. Wow - you think you are in the lap of nature and then, bam, you suddenly come to learn that you are in an environmental disaster zone.
The trees in the park were carefully planted. They have a plaque which says the city planted 400 trees in the park.
We came back to the park another day - at night. The two pictures above - of the climby thing, and the one below of the kids in front of a lake were taken sometime between 9:30pm and midnight. We were sitting around at home and the kids wanted to run around so we went to the park in the middle of the night. I love this daylight-all-the-time thing as much as the kids do.
1 comment:
Same thing happened to Scotland
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caledonian_Forest
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