Bypassing Blue Lagoon

On summer holidays in Kolkata, Pushan, Bunti, Rohit and I would walk down to Jamuna cinema and watch classics like King Kong and Where Eagles Dare. The only "Blue Lagoon" I had heard of before today was a steamy-looking "A" rated film that they used to show trailers for at Jamuna.

Today's Blue Lagoon was equally steamy, but it wasn't just A rated - there were kids, babies, and 80 year old grandpas all enjoying it's overpriced joys. The Bláa lónið is a manmade spa about 15km south of Keflavik near a geothermal power station where the salts and silica in the hot spring water are supposed to be wonderfully curative, especially for psoriasis.





Both Andrea and Unnar thought that the 2300 ISK (about 25 USD) price was way too much for something that was essentially the same as a neighborhood swimming pool which costs a lot less. I thought it might have been worth it if I was planning to spend a couple of hours in it and had psoriasis, but not otherwise, so I skipped it. But the water really was very blue (thanks to the silica and salts).

The rest of the afternoon was spent happily wandering the Reykjanes peninsula with A and U (and little Björkvin of course). We started with the giant who lives in a cave overlooking the Keflavik Marina:





(that's her bed!)

Followed by the spot where the rift between the north american and european continental plates is only a few metres wide:









(the rift cuts through diagonally across Iceland, from the SW to the NE, so Iceland is geographically neither Europe nor N America, though it is European historically, and visually / architecturally / drinking-fountain-ly / shopping mall-aly North American (I have almost never seen a drinking fountain in Europe, and there were tons here)

Then we drove down to watch the waves crash into the shore (on a very windy day) at Reykjanesviti:



And stopped on the way back to see some icelandic horses and a geothermal power plant blowing it's nose (they release high pressure steam from newly drilled bore holes to remove all the rocks/dirts until they get pure/nearly pure steam):



(Icelandic horses are much valued internationally because they're super hardy, docile, intelligent, and have a fifth gait unlike other horses that have only four, called the flying pace which, done well, can apparently feel like flying along the ground because it isn't as bumpy as a gallop)



The 'american' feeling was complete when we ordered Pizza from a takeaway on the former US military base where A and U live now!

ps. Chris' excellent game flitta was a big hit on Sunday morning. I was telling Andrea and Unnar about it in the morning and by the evening, Unnar had the highest score (and when I checked just now, he'd beaten that again, and someone called Jarmi is running him close - am guessing he's one of Unnar's friends).