Iceland XV: Fighting the Polar Bear

I am a museum junky.  On August 25, 2022, Dave and I spent the whole day in Reykyavik, before flying home on August 26.  We took a bus tour and then visited five museums.  That would definitely not have been possible with Audrey!  Five museums in one day is probably my record, and I loved every one of them.  I also learned an enormous amount about Iceland.

We first took a "Hop on, Hop Off" bus tour to get "the big picture" of Reykyavik--a bit of history, the major sights, and the lay-out of the city.  When we arrived in Reykyavik, we visited some of the major sights, such as the National Museum, the Settlement Exhibition, the Perlan Museum, and the Hallgrimskirkja (the iconic white concrete church looking down on the city). Riding past those sites on the bus was like visiting old friends.

 

I love Scandinavian design, and I could not see this church often enough!

We drove past the port, where cruise ships were docked.  Increasingly, Iceland is included on the cruise boat circuit.  We also passed this very modern statue of a Viking boat.

We then drove past the building where Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev met in the late 1980s and ended the Cold War.

We exited the bus at the Old Harbor and visited our first two museums, the Aurora Borealis Museum and the Saga Museum.

At the Aurora Borealis Museum, we first learned the science behind the aurora borealis—magnetic activity on the sun releases great blobs of “plasma” that sail towards the earth, interfere with the earth’s magnetism, and create auroras.   We learned that the actual auroras come in different shapes and different colors (green is most common), and that they look brighter in camera shots than in person.  

We then entered a room with a continuous loop of room-size projections of the aurora borealis over different landmarks we had seen—the Viking boat statue at the Reykyavik harbor, the waterfalls of Godfoss and Dettifoss--and some sights we hadn't seen, such as a winter tram parked on a snowbank.  We relaxed on a bench in the darkened theater and were immersed in the northern lights.

Next was the Saga Museum, behind this statue of Leif Ericson.

The Saga Museum walked us through Icelandic history with the help of life-size “dummy” characters portraying events, in vignettes lined up along a walkway.  Signs and a headset relayed the stories.  The creators included plenty of the blood and gore of this Viking nation, such as a mock-up of a witch being murdered, with groaning on the soundtrack we carried with us.

At the end of the exhibit, there were Viking costumes for us to dress up in.  We pretended to joust with a polar bear and with a Viking warrior.

Next stop was the Whale Museum.  This museum included scale models of all the cetaceans (whales, narwhals, dolphins), hanging from the ceiling.  The model of the blue whale, which is the largest animal in the sea, was simply mammoth. I also didn’t realize that there are significant differences among bowhead, humpback, Northatlantic, orca, and minke whales.

We then visited the Maritime Museum.  One exhibit discussed marine archeology, including the analysis of a ship wreck near Flatey Island, which we visited.  The wreck turned out to be a Dutch merchant ship from the 17^th century, heavily loaded for the trip from Iceland back to Amsterdam.  There were also dozens of exhibits in the upstairs sections—everything from collections of oilskin jackets and collections of nets with different size grids for different types of fish, to taped interviews with fishermen and their families.  “We could have spent the whole day right here,” I told David.

We walked outside and were on the old Reykyvik pier, now the meeting place for whale-watching tours.

We finished with the contemporary Art Center.  I particularly enjoyed a collection of paintings by Erro Timaline.  I often do not understand contemporary art, but I loved Erro’s huge, satirical collages.  There was one entitled, “God Bless Bagdad,” which included cartoon clips about the war and its leaders (Hassam Hussein, George Bush) and some random cartoons that showed the insanity of aggression and war.

Another was entitled "Rebirth of Nazism."

We ate dinner at Hofnin, a highly rated restaurant on the waterfront of the Old Harbor.  We could see tour boats for whale excursions parked outside.  Dave and I both ordered the special—baked flounder with a butter sauce, new potatoes and bok choy, and molten chocolate cake with licorice ice cream and berries.

After all the Icelandic words we couldn't read during our tour, there was finally a street name that was familiar to us!