Day 2 In Iceland

 Today, I feel much better although I did end up taking a 2 hour nap.  Part of it is that I'm still a bit sleep deprived but the other part is we spent 2.5 hours wandering around a local shopping mall. 

I am staying at the Capital Inn which is a guest house and not a regular hotel.  In this case it is sort of like a hostel but it serves breakfast if you want to pay a bit more. 

Check in is on the landing off some stairs heading to the basement which has small lockable dormitory style rooms with a shared bathroom, social area, and kitchen. 

The rest of the building has apartment like rooms with a private bathroom or shared.  I chose to go with the shared bathroom so I have a bedroom with lockable door in a apartment with a total of four bedrooms and a kitchen.

The floors are wooden and the room has tons of plugs but they are not the usual plugs. They are round and strange but I have an adapter which allows me to charge all my gear.

I did not know when I booked my room, it came with a shared kitchen.  In the picture above, my room is on the bottom floor to the right with the shades drawn. 

Its not a huge bedroom but it has a large bed and desk.  There appears to be a television in the room but I'm not sure its hooked up to a signal because I've not been able find any thing on it.

The kitchen has everything a person needs to fix a quick meal including a hot water heater.  I love that because I adore having a hot cup of tea regularly.  Since I'm going on a tour tomorrow of the National Park and other sites, I wanted to hit the grocery store for a few things like fruit, yogurt, and cheese. 

The front desk gave me directions to the local shopping center complete with a decent sized grocery store.  The shopping center was about 15 minutes away by following a walking path.

I took the picture to the right as I headed for the mall.  I'm a few minutes away from the guest house, facing away to catch all the housing on the hill. 

I have never seen anything over 10 or 12 floors since arriving here.  The roadway is one of the major highways heading out towards the airport.  I had a great walk over but it rained while I was in the mall.

I am further along the path, closer to the  mall.  The yellow bus is one of the many providing public transport.

I spent part of the walk identifying familiar plants such as Dandelions, Yarrow, Clover, Timothy grass, something similar to Sour Dock, Roses, and a few I didn't know the name of but recognized.

The owner of this place has some sort of Josta or Current he covered so the birds could not eat all the fruit.  He wanted it for preserves.

The mall turned out to be a three story affair with a theater way up on the 3rd Floor.  The Dunkirk movie had opened there but it was not open quite that early in the morning.

There was some sort of sidewalk sale going on with lots of clothing marked down but I didn't buy anything because I didn't need it.

I found a nice bookstore where I bought a book on the geology of Iceland and a magnet with a wonderful shot of the Aurora over a small house.

Several shops were not one thing or the other but kind of mixed.  I went through several stores and found a few things I wanted but could not justify their purchase because they were extremely heavy such as a Marble pestle and mortar set or a cast iron Japanese tea kettle. 

 This is a place I stopped to pick up a meal for later in the day.  It advertised itself as having Indian street food.  I'm not sure spiced sweet potatoes are considered Indian street food but I got some anyway.

The nice thing about the restaurant?  It had a menu in both Icelandic and English so I could figure out what I wanted.  In addition, they had symbols to let people know if things were Vegan, Vegetarian, or heavy in dairy.

I purchased a Naan roll-up filled with vegetables and chick peas.  It resembled a burrito but smelled quite good.

My final picture is of the garden just next to the Inn.  It has tons of lettuce and it looked quite good. 

The temperatures in Iceland do not get super hot, nor do they get below -20 C.  It has something to do with the location of Iceland in regard to everything so it stays fairly mild all year round.

I hope you enjoyed this short view of my hotel and trip to the mall. Tomorrow, when I get back to the hotel, I'll down load pictures and share several from the tour.

Sunday afternoon, I head off to Helsinki, Finland where I'll be till the 12th.  I hope to take pictures every day to share with everyone.  I want to come back and visit Iceland sometime in the future so I can see more of the country.

Have a good day everyone.