Iceland Day 5 - Lazy Day

I think I've finally deciphered the weather here in Iceland. If the report says 50% chance of snow, that means it's going to snow half the day. Which is an improvement over the last several days. Actually it was only random patches of really light snow today. Even the wind played along, for the most part. It was however a good bit colder today but I still managed to snap a few more photos. Of particular note is the church Hallgrímskirkja (meaning “church of Hallgrímur” - a minister and one of Iceland's most famous poets). It's easily the most unique and identifiable part of the Icelandic skyline. Compared to a lot of the large churches you see back in the states it's a surprisingly small church considering it's the largest in the country. It does happen to have a beautiful, both aesthetically and aurally, pipe organ.

For breakfast I decided to partake in a ridiculously large meal typically reserved for hangover food called a Truck. A Truck is two fried eggs, fried potatoes, a big stack of bacon, two pieces of toast, and two thick ass “American-style” pancakes. It is essentially a truckload of food (no, I didn't eat it all) and more than enough to make you want to crawl back in bed with a serious case of the itis. Itis or not I still managed to make take a frigid two mile walk around some of southern Reykjavik before running out of pancake power. With such a large breakfast it was a long time before I was hungry again so I ended up skipping lunch and had dinner relatively late.

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. Fighting the urge to take a nap I grabbed some coffee and spent some more quality time reading in the coffee shop that's on the ground floor of the building I'm staying in. It was nothing but R&R until dinner, which was at a great Indian restaurant called Austur-Indíafjelagið (something about East India, not entirely sure). It's a restaurant that focuses on combining Indian food with Icelandic ingredients, born from the marriage of an Icelandic man to an Indian woman. My dish was a lamb filet marinated in a spicy rub of black pepper, garam masala, and green chile. Considering the Icelandic diet doesn't seem to include a lot of spicy foods it had a surprising, but pleasant amount of heat to it. It's possible that I underestimated the Icelandic palette, the diversity of Iceland's population, or perhaps both. I'm not going to lose any sleep over it, though. And speaking of sleep...