As there was no room at the inn in Vik, we returned to Reykjavik for the final four nights of our trip with plans to take day-trips from there to places we still wanted to visit (Iceland is small, but it's not a tiny place, and everywhere in Iceland is not a day trip from Reykjavik, but several places are, including several places where we'd spent overnights).

As we were checking into the Hotel Plaza, a "douchebag" (Persephone's later description) walked into the lobby and said this to the guy at the reception desk, who was in the process of checking us in: "Excuse me.  This may not be an issue, but if I meet somebody later this evening, will it be a problem if I bring her back here to my room?"

This was a genuinely weird question.  We weren't checking into a hostel or guest house or B&B; this was a proper hotel, and a reasonably nice one, although we departed for another, the aforementioned Klopp, the next day because Persephone felt that this "doucher" had "soiled" the Plaza.  (And also because they were booked up.)

People are odd, aren't they?  It's difficult, in fact, for me to put my finger on what was so odd about this man's query, but I think that's because there were so many things which made it odd.

The next day, we took a little tour boat (the Puffin Express) out into the harbor to look at puffins.  Persephone goes all wobbly when it comes to "baby animals."  Most puffins do not, strictly speaking, qualify as baby animals, because most puffins are adults.  However, puffins of any age are small and cute, and therefore qualify, roughly, as baby animals, regardless of whether they're babies or grown-ups or whatever.

Anyway, this photo will give you some idea of how excited Persephone was about the puffins -- she's the one with the green bag over her left shoulder, the second person in line, I believe, to board the Puffin Express.  (I took the photo from the back of the line.  I was not as excited about the puffins as Persephone was -- I wasn't unenthusiastic about them; I just wasn't super-fucking-pumped.)

The puffin tour, by almost any measure, was a failure (almost: if you'd never been on a boat before in your life, you might have found it exciting).  We saw puffins, yes, but puffins are small birds.  They they weigh about a pound.  And we didn't get within five hundred feet of one.  I didn't bother taking out my camera, partly because I was semi-sulking -- as the second person aboard the Puffin Express, Persephone got a seat, while as the last person aboard the Express, I did not -- but mostly because there was nothing to take a picture of, which is the whole point of taking your camera out.  (Even if we had been close enough to the puffins to be able to distinguish them from rocks, there was also this: they weren't doing puffin stuff.  Puffins suck at flying; this is one of the reasons they're supposed to be entertaining.  They crash-land onto each other; they fall out of the sky into bushes; they execute what appear to be successful landings, only to fall over.  We saw none of this.)

Following our failure to see any puffins up close -- or to see any puffins, from any distance, doing anything inept or otherwise entertaining -- we went to Cafe Babalu, a place I'd stumbled on a few days before...

...a little cafe (there are little cafes all over the place in Reykjavik) where we sat outdoors on the roof and had lunch and listened to four English girls talking gratuitous shit about the stupid American on the puffin boat who couldn't see the puffins which had been, they felt, right in front of her.  (They'd been on the boat with us; they were speaking of a woman from Long Island -- one of the few other Americans we saw in Iceland -- who was complaining, loudly, about the lack of puffins available for viewing.  The woman was right, of course, but these girls had convinced themselves -- maybe because they had, as we had, spent about thirty dollars each to not see any puffins -- that they'd seen some puffins.)

Here's the view from Cafe Babalu (apologies if you're tiring of telephotoed shots down Reykjavik streets, but this is the final one):

We spent that day walking and driving around the city.  I liked this church:

And then we hit the zoo, except that the zoo was mostly closed for the day.  The English version of the zoo's daily schedule follows; please note what happens at 1:00 in the afternoon...

...and imagine, if you can, Persephone's disappointment at having missed "Rabbits petting time."  (I need to tell you now that Persephone will read this post and feel that I'm portraying her as sort of a dim bulb with all of this cute-baby-animal stuff.  Persephone is not a dim bulb; if you read this blog regularly, you already know that.  She is an extremely smart, multi-talented person with many interests who happens to have a thing for cute animals.  Baby ones, preferably.)

So the zoo was closed, but the adjacent botanic gardens were not, and they were absolutely beautiful.  There were many trees in it, too, which was nice, because trees are one thing you miss when you're driving around the Icelandic countryside (or, the part of the countryside around which we drove, and yes, I did just say "around which we drove").  This bit of park...

...reminded me, I'm not sure why, really, of the secluded London park in Blowup (and, Blowup-like, I didn't realize that I'd inadvertently taken a photo of Persephone in this park until I reviewed my photos later that day: weird, right???  Yeah, I thought so too!!!).  Anyway, it's a great film, Blowup, if you haven't seen it.  Here's the park in it where sinister things happen, or don't, with the photographer-protagonist in the foreground:

The following day, we took a day trip to the Snaefellsnes peninsula north of Reykjavik.  It was generally while driving that we sampled Icelandic candy-bars.  Icelanders (I deduce) have a penchant for licorice -- this, for example...

...is a milk-chocolate bar with a slab of licorice affixed to it, and it wasn't half bad.

Cliffs, ocean:

A beautiful harbor in a town whose name I can't remember.  I took a two-hour nap here.  While we usually went to bed at a normal time, Eastern time (4:00 or 5:00 AM local time), we got up at a normalish time, local time (GMT with no Daylight Savings Time), so there was rather a lot of napping on this trip:

A beach similar to the one at Dyrholaey, although more volcanic-seeming (please don't ask me what I mean by that):

And below are some "whale stones."  Iceland is not part of the E.U. for a number of reasons; one of them is that it's reluctant to give up whaling.  While most Icelandic whaling is performed in as humane a way as whaling can me, in remote regions it's done "the old-fashioned way."  Whaling as performed by the indigenous peoples of Iceland involves taking baby whales from their mothers and smashing them against rocks until they're dead (their blood turns green when they're freaked out, which is why the green color):

Sorry, that was beyond gross and also beyond false.  I want to be finished with this post, and I'm getting punchy.  The only part of the above paragraph which is true is the part about Iceland not being part of the E.U. in part because of the whaling issue.  (And there were no indigenous people in Iceland for the Vikings to displace when they arrived in Iceland, unless you count the small handful of Irish monks.  When the Vikings showed up, the Irish monks were all, "it's-cool-it's-cool-it's-cool, we don't want any trouble, we're out, we'll just get our bibles-n-shit; give us like ten minutes and we'll be out of here."  And that is the truth, about the Irish monks.)

Here is a mountain with some snow on it:

Here is the same beach again (sorry; really am running out of steam here -- pretty, though, isn't it?):

...and this is a sign which you see as you're leaving most villages that tells you you're not in a village anymore, as if that weren't usually super-clear:

...and-then-we-went-back-to-Reykjavik-and-then-we-flew-back-to-JFK, and here endeth the posts relating to Steve's and Persephone's first trip to Iceland (and we do, definitely, want to return; it's a delightful and mysterious and unexpected place, plus we didn't get to try the putrified shark).

All Iceland-related posts are here.