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.

If you're like me, when you travel you have a difficult time keeping up, blog-wise, so you end up in the lobby of the Hotel Klopp in Reykjavik on the morning of the day of your return to a place where it gets dark at night with at least two posts left to write about your trip.

Then again, I'm looking around the lobby and I don't see you, so maybe you're not like me.  Unless you're the creepily aggressive German man who is complaining to the hapless half-English, half-Icelandic reception-desk woman about how his room is not up to his standards and about how, therefore, he wants to cancel his room, be exempted from the forty-eight-hour cancellation policy, and have a taxi ordered from him.  (Now.)  (He may or may not be entitled to a cancellation without penalty; I don't know.  He thinks his room smells: whatever.  Based on his attitude alone, if I were the reception-desk person, I'd do everything I could to give him nothing.  I am, also, glad that he's not American.)

But so you're not this German guy, I think, which means you're not like me at all -- at least, not in this particular way.

* * *

We left the gentle, kind, sociopathic horses of Geysir behind for the southern coast of Iceland.  Photos (or, my photos) don't do it justice.  Lush green cliff/hill formations slope down from the clouds to the edge of the highway, and they do this for mile after mile after mile, waterfalls occasionally gushing rivers' worth of water onto cliffs below.  (Note the low-hanging clouds above the mountains here.  Passing them on our way back to Reykjavik after they'd lifted, we noted that the clouds had been hiding a massive glacier, Myrdalsjokull, which seemed to float, menacingly and gorgeously, above their peaks):

The largest of these waterfalls is Skogafoss...

...

...so different from the Gullfoss falls that there really ought to be different names for these two types of eternally tumbling masses of water (and if you're seeing a pattern here -- i.e., the pattern where the names of waterfalls end with "foss" -- then you're well on your way to speaking Icelandic; I speak Icelandic fluently now, btw, having spent almost ten days "in-country," and plan to begin writing this blog in Icelandic, so you might want to learn Icelandic too).  Gullfoss was about being in the middle of a semi-wasteland and stumbling on a river which abruptly tumbles/slides/falls into a gaping canyon whose bottom you can barely see for all of the falls-mist.  Skogafoss, on the other hand, is about driving along a seaside highway, verdant, small-waterfall-dotted cliffs to your left, and, without warning, having the much, much, much bigger brother of these little waterfalls slide into view.

(I suppose all I'm talking about is a difference in perspective.  From nature's point of view, Gullfoss and Skogafoss represent the same phenomenon: there is water which gravity would like to be much, much closer to the ground than it is, and gravity gets its way, gravity wins, as it usually does.)

As at Gullfoss, perpetu-misted vegetation near the foot of the falls (and as at Gullfoss, the greens really are this green):

And then there was this: a smiley-face applied somehow (gnomes?) onto the side of one of the aforementioned cliff/hill formations (apologies for the poor photo quality of this photo, cropped from the center of a larger, higher-resolution one):

This incongruity reminds me of the classic mid-1990s game Sam & Max Hit The Road.  (Yeah, laugh it up: go for it.)  Specifically, the "scene" where Sam, a dog who wears clothes and is also a private detective (his orange front paws appear below), in a rotating restaurant atop the world's largest ball of yarn, scans the horizon with one of those tourist-oriented binoculars and sees odd things which one wouldn't expect to see (here he sees just a rock in the distance, but trust me... he sees weird stuff through this telescope, depending on "where you are" in the game... Never mind; Persephone was not moved by this Sam & Max-Iceland "connection" either, but I believe it relates to this recurring Icelandic deal I've noticed of finding stuff where you don't expect to find it):

We continued east along the coast to Dyrholaey (which Persephone pronounced "diarrhoea," because despite being seven years younger than I, she is roughly as mature as I am about some things), passing a turn-off to a town called Ass, which both of us ached to visit if only so we could walk down the main street, if applicable, one of us saying to the other, matter-of-factly, "this place is Ass," but, reluctantly, we skipped it.  In Dyrholaey are black-sand beaches and extraordinary rock formations, such as this one:

And then we drove on to Vik, where we planned to spend the night at an inn or hotel or guest house.

Until this point, we'd planned our trip ahead of time -- the hotel in Reykjavik, the inn near the Blue Lagoon, the cabin in Geysir -- but were winging it down here on the coast, making our way to the national park near Skaftafell.  Winging it isn't always the way to go, though.  Winging it doesn't work in Vik, for example.  In Vik, an innkeeper told Persephone that not only did he have no rooms at his inn, but also that he'd had phone calls from as far as three hours away inquiring about availability.  It was 9:30 by this time.  After trying and failing to secure a room at several other guesthouses and inns around Vik, we decided to return to Reykjavik.  Which we did, arriving there a few hours later under a sunset which would, in short order...

...become a sunrise.

Danish Embassy, Reykjavik, tonight

There's a Sondheim lyric which I like: "perpetual sunset is rather an unsettling thing."  It's from A Little Night Music, based on Bergman's film Smiles Of a Summer Night, the setting of which is a summer gathering at a country house in Sweden whose location is far enough north that the sun never completely sets.

I don't find it unsettling that I haven't seen a "real" night sky for a while.  The perpetual non-darkness here has, though, had an unsettling effect on when I feel like sleeping and when I feel like getting up.  This, for example, is the first post I've written which I'll post before five in the morning, local time.

We left the Blue Lagoon for Geysir.  Geysir is the site of an extremely powerful geyser; the word "geyser," in fact, comes from... you know, you can figure this one out, I'll bet.

Anyway, the thing about the Geysir geyser is that it very seldom geyses.  There is, however, another geyser in the area called Strokkur, which erupts every five minutes or so.  I'd just woken up from a nap, though, when we walked across the highway to see Strokkur, and sometimes I'm not in the best of moods after waking up from a nap: groggy, slightly irritable.  So groggily and slightly irritably, I approached Strokkur and saw something which I probably shouldn't have found as irritating as I did: about twenty-five people, all but one or two of them pointing cameras at a steaming hole in the ground, waiting for boiling water to erupt from it.  In stupid protest, therefore, I did not take a photo of Strokkur erupting, which it did, as promised, about three minutes after we joined the group of camera-pointing people.  It erupted, and everyone, including one extremely well equipped -- expensive tripod, 18-inch lens, North Face photograph-taking ensemble, and so on -- taker of photographs, click-click-clicked and got their photos of the geyser and then we left.

What I found more interesting than the geyser itself was the "geothermal area" surrounding it...

...the field of steam-emitting holes in the ground, which surrounds the geyser.  As we walked past it on the way not to take pictures of the geyser, we could hear an eerie bubbling coming from the field, as if water were boiling directly below its surface.  Water was boiling directly below its surface, you see.

Geysir is in the middle of acres and acres and acres of farmland, but drive for ten or fifteen minutes and down a few dirt roads and you're in the middle of a wasteland similar to the one which surrounds the Blue Lagoon (although not as overtly moon's-surface-like).  "Why don't they bring a bunch of Sudanese refugees here and let them live on this land!  Wasted space!  This is not acceptable!", said Persephone as we drove through it past midnight one night (I thought to myself, because nothing would grow here; because it's literally a wasteland; because relocating African refugees or for that matter refugees from any continent to the middle of a lava outcropping near the Arctic Circle would probably violate at least one U.N. convention...; to her credit, she wasn't completely serious, and also to her credit, it's difficult not to drive through Iceland and think about the "wasted" space -- there's just so much of it: space, space, space, and usually next to the space you're looking at is more space, perhaps itself adjacent to a bit of space) listening to mix CDs which we'd heard many, many, many too many times and marveled at the fact that we were in the remotest place to which either of us had ever been...

...

...and then, since it was only 1:35 in the morning or so, we drove about thirty-five miles to find coffee.

Next day: Gullfoss.  Gullfoss is a massive waterfall less than ten miles from Geysir.  I believe I'd skip Geysir on a return visit to Iceland, but Gullfoss isn't to be believed:

Oh and by the way, they don't do fences in Iceland (note the un-fenced-off cliff edge in the next photo).  Persephone speculates that Iceland's attitude about not putting fences anywhere might that there'd be "one less stupid person to deal with" should someone fall to their death off such a cliff:

And the vegetation around the falls really is as green as it appears to be in the photo.  As green as it is, I suppose, because it's constantly bathed in the spray from the falls.  Stunning.  And in the middle of nowhere.  And there's a pattern here: the pattern where you're in the middle of nowhere in Iceland and all of a sudden you're looking at the last thing you expected to see, even if what you're seeing is what you came to see.

And then we left Geysir and Gullfoss behind for the black sand beaches of... Oh my God, wait-wait-wait!  I almost forgot: do you know about Icelandic horses?  No?  Well, they're wonderful animals.  And they've got five gaits; isn't that great?  Not four, like normal horses, but five: they have, you see, a fifth gear of sorts.

Anyway, so these sturdy, gentle animals...  well, here, have a look:

Extraordinary looking animals, aren't they?

Anyway, I'd never ridden a horse.  In Geysir, I rode a horse for the first time.  I rode, of course, an Icelandic horse.  Also in Geysir, I rode a horse for the last time.  The horse I rode for the first and last time in my life was a passive-aggressive jerkoff named Roiðid ("ROY-thuhd"; ð is pronounced th, as in the, not as in with).  Nice name.

First: I have never wanted to be a member of the club of people who know how to ride a horse.  I haven't wanted to be, and I haven't claimed to be, and I haven't been, and that's worked well for me for a really long time.  There are many clubs to which I don't belong and don't want to: the club whose members follow NASCAR; the club whose members go rock-climbing every weekend; the club whose members still think that Dick Cheney is an outstanding American; the club whose members rave about why Portland, Oregon is totally great; the club whose members spend five hundred dollars on a coffee grinder and convince themselves that this is saving them money in the long run and/or is resulting in better-tasting coffee than they used to get from their Braun grinders.  I have nothing against members of this particular club, this horse-riding club, but I didn't want in.  But:

"So we're going horseback riding in Geysir, right?  That's where they said we should rent the horses, right?  In Geysir?  The horses, the Icelandic horses, the ones they let you ride?  The Geysir ones, the ones which are Icelandic and sturdy and okay for people like you who've never been on a horse before?"

"Ugh..."  Persephone has been on a horse before.  Persephone is not a horse expert, but Persephone has rented horses in Egypt near the pyramids at a secret stable, the only one where the horses aren't emaciated, and ridden around the desert.  She went to summer camp and rode horses.  She's been to Central Park and ridden horses.  She knows about horses.  She is in the club.  She is a junior member, but she's in.  "Jesus, the idea of being on a horse makes me really, really panicky and anxious.  The horse will sense this and he will fuck with me and/or kill me."

"Steve, no but these are Icelandic horses!  They are sturdy and also they are gentle and kind!  It doesn't matter if you've never ridden if you're riding an Icelandic horse.  They like beginners!"

Twenty-five minutes into our ride, my right hand looked like this:

My hand looked like that because less than a quarter of the way through our two-hour ride, Roiðid, with a twitch of a few of his gentle, sturdy Icelandic back muscles, flicked me onto the ground, the gravel there instantly removing a square inch or two of skin from the palm of my hand and then working its way into the raw under-skin.  I hadn't been getting particularly good vibes from him, but I also hadn't expected this.  Roiðid, after all, was an Icelandic horse.  The bad vibes were in my head, I'd thought.

I spent the rest of the ride (ninety of the longer minutes of my life, wondering when my gentle but deranged horse was going to dump me again and step on my face or whatever) composing a hate-letter to Roiðid in my head ("Dear Roiðid: guess what: you suck.  It's fuckwad asswipes like you, you son of a bitch, who give horses the reputation they have for being sadistic, deranged assholes, but guess what: in a few days, I'm going back to New York City, where I live in a big house where it's warm in the winter and cool in the summer while you, on the other hand, are going to freeze your motherfucking balls off..." etc.), but I gave up on that after a while, realizing that Roiðid would "win" if I kept that up (and after further realizing that I was thinking of my interaction with Roiðid as one which both of us were trying to "win").

Twelve years later, the ordeal was over and I was back at our guest cabin in the Geysir Center picking bits of granite and lava out of my flesh.

PH, last night: "You were in such a good mood today!"

Me: "Thanks!"

Me: "..."

Me: "How do you mean?  Am I not normally in a good mood?"

Persephone (PH's name is Persephone, btw, although people do sometimes call her PH, especially friends from work, and, sometimes, me): "Sometimes you're not...  Sometimes you're fussy."

Fussy?

Me: "Fussy?"

Persephone: "Yeah, like -- sometimes babies are fussy about stuff.  Like that."

* * *

First disappointment of this trip (a minor one, certainly): does the photo below look like a photo of a manual gearshift?  I didn't think so.  This is the shift of the car we've rented for the non-Reykjavik portion of our trip, and it was to have, explicitly, a "manual transmission."  Not because I ordered it that way from Hertz; just because that's what Hertz told me it'd have: a manual transmission, not an automatic one.

I was looking forward to this in a vague sort of way.  All of the cars we had when I was growing up were stick-shifts, including the large Chevrolet station wagon we had, which had to be special-ordered from the factory that way because (I guess) nobody else was interested in having a stick shift on that type of car.

Right, so but this...

...is the shift of a car with an automatic transmission (yes, with the goofy ability to be shifted "manually" if the driver pushes the stick to the left and then jerks it backwards or forwards to change gears, but this is far, far, far from a real manual transmission where you must apply the clutch before shifting from first into second, and second into third, and third into fourth, etc.).  I miss feeling the engine when you grip the knob of a stick-shift car, and when you live in New York City and don't own a car, you don't get to drive sticks often, because most rental cars in the U.S. are automatics.  So I was looking forward to that: to feeling the engine.  But: whatever.

(Astute readers will also note that the shift above is a mutant version of what we North Americans expect automatic shifts to look like: fine, "E" means "D" (drive) in some language or other, but where's "P"?  There's no "P": no park.  The idea, you see, with this transmission, is to leave the car in neutral when you turn off the ignition.  Not park, because there is no park.  Which is fine: what is the point of park, anyway?  One problem, though: someone who's used to "throwing it into park" as the last step before turning off the engine will, with a shifter such as the one above, habitually throw it into reverse instead, since reverse occupies the "top" position on the shift, the position reserved for park on any other automatic I've driven.  This car, though, doesn't like being left in reverse; I found that out the non-easy way yesterday when it petulantly refused to be shifted out of reverse when I wanted to start it after having left it to its own devices for a few hours.  An extremely nice Dutch man (perhaps sensing that we were from New York, and wishing to grease the wheels of the NYC-Holland special friendship) wanted very, very, very, very-very much to help PH and me with this problem, but it sort of solved itself eventually.)

Anyway, here is our non-manually transmissioned carriage (Persephone's middle finger is visible through the front windshield):

Our last night in Reykjavik (aside from the final night of our trip, which we'll also spend there), we got into our automatic Toyota and drove thirty miles south to Stokkseyri, a small fishing village where Vid Fjorubordid, an unassuming restaurant, serves excellent lobster.  Two of our friends had recommended making the forty-minute drive from Reyk for this ("Reyk" is what we Iceland experts call Reykjavik), so that's what we did, in our rental car that does the shifting for you.  (Actually, nobody calls Reykjavik "Reyk"; sorry: I lied again, like when I lied about the JFK photo -- sorry.  Also, I'm not an Iceland expert: no really, I'm not.)

Anyway, here's the beach at Stokkseyri.  The village wasn't much to look at -- wasn't, actually, a village at all -- but the shore was beautiful:

...And here's a sign hanging on a chain which crossed the path from the seawall down to the actual beach.  "LOKAD" means, and I'm paraphrasing here, "Welcome foreign peoples to our small, Wasilla-like village; please it is that you will come down to the beach and walk about!", and we were tempted, but the lobster over at Vid Fjorubordid beckoned...

...which was great except that it wasn't great in the following way: Persephone believes that she is violently allergic to lobster.  She believes this because when she was six, she was on a family trip to Maine and she ate some lobster and, soon thereafter, revisited it onto her mom and dad and also onto her two older brothers, and hasn't eaten lobster since.

She gave it a shot anyway.  She did not order the lobster (she ordered the only other entree on the menu, the lamb), but she did order the "lobster soup" to start.  And gingerly dipped into it, and did not become ill, although she did come close to self-inducing a panic attack.

And I had the lobster...

...which was excellent (and unlike the American Lobster -- or "Maine Lobster," although this type of lobster seldom comes from Maine -- which we're used to in much of the U.S.).

After which we returned to Reykjavik.  After which, the next morning, we left Reykjavik for the Blue Lagoon.

* * *

The Blue Lagoon is probably Iceland's largest tourist draw -- our Lonely Planet called it Iceland's Eiffel Tower or Disney World, although it reminded me more of the Kennedy Space Center than anything else.  Anyway, the Blue Lagoon is odd in this way: it is a completely made-up place.

And what is it?  First, let's talk about where it is.  It is fairly close to the airport at Keflavik (the large international airport serving Reykjavik) and like Keflavik, it is in the middle of fucking nowhere.  And when I say "fucking nowhere," I mean this...

...a "tortured lava field" (nice turn of phrase, Lonely Planet, and I mean that) which you might easily mistake for the surface of the moon.

The deal with the Blue Lagoon is this: Iceland, an island, thrust itself from beneath the ocean a mere seventeen million years ago.  It is highly volcanic, and (literally) bubbling with geothermal activity.  Iceland generates something like eighty percent (maybe more) of its power by capturing the energy of all of this activity.  In the 1970s, the Svartsengi geothermal power plant was built to trap the extremely hot water which is vented from the lava field near what is now the Blue Lagoon by running the water through turbines, generating electricity.

When the Svartsengi plant is "done" with the water, the water is still very hot, so it's run through a heat exchanger to heat water for a nearby water utility.  After that, the water is still pretty hot, a nice 104 degrees Fahrenheit or so, and it's this water which flows into the pond-sized, man-made "lagoon" which has, for a few decades, been called the Blue Lagoon.  The water is rich in sulfur and other minerals, so rich that it looks less like water and more like skim milk.  And when the sky is blue, the water looks like light-blue skim milk.  (Perhaps it's naturally a bit blueish too, but I don't think so.)

Anyway, I took many photos of this weird Blue Lagoon phenomenon which is man-made, yes, but which couldn't exist were it not for an extremely powerful, naturally occurring phenomenon (boiling water leaking from the surface of the earth); this photo sort of captures things...

...although none of my photos (or even a video I took, and no, I did not take a video camera into the pond-thing with me; I just used my little still camera's poor-quality-video-making capability, mostly to "interview" Persephone about her thoughts on Tha Lagoon) capture the eeriest thing about this place: the steam which constantly but slightly irregularly rolls across the surface of the water.  I've never seen anything like it, except maybe in 8 1/2.

Here's another photo I took (of Lagoon-overflow water); I like it mostly because it gives one almost no sense of scale (this "river" of mineral-rich water happens to be about five feet across, but it could just as easily be fifty, seems to me, or 500):

And finally, a statue of a child peeing in a parking lot at a gas station (near Reykjavik):