Views of Sequim, the Olympic Peninsula. . .and beyond
Before we head back to the U.S. and my hometown, I thought I’d show a few more buildings in Reykjavik that caught my eye while we were there. This one is on the main shopping street.
This one was nestled back in an alleyway. I love the polka dots and stripes.
And here’s a nod to Art Deco. Notice the dark shapes to the bottom left of the shot? Those were small columns with the look of basalt that were dividing lanes on the street.
Some of the murals I saw in Reykjavik were colorful, like this one.
And this one. Its colors seem to subtly wrap around the edge of the building on the horizontal panels, above left.
But the mural didn’t need to have a lot of color to be interesting, like this one in a residential area.
The detail was amazing.
Are you ready to see some of the other reasons we went to Iceland? I’ll show you tomorrow.
When faced with graffiti, people in Reykjavik found that if they treated their blank walls as canvases and invited or commissioned art on them that there was less likelihood that they would be tagged. The result is a great array of art with many subjects and styles.
Many of the pieces I found were in downtown shopping areas.
It adorned parking structures.
I found it on courtyard walls, set back from streets.
And it certainly wasn’t boring. I’ll show you more tomorrow.
It’s fun to discover public art in a new city. This basalt and bronze sculpture, “Unknown Bureaucrat,” by Magnus Tomasson, is found walking toward Reykjavik’s City Hall.
We found many other sculptures in parks and, like this one, in residential areas.
And there was fence art, too. Tomorrow I’ll show you what I found on some of the walls in Reykjavik.
Reykjavik’s Maritime Museum was high on our itinerary and it was one of the best we’ve visited. After a couple of other nearby stops we found ourselves at part of Reykjavik’s harbor.
It was a quiet time of day, though a nearby ship from Greenland was being loudly power washed in preparation for a new paint job.
As we moved closer to boats that make up the Icelandic fishery, DH pointed out these two boats, contemporary whalers. Iceland is one of the few countries in the world that has a whaling fleet. Whales are hunted for export to Japan and for domestic consumption. Apparently it’s popular with tourists.
Our seafood consumption was limited to fish and chips with the best, freshest cod I’ve ever eaten.
What makes a city interesting? In Reykjavik for me, certainly, it was the colors. And, on a grey day, the light that sliced through overcast after a day of gloom.
There’s a soothing presence of water, both as a feature of the city and by its nature as an island.
The tidy sensibility of Scandinavian design appeals.
And, for me, it’s always the pleasure of finding interesting and unusual details.
The streets in Reykjavik held very different sights than I’m used to in the U.S.
Older, more traditional buildings intermingle with newer, more modern features.
There is a sense of color that belies long, dark winters with short days.
The place is, simply, really interesting and presented eye candy at every turn. We walked a lot and enjoyed the sights.