Iceland - Day 8

It has been another wet, wet day. But not as cold or dramatically changeable as yesterday. We decided to head into Reykajvìk and hang out at the big mall everyone has told us about, Kringlan Mall. That would give us a place to walk around and see, and it has a parking garage so we didn´t have to get out in the weather even to get to the stores. Shopping is definitely not on Jimmie´s favorite anything list, but he doesn´t mind browsing so I think we all enjoyed it. We have bought very little while here, and we didn´t buy much today other than a late lunch, because everything is expensive.

But I ran into an Iceland oddity again so perhaps I should try to describe it. They have the strangest revolving doors here, at least I had never seen one like them before. At the entrance to the malls and larger stores there is a large, metal circle in the floor (maybe 8 feet across) with a glass wall that spins around it. There are 2 breaks in this wall allowing you to step into the circle and walk across to the other side to step out when there is an opening, which works wonderfully well to keep the bad weather out of the store. But there is also a glass wall that goes through the center of the circle that spins around with the outer wall. It always gives me a sense of urgency - we have to get out of that circle quickly before that center wall smacks you. Of course, they also use part of the space to set up displays which is rather interesting. They spin with the wall.

Another thing that we saw today was a rainbow. Katrece noticed it spanning the inlet where all the ships are docked at Reykjavìk as we were driving to the evening´s workshop. It went right across the water below the clouds as though touching both sides of the land, and looked so close it seemed that we could have driven right over to it. It has been years since I have seen a rainbow at home and they always look so high and faraway there. The ladies tonight were a bit surprised at our enthusiasm over the rainbow because they are quite commonplace here.

Katrece and I finished out lessons for the workshop tonight. The workshop runs through tomorrow but 2 of the ladies, Anna and Svanhildur, are leaving tomorrow morning flying to Budapest for the weekend and asked if there was anyway we could hurry our part. Since they didn´t want to miss anything we were happy to do that. So today our Ladies´class took a bit more than an hour as Katrece and I spoke back to back. The brothers and sisters here have asked some really good questions and I´m pleased by their interest.

- Linda