ICELAND: DAY EIGHT

I'm writing this at 10 pm from a hotel room in Reykjiavik. Our guided coach tour has ended, but we still have two more days here in the area of the city before we fly home. We are both tired and, as Leonard Cohen said "I ache in the places where I used to play" ... but also very happy



Collette and I are both very sad that our tour was over. It was indeed an incredible, eye opening experience, shared by some very likeable and interesting people from all over the world .. well an awful lot of folks from Belgium but as it turns out, that is not a bad thing at all



The day began with a visit to the Friheimer farm for an event that we both have been antcipating: A demonstration of the Iceland horse





As I stated in a previous post, the Icelandic horse is considered to be one of the purest strains in the world. Importing other breeds of horse is strictly forbidden here and this horse has remained true to itself for countless generations. Is the Icelandic horse a snob? Well if you were that pretty you would be as well, and who could argue with you

It was explained to us that another thing that makes this breed of horse unique is the fact that while most horses have two or three gaits, the Icelandic horse has five. The family that owns the farm demonstrated one of these special gaits by riding the horse around the ring while carring a mug of beer, without spilling very much. How cool is that? Oh, waitress ...

From one of the many animal wonders of Iceland (I was going to use the term "bestial" but as we all know, this isn't that kind of blog) we went on to check out one of the inumerable natural wonders. This time it was a geyser and, in the practical way of the Icelanders, it was called .... Geyser.

Gosh, didn't see that one coming did you.

From the geyser we went to visit the site of the original Icelandic parliment, established around 930 AC, making it one of the oldest parliments on the planet .. making it a Viking parliment, dude, so don't you mess with our democracy or we'll cut off your head and use it as a flag .. um ..er... well really, nothing like that. But a boy can dream can't he?

As always, I'm going to keep this short. We have a full day tomorrow in which we plan to visit more of Reykiavik (have I ever spelled that same way twice? If so, please ignore) hopefully to hit a couple of art galleries, do some shopping and visit a site where they've excavated the oldest building in the city... or we may just hang around the hotel room and drink Viking beer in our underwear.