A Billion Photos of Iceland

I'm home! My flight landed half past three yesterday, and I only ate, took a shower and headed right to bed. The trip was tiring, but fun! I was working at Paradox Convention 2013, arranged by the publisher my company works with, Paradox Interactive. The convention is all about showing off new and upcoming games, so if you are interested in games, have a peek! I'm working on Cities in Motion 2 but there's no release date yet, so you have to wait a little longer for that one :)

The highlights of the journey to Iceland would include:

1. Cuisine
Icelandic people eat basic anything on the island, but fish is the most important part of their diet. I happen to love fish (and my other half hates it, so we almost never have any fish meals at home) so having many different kinds of salmon in the hotel breakfast buffet made me super happy! I also had at least three meals of sushi during the trip ;P

2. The landscape
Finland has so much forest area that the whole country could be considered one big forest, basically ;) So for me, seeing the treeless tundra of Iceland was an intense experience! Also the black volcanic rock, green moss and huge rough mountains looked gorgeous.

3. The Blue Lagoon spa
This was totally the greatest place ever! It was the last stop on Saturday's sightseeing tour and everyone was a bit tired, so no one was really expecting anything grand. We were so wrong. The Blue Lagoon is a geothermal spa, where visitors bathe in an outside pool filled with hot water heated with geothermal energy. The water is rich in minerals, and is milky white, which is nice if you feel a bit shy in a swimsuit. No one will see any parts you keep under the water ;P And the deepest part was only up to my neck, which was good, since I'm not a good swimmer. The Icelanders must be geniuses, because they had a bar set up so that you could buy beer, smoothies and ice cream without even getting out of the water! I can't think of anything nicer than being in warm water and drinking cold beer at the same time ;D I didn't even mind the short time when it hailed, it nicely cooled the beer.

4. Hanging out with the Swedes
I've studied Swedish for six years (it's mandatory in Finland) but had totally forgotten it because I never needed the language after my studies. But after being surrounded by many Swedes for four days, it started to come back to me! I understood most of what they said if they spoke slowly, and could form short sentences, like telling how I constantly woke up fifteen minutes before my alarm went off. Now I'm planning to visit Stockholm or ask my Dad to speak only Swedish to me, so I could brush up my skills ;P

Now on to the pictures!

This was the theme of the sight seeing tour at first, it was raining
and super windy!

This is the same waterfall I posted earlier, but the pic is taken with a better
camera. The waterfall was huge and the guide told us the water is mainly
melting water from the mountains, and that in springtime there's much more
water going through it.

Early morning landscape. It became light only after ten o'clock.

A view of a mountain from a geyser field.

The geyser field again! All of the geysers had names, and this one had
a tiny house-shaped structure built on top of it so that it looked like steam
came out of its windows. There was also THE geyser, the one that gives its
name to the whole phenomenon.

Another hot pool, it was constantly bubbling hot water.

Pretty, pretty mountains. I think this was the mountain a fabled king was
buried under, but I ended up with like a hundred pictures of mountains so
it might be a different one. Pretty impressive, still ;)

More mountains.

A wet Icelandic horse and a mountain.

The locals grow vegetables in huge hothouses, naturally heated with geothermal
energy. They do need some artificial lighting still, since it's so dark in the winter months.

A small town and a mountain.

Yet another mountain ;P

I liked this mountain, too ;)

This is from the Blue Lagoon! That's not the pool where you bathe, but
it's a similar one, with the milky water with an impossible blue shade.

This was some of the youngest lava in the island. It's covered with evergreen
moss. There's also some mountains.

Look, more mountains!