In the summer of 2024, Mr. BooksandTea and I took a trip to Reykjavik, Iceland, to celebrate my then-upcoming 40th birthday. We had a lovely time, and posted lots of photos and detailed status updates to Facebook.
I’m debating leaving Facebook, but I don’t want to lose those posts, so I’m sharing them here for posterity. The post below is an expanded version of two Facebook updates I made on July 29th.
Reykjavik, day 3!
The first event of the day involved stuff that’s pretty much the definition of Not Safe For Work. So if you happen to be my mom, a small child, a generally squeamish person, or some sort of authority figure, you have been warned.
Any authority figures left? No?
Y’all.
Dicks. We saw SO MANY dicks today at the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which is apparently one of the most popular museums in Iceland, and the only one in the world dedicated to the study and preservation of penises.
Ungulate ones. Rodent ones. Cetacean ones. Ones preserved in jars in formaldehyde. Ones carved out of wood. Plaster casts of human ones. Even ones that the curators claim to be from supernatural beings. That special adults-only room in that Pompeii exhibit that stopped in the Royal Ontario Museum a few years back has NOTHING on this.
The interesting thing is that after a while, seeing such a variety of specimens stops being salacious and quickly becomes clinical, even blasé.
However, maybe that’s just adulthood talking. Mr. BooksandTea pointed out to me that there was a family visiting at the same time as us with multiple young boys under 10 years old; although the mother chastised them, they wouldn’t stop mugging and making lewd gestures at each other.
There were, of course, plenty of themed knick-knacks and souvenirs in the gift shop, from shot glasses to tote bags and and the kind of candy and pasta that you hear about as gag gifts at bachelorette parties. We bought some for a friend back home, so all of us — him included, obviously — could joke about eating a bag of dicks.
Afterwards, we walked along the waterfront and got a chance to take in Harpa, Reykjavik’s renowned concert hall. The exterior is so distinctive that it’s often used as a shooting location for film and TV. Further walks down the waterfront took us to the famous Sun Voyager sculpture, with its minimalistic steel bars glinting in the sunlight. Reykjavik’s shoreline really is stunning – the clouds and seabirds are constant, but you can see across to the other side of the large natural harbour, where Mt. Esja is coated in fog. We finished that stretch of the walk by finding a food hall downtown, where I was able to order pho and fresh rolls from a Thai restaurant.
Later on, we visited the Icelandic Punk Museum, which was right down the street from our hotel; it was originally a public bathroom before it was converted to its current state. The curator/cashier for the museum was an old guy with a mohawk who exuded a very appropriate aura of contempt for visitors. I was too scared to take a picture of him, even though I took a picture of almost everything else.
I need to admit something: probably about 50% of why I wanted to visit Iceland in the first place is that I was a huge fan of Bjork in high school. Her presence in the Icelandic Punk Museum was inescapable, even though it does its level best to not turn itself into the Bjork show. Still, her name and face and voice show up all over the place.
To finish off our day, we took part in an evening walking tour about the folklore of Reykjavik. The weather was sunny and mid-teens, and I even got a bit of a sunburn. Our tour guide said it was probably one of the top 10 warmest days of the year, one of the only ones where you could walk around comfortably with just a t-shirt. As a Canadian, we found that the summer weather in Iceland was equivalent to a spring day here — mostly damp, hovering in the low teens. We were fine with our spring jackets and a few layers, but it was the kind of weather that, back home, would have me reaching for a cozy blanket and a mug of tea. As you can surmise from this site as a whole, this is not a huge stretch for me!
