4 Airports later...

After four different airports (Minneapolis, Chicago, Boston, and Reykjavik) in less than 24 hours, I am now settled in a guesthouse in Iceland (desperately missing the 6 hours of sleep I gave up)!  It was a long trip, but we all made it safely, and I only set off security alarms once.  I got to spend some time sitting between two strangers on the plane to Boston, which was fun.  My American seat buddy didn't believe me when I told him that he was using half of my seatbelt, but we got that all figured out, and then bonded over how boring Iowa is (he had been visiting there).  The other seat buddy just sat there the whole time reading Freakonomics in some symbol language (Chinese?).

When we got to Iceland today, we bought our tickets to The Blue Lagoon, and thermal hot springs spa.  We arrived in Iceland really early in the morning, so we had a bit of a wait until the bus took us there, and watched the weather outside, it looked kind of windy, which reminded me a little too much of Moorhead.

When we got to the Blue Lagoon, we gave them our tickets (and paid about $20 to rent a towel and robe), and got our admission bracelets, which also had a computer chip built into them to charge food on to and to use to lock our lockers.  It was pretty impressive I thought.  We then all showered together (which brought back waay too many memories of 6th grade gym class), braved the cold with in our swim suits and bare feet, and finally entered the actual lagoon.  It was not quite what I expected, you couldn't see into the water further than a few inches, and they warned us not to put our hair underwater or it would get really dried out.

This is the main part of the lagoon, where we were.












Here's me, next to the lagoon.









After we left the lagoon, we found the place where we will be staying for the rest of the weekend, got settled, and made supper.  Our guesthouse is close to Hallgrímskirkja, a church that is the 6th tallest building in Iceland.  In addition to be super tall, it has bells which chime ever 15 minutes, just like the belltower at Concordia!  We went on a walk to see what we could find, one of the highlights for me was the crosswalk sign.  The don't walk signal is a red light with a sad face on it :(, and the walk signal is green with a smiley face :).  I think the US should get some too! 

Here is Hallgrimskirkja, the Lutheran church that was close to where we were staying.

I tried to put the camera on the ground and tried to take a picture with the church, but it was REALLY windy and my camera started blowing away. 

Here is the smiley face walking light.

Here is the red don't walk light.











Tomorrow we will go on a walking tour of the city, and do a bit of independent sightseeing.  Once I find a cord to connect my camera to the computer and figure out how to put pictures on here, I will share some visuals of what I have done so far.

**NEW on 1 Februar 2011: picture of what I mentioned in this blog. YAY!**

Ready or Not, Here I Go!

     Hi! As most of you probably know, this is Bente's blog.  I have started it since tomorrow (techinically today, I guess), I am boarding a plane and heading to the country I was born in, Norway.  I will be living in Lillehammer and visiting other places in the next four months through a program called Scandinavia and the Baltic.  This is a really great opportunity for me, and I am really grateful to be able to go, since it kind of fell into my lap at the last moment, right at the end of the 09-10 school year.  It's a great program because it will meet the Concordia requriements I still have while allowoing me to study abroad for a semester, something that's fairly rare for an elementary education major.  I also didn't have to know any Norwegian to be able to go, so that's good, but I am excited to learn some, and share some with you, my readers :)  If I'm really brave, maybe I will eventually attempt a whole post in Norwegian.

     I am really excited to leave tomorrow, although I don't think it's really sunk in yet.  Maybe that's because I have procrastinated, as usual, and am not completely packed yet.  I don't have any nervous butterflies or anything...like I told a few friends I've been chatting with as I finish up packing, I feel normal, which isn't normal. 
 
     I'm not really a person that likes to share--I don't see the point of Twitter and I rarely update my facebook status, so this blog thing feels a little weird to me.  We'll see how it goes. As I've been going through my room in the last month, I have found a few diaries that I started as a child, and none of them had more than 3 or 4 entries.  My goal is to keep you all a bit more in the loop and use this as a place to talk about what is happening in my world.  Let's see how I do with beating my childhood record of journal keeping! 

Just a fun note: the picture on the background of this blog right now is a picture I took in Lillehammer when I visited there with my family in 2007.