Our last full day in Europe! (If, that is, you include Iceland in Europe -- which is really a challenging thing to do once you’ve been there.)
Our last day was very low-key and leisurely.
We started off by enjoying the interior of the Harpa, another controversial architectural wonder of Iceland. In this case, the controversy was largely around the cost of the concert hall given the economic crisis that hit Iceland in 2008-2011.
Apart from its timing, I can’t imagine this having been controversial in Iceland, however. Like the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the Harpa is a public space that is centered around the performing arts. A coffee shop and spacious interior provide a place for tourists, readers and casual visitors all day long. It seems perfect for Iceland.
From the Harpa we walked down to the main harbor of Reykjavík, which revealed another side of Iceland altogether. Icelandic fisheries compose over a quarter of Iceland’s GDP. It was great to get a little glimpse of the blue-collar industry there in the harbor.
The next visit of the day was to Landakotskirkja, formerly Christ the King Cathedral -- the only Roman Catholic church in Iceland. When I first encountered Hallgrímskirkja, I assumed that it was a distinctively Northern Protestant aesthetic I was encountering -- with a particularly modernist flavor. But here was a Roman Catholic cathedral predating Hallgrímskirkja by approximately fifty years that looked cut from the same stone!
I would later learn that Landakotskirkja and Hallgrímskirkja were in fact designed by the same architect -- Guðjón Samúelsson, one of the state architects of Iceland. But one way or the other, whatever aesthetic was acceptable to those who commissioned Hallgrímskirkja was also previously acceptable for the small number of Roman Catholics in Iceland.
The last major site we visited in Iceland was described as a hidden gem of Reykjavík -- Elliðaárdalur park. This was one of the purely leisurely portions of the trip, strolling through an urban reserve with wildflowers, trees, and the salmon filled pools of the Ellidaár river.
The kids ran on ahead and hid in various places, waiting for us to walk by without seeing them. We paused at a large pool. Enjoyed some familiar and some unfamiliar flora.
The river seemed to be at a low or moderate flow, but nonetheless we happened upon a fisherman at one of the pools who caught a salmon on a fly. I seriously considered getting a license. Dietrich found a recently dead salmon (maybe a fishing kill) and when he held it up with a club in his hand to make a joke drew more attention than we were hoping for.
We took the bus back to the motel, and Jen and I went strolling in downtown Reykjavík for one last European evening.
Day 26 Reflection
You could argue that going to a park like Elliðaárdalur is a waste of one’s precious time in a foreign land.
After all, in one sense, this is an experience that can be replicated in any major urban area that has maintained even some dim connection to the living world beneath and before it. I experience something like Elliðaárdalur every time I make the hike from Minnehaha Falls to the Mississippi River. I have experienced this in a slightly different way in places as diverse as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and San Antonio. There is nothing genuinely unique about Elliðaárdalur.
But it is not the idiosyncratic alone that one goes in search of when one travels. It is also the universal -- the familiar smell of the city receding, flowers uncontained by neat garden walls, the Icelandic fisherman’s joy in his catch so like my joy, a joy even deeper than the catch.
As Norman Maclean wrote in A River Runs Through It:
“I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by and I who watched. On the river the heat mirages danced with each other and then they danced through each other and then they joined hands and danced around each other. Eventually the watcher joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river.”
Perhaps I should save anything more for a final reflection upon Europe.
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