Day 12

Today was our last full day of staying at the student hostel on the University of Reykjavik’s campus.  After three hours of language class we said a nice goodbye to our wonderful teacher.  In the afternoon, all of us went to the Reykjavik swimming pool Sundhöll for the second time.  The rainy, overcast, windy weather made it the perfect day for relaxing in some warm geothermal pools.  Plus the pool area is huge, with full sized indoor and outdoor swimming pools as well as a steam room, sauna, cold and warm pools.  Several other Snorri participants and I even played in the kiddie warm pool for a little while.  It had a fun structure that looked like the nozzle of a watering can and had water pouring out over the top of the structure on all sides.  After enjoying 2+ hours in the different pools relaxing and swimming some laps we walked back to the hostel and checked out a few shops along the way.  One the stores, called IceWear, was like an Icelandic miniature version of an REI store, which I found very amusing to look around in.

For dinner, we were invited to have dinner at the house of our program coordinator Ásta Sól, which is conveniently located downtown.  We had a great dinner full of hot dogs, burgers, salad and potatoes while watching the Argentina-Croatia football game.  Amazingly, Croatia won with three goals and Argentina ended up with making no goals at all.  Tomorrow is the Nigeria-Iceland game that everyone here is SO excited for.  After the game finished, we watched a documentary Ásta made about the 2004 Snorri program which was very well done and made me sad to hear about the participants not wanting to leave Iceland at the end of the program. 

On a different note, tomorrow I will be meeting the first family of living relatives that I will be staying with.  The mother of the family will pick me up tomorrow afternoon and I will be staying with her until Monday in Reykjavik only a few blocks from where I’m currently staying.  Then I’ll be picked up by my second host family where I’ll be staying in Akranes a 40 minutes drive north of Reykjavik and volunteering with the municipality there for about three weeks!

Sadly, I have no new pictures to share today! But I’ll try to take one with my host family and some of the football game tomorrow!