evening activities

We are done with the field portion of the school and are spending the next several days in the lab and finishing our reports. However we have been taking advantage of the daylight evening hours to explore what Reykjavik has to offer. Friday night we went whale watching and had dinner on Vidney Island. Thursday through Saturday summer nights in Reykjavik are a bit crazy and prone to all night partying so when we returned to the harbor about 20 of us decide to join in the reveling.



Whale watching : Minky whale, also known as "stinky minky" for the wonderful smell they emit when they come up for a breath.





















Jeff and Sonnet keeping an eye out for pirates.
Jeff is quite the photographer and I am looking forward to seeing his images. He is in the Astrobiology program at University of Washington so if I end up going to Seattle I will hopefully get to hang out with him more. Despite his liberal leanings, Jeff was in the army for most of his 20's and did an early tour in Afghanistan and Iraq. He had some interesting opinions of what is going on over there and how half-hearted our occupation of Afghanistan was.




Puffin Island!














Kids at the bow of the boat.












Vidney Island. We had dinner here but did not get to see the rest of the island (despite its small size) so I may go back here for an evening once the program is over. The waitresses seemed really unhappy to be serving us and got mean when we ordered a bottle of wine to share rather than individual glasses. They made a show of pouring a VERY full glass for Vlada when he ordered just a glass to show us what we were missing out on, but then didn't our such a full glass for anyone else who ordered just a glass. Very bizarre. We were trying to figure out what we did to piss them off.


Pseudo sunset over the harbor (the sun didn't actually set for another hour and a half)












For the record, an excellent large group social activity happens to be Karaoke. When you have a large group of people in a bar, the tend to split into small groups of varying conversations. However, when there is music, we are all focusing on the performer and singing along. It was great fun. I sang "Let's here it for the boy", "Hey Jealousy" and a version of "I want you to want me" ( it was much slower than I was expecting it to be and I felt like I was singing a country version). A group of the boys sang "total eclipse of the heart" much to our delight:















They really got into it! We had our own "boy" band.
We finished of the night with a rousing rendition of "Summer Nights" with the full group, boys on one side of the stage, girls on the other. So much fun! The Icelanders were less than pleased with our performance...maybe they've not heard of Grease? But we had a blast and that was all that mattered.


Coming home at the end of the night - 3 am Reykjavik the party was just getting started...
















Update:
The next day were were all pretty through...most people were napping ont he couches outside the classroom any chance they got, while others (Brittany, Matt and Jeff) decided to have a coffee challenge. This was the tally at dinner.