Last day of the School

Monday was the last day of the school and as soon as we finished our lab reports we were pretty much free. Bethany, Vlada and I went and got some chai from a wonderful little hippy cafe and then had lunch at the best Thai restaurant in Reykjavik. The food was awesome. It may just have been that I was so happy to not be eating red meat but fragrant jasmine rice and spicy curry was heavenly.

From there, Bethany returned to the hotel and Vlada and I wandered the streets fro a few hours ending up in a music shop called "rin". Rin is Vlada's nickname, short for Rinato, long story how he got it, but he was excited to see the shop and tried out a few guitars and fell in love with this one, which has a serpent coiled around the neck...interesting/weird thing about him falling in love with this guitar was that there was a bright red, half eaten apple on the ground outside the shop...perhaps an omen?



The final meal was held at the Perlan. The Perlan used to be large holding tanks for geothermal water but has since been converted into a posh restaurant with a revolving floor and an observation deck. The night started out with our choice of cocktails on the terrace, followed by a three course meal with a wine paired with each course. Our table was fortuitously next to the wine table and we (ok, I) convinced Matt to refill our glasses fromt he already opened bottles. This is how may glasses Carrie has had!













Bet you can't guess what the main course was? Thats right! Red meat and potatoes. bleck. Seriously I am not eating red meat again for like a year, if ever. But desert was chocolate cake and the view was awesome.









Brittany and I: it was windy.













Several of us stayed to watch the sunset. The sun dipped below the horizon, but because it is going down at such a low angle it reappeared on the side of the mountain.




Not sure what Thomas is doing here, but almost certainly alcohol was involved.













Vlada making Marizilla swoon.







Wolf is a walking search engine. He can answer just about any question you throw at him. I am not sure what he is telling us here, but I am sure it was good. It was amazing. One night we were trying to remember what year the winter Olympics were in Tahoe so we called him over. At first he said he had no idea, but then 5seconds later he said "Oh it was 1960!" and then continued with why it was there that year, and who won the downhill skiing that year etc. Seriously it was like you typed the question into google, it thought about it and then gave you more information than you thought was possible! Truly amazing.

I was known for giving good backrubs and head massages...Erik was having these horrid headaches the first week we were there and so I was trying to help relieve them. Then I gave some people the business (as my yoga teacher Kat says) in the yoga I led. Then people were making their shoulders available to me all the time. Its fine, I love it...but perhaps I should have gone to massage school rather than having gotten my PhD?

Don't Vlada and Matt looked relaxed, though?



We sat in the bar until the waiters finally kicked us out around 1am.

On the way home we split, some going directly to the hotel and a group of us (Jeff, Bethany, Aaron, Vlada, Kristen, Jonas and I) going to the Viking Ship to decide whether to stay up and watch the sunrise.

Jeff the Viking climber!


Turns out we had a bit to wait so we headed back to the hotel where most of the rest of our group was in the lobby drinking and hanging out. Around 4am the hotel served us croissants and coffee and at 4:30 the bus came to take most of our groupr to the airport to catch 7am flights. It was sad to see them go. This was a really great group of people. We really could have ende dup with a bunch of duds or a lot of drama, but for the most part everyone got along well and we have made some great connections for future collaborations. I feel very fortunate to have been included on this trip.