"We've Never Found Anything Living In Here, Not Even a Spider" = The Perfect Cave

Awesome day down in the lava tube and snorkeling. Got picked up at 9am by Greman (or something like that) and boarded the van. Greman turned out to be pretty great: big mustache which he called his love brush, swore a lot, had a lot of opinions about the Icelandic government. There was also a cute Icelandic girl named Thora who was doing some sort of field work for school (also, something like that). The only other guest on the tour was an older woman from Chicago. We drove out to this lava tube outside of Reykjavik, which was just a narrow entranceway in the ground. Needless to say, there were a lot of Bear quotes running through my head ("and these rocks are just so slippy," etc.). The lava cave was pretty awesome, and at the end you felt like "yea I just crawled 65 meters underground through a mother fucking lava cave."

After the cave, we got some Icelandic meat soup at the gas station (I guess that means the meat was people meat). We continued on to our next destination: snorkeling in the Silfras Fissure. The Silfras is located between the Eurasian and American tectonic plates. Got into our dry suits and took off down this little river. I had rented an underwater camera from the tour company, but that thing ran out of batteries about three photos in. At various points swimming in the 35 degree water, I thought my mouth was going to freeze off (it didn't), but all in all, it actually didn't feel that cold. Ended the day by jumping off this little rock, which was actually deceptively high. Griman took a video of me jumping in, in which he narrated. It's pretty great.

For din I went over to Icelandic Fish and Chips, a nice little establishment down by the water. I'm always very confused in these places as to how to order and what to do. Whenever I walk in a place, it always feels like that scene from the Lonely Guy (a Steve Martin movie), where he asks for a table for one, the restaurant goes silent, and the spotlight shines on him. This fish and chips was a more upscale take on the matter, but it worked, there was a lot of food, and it was relatively cheap. Headed over to Kofi Tomasar Fraenda for a couple beers after that. This place is pretty cool... just below street level, more laid back. Not much going on on a Tuesday night, so the cat is signing off early to get up for the breakfast buffet.

- CM