It's an ology

The facades of the Harpa Concert Hall are a honeycomb of programmable glass. The windows have been turned into rainbows and national flags. All sorts of images are possible, but when we were there I only saw it shimmering like the scales of a huge fish or perhaps the ripples on a dark lake.

Like everything in downtown Reykjavik it was a short walk from our hotel. The Prime Minister's office is over the road and the Parliament is just round the corner. I'd just walked down to the ocean but now I was going again, this time with company. We went into the concert hall just to soak up the feel of civic culture, we didn't have time for a show while we were there. Outside the rain was back and this time it was horizontal. We (I) made a bad navigation choice, thinking that the turning back to the hotel was about one-third of the distance it actually was. My dress wasn't entirely inappropriate. I had my hat, gloves, scarf and jacket tightly done up, but my jeans got soaked. And the wind was coming from the north - that means just over the straits from Greenland - that means very cold.

Having escaped to the relative shelter of a side street, we staggered up the hill to our familiar locale and bundled into the nearest thing that said it sold food. We hung our outer clothes up, dried off and filled our tummies with delicious local lamb chops. We found out later that the reason the lamb tastes so good is that they are basically allowed to run wild in the mountains and their foothills through the summer and then rounded up when the nights get shorter.

I took Laura to see the supermarket (I know how to show a girl a good time) and she picked up things I would never have. A little further along the street was a fashion store that carried swimwear, so naturally, in Iceland, in November, she bought a new bikini. We were running out of things to do in the downtown area and so we went to the museum up the road. Erla had pointed it out to us the night before with a smirk. It is dedicated to Phallology - the study of the male member.

The foyer was full of giggling women and their less-giggly male companions. The museum was smaller than I'd expected, though of course size isn't everything. It had a fairly comprehensive collection of mammalian phalluses ranging from the enormous blue whale down to the tiniest dormouse and lots in between. In totally unrelated news, Laura had a headache and felt a little faint after walking round for a while, so we thanked the curators and made our way out and back through precipitation which had now turned to snow.

Back at the hotel, we found that we'd been e-mailed by the company we'd booked with to go out on a boat to try to find Northern Lights. They would be going out tonight and we needed to be there at 10pm.