Day 3: Reykjavik, Iceland

Through the Eyes of a Choirboy: Kolton Ascheman

"Episode 5: time to BREAK-FAST

9:06 am ICL – 4:06 AMR

Adam calls out, “Rise & Shine!” as I tiredly woke up. We changed and chewed up breakfast. We really had to hurry because a full concert was soon [at Reykjavik City Hall]. It was a standard cereal, toast, nice breakfast. What I don’t believe is that tomorrow we wake up at 3 AM! GOODBYE ICELAND!!! L Anyways, It changed to a 40 minute concert. After breakfast we toured the town by feet and bus. Joel, Josh, and I were “surfing” on the bus. Then we took a nap. I woke up and we got to go SWIMMING! We left the church and headed our way.

Episode 6: WATER you waiting for?

Adam and Kenny were really rushing us. They said we had limited time. We had to SPRINT uphill and I thought I was going to die. But I made it. They had an indoor and outdoor pool. And a really cool slide. The S.S. was funny. All you do is you walk through the gate slowly then it crashes you. After that we had one minute till supper, so we shuttled our way back and unfortunately we were 35 minutes late but the church was not finished cooking. For supper, we had the original spaghetti. Plus we had Charlie’s b-day! Iceland’s culture is to have the cake with milk in a bowl. Then we went to bed."

The boys got up and had a European breakfast—toast with ham, cheese, etc…well, and of course, corn flakes! ;) After breakfast was finished, the boys warmed up for their concert at the City Hall in Reykjavik. We had to rely on public transportation (transit bus) to get us there, so we had to rush the boys in order to make it to the bus stop on time! We made it, and we took up most of the bus!! We got off in downtown Reykjavik and our host, Bjarney, told us about some Icelandic culture and history. We walked around downtown a bit, and visited a few churches, then made our way to the City Hall.

The City Hall was pretty unique—it was a concrete structure built over water! When you walk inside the windows are even with the water level. It was pretty sweet! The boys did a short concert (about 40 minutes) and drew a big crowd of passersby.

Following the concert, we took the boys out for a little shopping. Unfortunately everything is Iceland is SUPER expensive—particularly souvenir shops. For an idea of how expensive stuff was…t-shirts (which typically runs around $20 in souvenir shops) were between $25-35! They also had simple “Iceland” refrigerator magnets that ran around $7. Many of the boys spent between $30-50 on just a few souvenirs in Iceland.

Then we returned to the church for a rest period. After their nap, we took the boys to an indoor/outdoor geothermal pool with a giant spiral water slide. We only had about an hour and fifteen minutes until dinner and the walk to the pool was about 25 minutes. We hesitated whether or not to go since they couldn’t stay long, but most of the boys wanted to go. After we got there, they all loved it and didn’t want leave! We ran back to the church for dinner (which we were nearly late for already!). Fortunately for us they weren’t quite done cooking yet, so it wasn’t a big issue. We had homemade spaghetti and garlic bread. They boys loved it, because they made about four times as much as they would have needed! Then to top off the night, we celebrated Charlie’s birthday with a yummy chocolate cake and candles, singing “Happy Birthday” and the LOLCB tradition…”Happy Birthday to Me.” Charlie was surprised and he was excited to see that his parents had also given him some birthday gifts!

We had to go to bed directly following dinner since we had to get up at 2:30am to catch our flight to Frankfurt! Today was our last day in Iceland! Tomorrow we fly to Germany!