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Luckily the day I had decided to dedicate as a museum day is the day when it started raining and just didn’t stop, which meant I visited a few more places than I’d actually intended to. The main museum I was interested in and which I had heard good things about, was the National Museum of Iceland.
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This is the part where I go through the sights I saw as I wandered around Reykjavik that don’t fit into their own category. I did not see all of these things in the same day, so please don’t try and replicate the tour, you may find yourself with very sore feet!
One impressive building, only opened in 2011, is the Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Centre, which hosts international events and concerts. It was designed by Olafur Eliasson and in a theme common in Icelandic design, it was built to reflect the surrounding landscape.
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Hallgrimskirkja, or Hallgrimur’s church, is the tallest building in Reykjavik and the largest church in Iceland, designed to resemble the basalt lava flows of Iceland’s landscape or an erupting volcano, depending on which tourist guide you read. Whatever the architect’s vision, it certainly is a distinctive building that you can see from practically everywhere in the City – and makes a great compass point if you need one.
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The Settlement Exhibition, is built around the remains of a Viking longhouse – excavated in 2001 and the oldest relics of human habitation in the capital. Photography was allowed inside but because of the low-level lighting I decided not to attempt it, so I’m afraid the only photo you get in this post is of the outside of the building.
During my trip to Iceland, as well as seeing the Northern Lights, which I’ve written about here, I naturally visited a lot of places in and around Reykjavik and took a huge amount of photos. But as is always the case I visited a lot of museums and galleries where photography was not allowed. So such posts as this one will have to cope with a lot more waffle from me than usual, though there will be pictures popping up of Reykjavik itself, if nothing else!
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Recently I took a holiday in Reykjavik, Iceland and that’s going to be the focus of the next set of posts. The main reason I wanted to go there was the opportunity to see the Northern Lights, and I was not disappointed. Of course, there were no guarantees that my tour group would get to see them – some in my group were on their second attempt – but we were very lucky in that the cloud cover broke enough for us to see the lights (nine other tour groups that went out on the same night were not so lucky).
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When I went to visit Stonehenge, which you can read about here I also went to visit Old Sarum, which is part of The Stonehenge Tour. I admit that I’d never heard of Old Sarum until I started investigating how to get to Stonehenge by public transport, but I’m glad I took the opportunity to go. It’s an Iron Age hill fort that was also the site of a castle and the original site of Salisbury Cathedral.
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Stonehenge, I’m sure, features on many a bucket list and it’s one of those places that I’ve wanted to visit but never really got around to. I finally got the opportunity whilst in the area for a (exceedingly lovely!) wedding and headed over on many a train and bus on my return journey home.
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Recently we took a trip to Bolsover Castle, an English Heritage site in Derbyshire. (I won’t say when we went, as the time between me making these visits and being able to sit down and write about them seems to increase exponentially). We don’t visit nearly as many English Heritage sites as we do National Trust, though that’s not any kind of conscious decision.
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For my birthday we took a trip to the newly opened studio tour of the Harry Potter film sets. (Yes, it has taken over a month for me to get this post together). It turned out to be an excellent trip; although certainly on the pricier side I’d say it was well the money, as no doubt did the other visitors. It was very busy though well organised – the timed ticketing system seems to be working very well and as we made our visit on a weekday, there were very few children present.
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