We woke up leisurely and explored our flat to find a lot of interesting art, books, coke tins and movie collection around.

One interesting fact about yesterday was that, our Airbnb host asked us a question on where in India we are from, for which we replied Hyderabad. His immediate reaction was “Are you all software engineers? I know a lot of software engineers from that place” 🙂 We told him that only a couple of us were software engineers. Apparently, he works in a company where most of the software engineers are from India, particularly Hyderabad :P. We didn’t realize that Hyderabad is world famous for software engineers :D.

We packed our bags, had breakfast and stepped outside to visit Temppeliaukio Church  before heading to airport. The only transportation that we missed yesterday was the tram and we got a chance to board it finally.

Temppeliaukio Church is a church built inside a rock, which allows natural light inside. It’s architecture looked very innovative and Helsinki was rightly called as design capital of the world.

We took a train back to Vantaa Airport in the afternoon and then boarded an IcelandAir flight. We got a single window seat and I quickly grabbed it to take a sneak peek of the country before entering it 🙂 By the way, our flight was to Reykjavík (j silent), the capital city of Iceland. I got to know its name only after we started planning our trip. Not sure how many have heard the name earlier, but all the towns and city names in Iceland are very tough to pronounce with lot of consonants and tones. Our flight flew over a glacier before reaching the city and there was a competition by the IcelandAir flight for the best photos clicked from the flight near that glacier. I was all prepared to take photos, but sadly I couldn’t see anything below due to a lot of cloud cover 😦

By the time we were about to land, there were a lot of green lights flickering around to give the passengers a feel of northern lights :). I was not sure if people really enjoyed that part or got frightened with those sudden lights, adding more fear to the landing process 😛

We landed amidst a light rain and we immediately felt the cold weather as soon as we stepped out. We were geared up with our sweaters and rain coats, after reading a lot of blogs about unpredictable Iceland weather.

We collected our luggage and rushed to the car rental company outside the airport. Our main objective of the day was to reach Bonus or Kronan, the two main (cheaper) grocery stores of Iceland and they close very early by around 6-7pm. There was a huge queue at the car rental place and they took their own sweet time to hand over our car. Meanwhile, we got some currency exchanged to Icelandic Kronas (ISK) and took a local sim (Síminn) for navigation. After one hour of waiting, our car (Dacia Duster) got ready and we could reach Kronan near the airport, to do our basic food shopping like milk, yoghurt, bread etc.

Then we headed to our Airbnb house located on a hill in Mosfellsbær town, just outside Reykjavík. There was a lock-box with a pin setup outside the house, which contains the house key. The pin was sent to our mail and we used that to get the key of the house, without the need to meet or call anyone. It was surprising to see everything automated and just wondered if this locking method works in India 🙂

We prepared our dinner in the night and slept quickly to wake up early the next day for the famous Golden circle tour.