Iceland - is very nice

We made it to Iceland! It was easy enough to get our bags, rent a car and grab some chocolate and wine from the duty free where it is supposedly much cheaper than in town. We stopped on the way into Reykjavik at the grocery store for some supplies for the next few days as we didn't really know what groceries would be like along the way. Even though the capital city houses half of the countries population, it only has about 120,000 residences. We easily found out hostel and less easily a place to park and headed out to explore the downtown.
I now have this theory that hipsters originated in Iceland, I mean if you are born and live in Iceland you are already obscure as there are only 300,000 of you in the world! They have amazing music, intersting names, all the men have beards, and everyone wears those vintage wool sweaters.


Hallgrímskirkja Church in Reykjavik

 The following day we headed out to Gullfoss, Geysir, and Thingvellir Park for some snokelling (amazing but really cold) along two contential plates of Eurasia and North America. We didnt plan super well so we did alot of driving back and forth but the landscape is so interesting it didn't really matter.


 Energy Generation

One thing there is never a shortage of..waterfalls! We saw too many too count.

Gullfoss

Geysir to our surprise was not just one Geysir but a group of them varying in size and timing of when they erupt from minutes to years.

Geysir

Serbia - Meet the Family

Now that I am graduated and a full time employee my vacation days have stopped being about 5 months of the year down to about 3 weeks. To spend vacation this year we have decided (my boyfriend Milos) and I to head to Serbia, his home country to meet his family for a week and then head to Iceland for a week of adventuring.

Packing for these two places was interesting as Serbia is a dry, but very hot at the end of August and Iceland can be anywhere from sunshine and 20 degrees to snowing with 60 km/h winds, try to pack light with that. We managed to get everything into two backpacks with the exception of the luggage Milos's mom sent us to bring to his aunts. Luckily we could leave that in Serbia and didn't have to take it with us while we were actually backpacking. The total trip flying would be Toronto-Rome-Belgrade, then Belgrade-Belgium for a night-Iceland.

The original plan was to head straight to Iceland but in order to keep all the flights under $1500 we booked each flights individually and the one between Belgrade and Belgium was cancelled and after some arguing on the phone and $100 we got another flight the day before giving us one less day in Serbia and an overnight in Belgium. (Never use JAT Airways).

We were not off to a good start as we were unexpectedly charge $100 for our second piece of luggage, and after being asked to be seated together we were sat in two separate parts of the plan. The plane was pretty empty at the back so we were able to move together right after take off. We landed in Rome around 1, grabbing out luggage and getting some lunch before we we boarded for Belgrade. Customs was a breeze and we were happily greeted by Milos's aunt and Uncle who I think barely recognized him. We packed it all into the tiny Euro cars with no seat belts or air conditioning and were off north to Zrenjanin.

Branka and Milos 

We arrive at Milo's Buba's (Grandmothers) house, and were welcomes by her and Milo's two younger cousins. He hadn't seen them for 15 years so everyone was pretty excited. Dinner was prepared, fresh veggies from the garden and goat! I should have seen the foresight into the amount of meat I would be consuming over the next week.

Buba (and her crocks!)