One of my friends here joked that I’m the navigator for our group (not always an accurate or efficient one, true, but I usually find the way eventually), so I decided that that was going to be my Viking name. I think it’s a lot better than Ketill Trout or Thorolf Twist-Foot (no kidding, these are people’s historical names)! So, souvenirs I’ll bring back from Iceland: a taste for chocolate and licorice combinations, a new sweater, and a Viking nickname. What more could you ask from a year abroad?
Having spent all last week on work for my classes and my thesis, I have nothing important to write about this time around, so I’ll blog up some more “notes on life in Iceland”—which, let’s face it, are probably more interesting to folks than my vacation pictures.
About the sweaters: I don’t know if I’ve really mentioned them before, but they are a hallmark of Icelandic daily life. Every Icelander (guy or girl) seems to own at least one, usually made by their mothers, and they wear them like jackets, even when it’s in the depth of winter. Icelandic wool has more lanolin in it than most other sheep’s wool (if you can believe what they tell you), so it’s more water-resistant and warm—serious pluses in this country as you might surmise. Tourists who don’t have the benefit of having Icelandic mothers buy them from the Hand-Knitting Association in such quantities that sweater production probably single-handedly keeps the Icelandic economy from dissolving into anarchy.
The Icelandic sweater typically has pretty patterns around the yoke and is called a lopapeysa. Lopi is the kind of wool, and peysa means “sweater.” Funny folk etymology of the term “peysa” that my Icelandic instructor shared: when French merchants started trading in Iceland, they would see the farmers coming down to the harbor in these lovely warm sweaters. Freezing their little French derrieres off in the Icelandic spring, they naturally wanted to buy some of these sweaters from the locals. So, not speaking the language, they would go up to folks in town in hopes of buying a sweater, asking the person if he was a farmer by saying, “Paysan?” Naturally, the Icelanders assumed this was the French word for “sweater” and somehow it stuck.Another folk etymology, this one for the word appelsína, which means “orange”: when the first oranges were imported from some more tropical exotic clime, the Icelanders looked at them and said, “Oh, they’re apples from China”—appel, sína. I don’t know if either of these etymologies is true; I’m particularly dubious of the appelsína explanation, given that the Icelandic word for apple is “epli” and the word for China is “Kína”—but good stories are more interesting than facts either way.
What I do know is true, though (cue awkward segue) is that Icelanders have a strange affinity for pear flavor. Now, pear is a nice flavor, but who ever thought it would be a good idea to combine it with dairy? Yet here you can get pear-flavored skýr (Icelandic yogurt), pear-flavored smoothies, and pear-flavored “thick milk”—an rather interesting drink that’s about the consistency of melted ice cream and almost as sweet. (I think this may be a Scandinavian invention, if not pan-European, but I’d never seen it before I came here.) None of these are bad, by the way; I quite like pear-flavored skýr especially. But still, it’s unique.
What’s not so unique (I’m all about the corny transitions today) is that Icelandic, like all the other Scandinavian and Germanic languages with the exception of English, does not have a W sound, just a V. This leads to perpetual confusion between the two letters when people learn English. Last semester I had a very hard time determining whether my Icelandic teacher was saying “word” or “verb” because she always switched the initial sounds. But it’s rarely confusing and instead leads to fun little Engrish errors like this sign I found on the main shopping street, advertizing “Owen-baked pizza.” My question: Who’s Owen?
And a final absolutely random note: people leave their babies outside stores here when they go inside. They tend to have these hermetically-sealed baby strollers that zip up like luggage with the baby inside (to protect them from the wind and rain—but can the poor things breathe?!), and when people are out with their babies and the door to the store isn’t wide enough to accommodate the stroller, or they’re not planning on being inside for long, they just park the stroller outside—baby and all—and go on with their shopping! It certainly speaks to how safe a place this is. Apparently they do it in Denmark too; I heard a story about a Danish lady who parked her baby outside a café in New York and was arrested for child neglect. Some customs just don’t travel well.
This coming week is the last week of classes, to be followed by some hectic weeks of choir concerts, finals, friends’ visits, and class trips (and supposedly thesis research?), but I hope everybody Stateside is having a nice spring! It might, MIGHT have decided to stop snowing here….
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