What a Trip

Velkomin til Íslands. Við vonum að þið njótið brottflutningsins ykkar. (Welcome to Iceland. We hope you enjoy your evacuation.)

For months and months I’ve been looking forward to my family’s visit to Iceland--playing tour guide to an appreciative audience in a country I have come to love very much is only slightly less exciting than the simple fact that my parents and sister actually braved the crazy weather to fly out to the middle of the North Atlantic to see me! And it was quite a visit, I must say--perhaps more remarkable than we had hoped. Certainly more remarkable than we had expected.

With a little over a week to spend in and around Reykjavík, we made the most of our time--visiting the famous flea market in town just a few hours after my poor family stumbled sleepily off the red-eye and trudged back to my apartment in the wind and on-and-off rain (which, by the way, accompanied us practically the whole time they were here).

We hit the Blue Lagoon the next day--the geothermally-heated pool in the lava fields (which I had visited in January but hadn’t swum in until this visit). It was so wet and foggy when we first got in that we couldn’t see the far side of the water--in fact, we couldn’t see each other if we got more than ten feet away. It was all very mystical, once we got over the strangely primal fear of being in water up to our necks, isolated from everything familiar and solid--and we stayed in the water for five hours, squelching our toes (and, let’s be honest, our hands too) in the soft silica mud that coats the bottom of the pool and is bottled and sold for big bucks in town.

The next day, it was the Golden Circle (Þingvellir, Geysir, and Gullfoss--the Parliament Plains, the geyser park, and the waterfall)--another obligatory tourist activity. I had been there on a big bus tour the same day we attended the sheep round-up in September, but we rented a car this time and practically had the whole of Þingvellir to ourselves. Not only was the experience more personal, but it was significantly easier to line up a picture without getting strangers’ elbows in the shot.

After that, there was of course a horseback riding trip for my sister and me--the 'advanced rider' version this time, though we couldn’t figure out why you had to be advanced to take this trail, unless it was simply for the fact that we tölted more than we walked. It rained on us the whole time and my sister gallantly called it an “epic” experience, but weather notwithstanding, it truly was intoxicatingly exciting to be out on the river delta, splashing through the water on our sure-footed ponies and feeling very much like the first settlers of an uninhabited Iceland. My pony, for the curious, was a big-boned, fuzzy black fellow named Nekvi, and he was a terrific tölter; my sister’s chestnut pony, Frísa, was less of a tölter but a real sweetie. (Google “tölt” if that means nothing to you--I’ve written about it before, the first time I rode here.)

During the week, my family was very accommodating, entertaining themselves (to say nothing of sleeping on my floor night after night!) while I ran back and forth between being with them and going to classes. We saw just about all the interesting museums in Reykjavík--and a few that weren’t so interesting--and experienced some nice traditional Icelandic foods too (we’re talking lamb stew and flatbread, not putrefied shark or pickled ram’s testicles--what kind of hostess do you think I am?).

Then, this past weekend, we rented a car again and drove down into South Iceland to visit Skógar one day and Vík the next. We saw three absolutely stunning waterfalls (Seljalandsfoss, Gljúfurárfoss, and Skógafoss) and drove across the heart of saga territory while I regailed my very patient family with stories from the sagas. (Over there you can see the place where Gunnar’s wife let Gunnar die because he slapped her one time years before...oh, and over there is where Njal was burned to death in his own home. Oh, and did I tell you the story about Auðr, who bopped her enemy in the nose with the bag of coins he was trying to bribe her with? That happened in the Westfjords, but it’s a good story anyway.) I must say that, even beyond the beautiful waterfalls, it was an entirely strange experience being in South Iceland because there are simply no real towns. Once you pass Hvolsvöllur (itself a town of maybe 1000), it’s just small farms widely separated from each other, dotting a truly vast landscape, until you get to Skógar--and even that is little more than a hotel and a museum of curiosities (which, by the way, is very entertaining). It was almost unreal to realize that there was absolutely no place to stay the night--not even a place to eat!--for mile after mile of deserted road. It was more like driving in parts of the American West than anything--mountainous Utah on one side of the road and pancake-flat Illinois on the other, until you reach the sea.

We doubled back from Skógar and stayed the night at a farmer’s house near the Bakki airport (remember I was saying how the tradition of hospitality lives on here? It’s true--I can attest from first-hand experience!). At least, that is what we intended to do. A little after midnight, we were woken up by the farmer, who told us we had to evacuate to Hvolsvöllur because a volcano had erupted under Eyjafjallajökull, the glacier a few miles away. Needless to say, we didn’t argue. In fact, when we got to Hvolsvöllur, we just kept going and drove all the way back to Reykjavík, watching the red glow on the clouds--the reflection of the volcano in the sky--disappear in our rear-view mirrors. The farm where we were staying was in the flood plain, and they were worried less about lava and ash than they were about flash flooding from glacial melt--but then, it IS a volcano after all, and who knows what might come out of it? It turns out it hadn’t actually erupted under the glacier but beside it--a much safer event, if anything involving lava can be called safe. If you haven’t yet seen pictures of the eruption, check out this video, and practice your Icelandic at the same time: http://vefmidlar.visir.is/VefTV/?channelID=STOD2&programID=d93d6ddc-f3df-4c27-90e2-28d49738f306&mediaSourceID=47b8d1b3-4c40-41b3-8d5d-aa2280563582&mediaClipID=96771c94-1541-493b-84da-c3cc9f729912

So there was no Vík for us--a disappointment, to be sure, as the area is famously dramatic and beautiful--but we do now get to say that we were four of the 450-some people evacuated due to the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption of 2010. My parents and sister were very good sports about it all. (Can I just say, though, that it WOULD be my luck to take my volcano-paranoid family on a trip in South Iceland when a volcano that hadn’t erupted since 1821 suddenly decided to open up and spew molten lava all over the place?)

And THEN, as if the volcano wasn’t enough, on Monday when my family was supposed to fly out, the mechanics at Keflavík Airport went on strike, causing such chaos and delays that my dad just rebooked for Tuesday. Not that I objected to having a bonus day with my family, but first of all, I think they were rather tired of sleeping on the floor every night, and second, they had kind of "finished" Reykjavík and we were hard-put to find anything entertaining to do for that extra day they were here! But the strike ended Monday afternoon and the volcano wasn’t putting out enough ash to close the airport, so my family was able to make it out Tuesday evening.

I miss them already, and I hope they’ll remember the fun parts of their visit--but really, Iceland? A volcano AND a strike? What kind of sense of humor does this island have?!

A Jaunt in Denmark

Græsset må ikke betrædes (The grass may not be betrodden—the amusingly formal Danish way to say “Keep off the grass”)

Where to begin after a week-long trip around the beautiful country of Denmark? I simply can’t detail everything we saw—there’s too much, and you can read a guidebook for a more accurate report on the attractions of Scandinavia if you really want to. So perhaps a brief overview, then some thoughts.

I flew into Copenhagen last Wednesday with a friend of mine who also happened to be presenting at the Århus Universitet conference on medieval Iceland. She had brilliantly discovered that Kronberg castle in Helsingør is just a train-ride away (it sounds like Elsinore because it is Elsinore!)—so naturally we two Shakespeare buffs had to take a quick detour to see Hamlet’s castle.





We got there just in time to see the courtyard and the casements (the terrifyingly labyrinthine, pitch-black cellar rooms where soldiers stayed during sieges), but it was so worth the trip.

Then it was back to Copenhagen to catch a different train to Århus where the conference was held. After getting over the shock at discovering that Århus has a population the size of all Iceland (about 300,000 people), we came to like the cozy, quaint city very much in the few days we were there. The conference, by the way, was terrific—all graduate students and therefore lots of free exchange of ideas, with none of the intimidation that can accompany full-fledged scholars when they sit in the back of the room with their arms folded as you stammer through your paper.

It was quite chilly in Denmark, but we were lucky and had very good weather while we were there. We missed our bus-stop going to see the Moesgård Museum outside of town and so ended up walking a half-mile on a country road through the snow-covered hills (and trees!) of Jutland. The walk was almost as great as the museum itself!

On Sunday, we reluctantly parted from Århus and took the train southeast back to Copenhagen (which is on the island of Zealand—something my geography-impoverished mind never picked up on until the train passed through an underwater tunnel to get there). Because all the museums are closed on Mondays, we raced through the National Museet (so many artifacts that my Old Norse Religion class refered to—it was like meeting celebrities!) and the Statens Museum for Kunst (the art museum—some lovely Danish paintings by artists whose names I will never, ever remember).

We explored Strøget, the world’s longest pedestrian shopping street, drooled copiously over the 17th-century books the antiquarian bookstores just had lying around on their shelves, and tried our best not to let our jaws drop too far when we realized how much food costs there. If any place can make Iceland look cheap, it’s Denmark with its 30% sales tax.

On Monday we walked all over (and I mean ALL OVER) Copenhagen, visiting the Rundetaarn for a bird’s-eye view of the city and seeing the famous Den Lille Havfrue statue (the Little Mermaid statue in the harbor). We managed to find the graves of Søren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen, and also the smørrebrød sandwich shop that my grandmother ate at when she was in Copenhagen some 40 years ago. Some good things never really change. The only thing we missed was Tivoli Gardens, which, sadly enough, are closed until April.

At last, it was “hej hej” to Denmark (pronounced “hi hi”—a very cute Danish way of saying good bye), “hæ hæ” to Iceland (pronounced the same way—a less creative Icelandic way of saying hello).

We got back on Tuesday and were pleased to find all the snow washed away by a week’s worth of rain! Enough of the virtual tour; I could go on and on, but I’ll curb my enthusiasm and move on to a few thoughts on my first impressions of Denmark.

First, every single corner of the downtown area of Århus and Copenhagen is photograph-worthy. There are so many charming red or yellow brick houses and churches that they don’t even bother to name them all on the maps. You turn a corner and ta-da—there’s an 18th-century church right in front of you. It was so overwhelming, in fact, that we walked right by the royal residence of Amalienborg palace and didn’t even distinguish it from all the other beautiful buildings. Copenhagen has its sketchy side too, of course, and its architectural monstrosities from the 60s and 70s when the world lost all artistic sensibility, but on the whole, it still feels like Hans Christian Andersen’s hometown.

Second, Danish is a bizarre language. The joke among Scandinavians is that it is impossible to understand a Dane—a stereotype I thought had to be exaggerated until I heard the language spoken for the first time. This is not my own analogy, but it’s accurate: if a person tried to speak with a mouthful of hot porridge while at the same time trying to blow on it to cool it off, they would give a fair impression of the sound of Danish. Where Icelandic is clear, articulated, and on the tip of the tongue, Danish is throaty, full of vowels, and short on consonants. An example: in trying to find the cemetery, I asked a fellow at a 7-11 (which, by the way, are far fancier in Denmark than in the U.S.) where the street called Kapelvej was. “What street?” he asked. I showed him on my map. “Oh,” he said, “Gawewai.” Yes, that street, thank you. I’m sure it’s a lovely language to those who know it, but to me it sounded like it was only spoken by people half-asleep or perhaps intoxicated.

Third, since Iceland has made me a bit of a hotdog connoisseur, I have to say that Danish hotdogs are more satisfying than Icelandic ones. They come in funny buns like half a hollowed baguette, so the hotdog is enclosed all the way around and about half of it sticks out from one end of the bun. The condiments are squeezed in between the bun and meat, usually overflowing from the top. Quite unique, I have to say—but the flavor just about makes up for the fact that you pay twice as much for a Danish hotdog as for an Icelandic one.

Fourth, Icelanders are everywhere. After the conference in Århus, we all went out to dinner and, toward the end of the meal, there were some toasts made in Icelandic. The folks in the next table over suddenly cried, “Eruð þið íslensk?”—Are you Icelanders? Because they were. And not only were they delighted to run into several of their countrymen, it turns out they knew one of the folks in our group! This led to much rejoicing and a spirited round of some Icelandic folksongs. (For some reason, one of the Icelanders from the other table pointed right at me and said, “American.” I must have a tattoo on my forehead or something that I didn’t know about.)

Fifth, it’s lovely to be back in Iceland where I can at least distinguish the words people say to me even if I don’t know what they mean, and where I know how things work and can do my laundry and enjoy all those comfort-of-home niceties.

Sixth, I hope I can get back to Denmark someday soon….

Six Months In

Orðin dagsins: hattur, úlpa, vettlingar, hanskar, trefill, stígvél (Words of the day: hat, coat, mittens, gloves, scarf, boots)

Imagine my surprise when I realized suddenly that I have been in Iceland for six months! If you don’t exclude the time I was at home for Christmas, of course. I am still loving my stay here and haven’t gotten bored with Reykjavík at all, even though it’s a small city. Practically every day I discover something new about the area, or the landscape changes in a way I haven’t noticed before, or the light is different. Only recently, I noticed that we’re finally getting honest-to-goodness daylight again; from November up until maybe a week or two ago, there’s been at best a late-afternoon cast to the sky, and the sun has been entirely in the south. Now it’s starting to swing up overhead again, east to west, just like it does at home. You’d be amazed how exciting we find that.

I’ve also started to venture to conduct business transactions in Icelandic, as long as I’m pretty certain I won’t encounter anything too unexpected. (I’ve bought stamps in Icelandic, and requested books from special collections, and even understood when they explained to me that their online catalogue wasn’t working. Just don’t ask me whether I want a side dish with my meal; I’ll just stare at you blankly because I don’t know the word for side dish. Or for meal, for that matter.) Let’s take it as evidence of the difficulty of the language and not of my dull wits that it’s taken me this long to make even that much progress!

As if to celebrate my six-month anniversary here, mother nature has dumped well over a foot of snow on Reykjavík in the past week, leaving the unplowed sidewalks a mess of either sludge or solid ice (depending on whether or not there are hot-water pipes running under them). It’s nothing to complain about in comparison to the weather that’s hammered the East Coast of the US this winter, but still, you can’t help but wish for spring as you slip and slide your way for a mile up and down steep hills to walk to school.

But we’ll let the pictures speak for themselves (oh how I wish I'd gotten a picture of the woman skiing down the street!). I’d rather report on a very interesting realization that I’ve had after a conversation with one of my friends here: this is a really old culture. That sounds patently obvious, perhaps, but in a very techno-savvy and thoroughly modern Reykjavík, it’s easy to forget that most of my neighbors can trace their families back to settlers almost a thousand years in the past—and every once in a while, the history of this culture shows through.

For instance, you need two witnesses to sign practically anything before it is legal. My friend discovered this when she had her family write a letter assuring the Directorate of Immigration that she had enough money to support herself—and the letter was rejected because it was not signed by witnesses. Now, you need witnesses in the US too, but usually they come in the form of a notary public with a fancy stamp and seal. Here, anybody will do: the lease to my apartment is witnessed by a waiter and a bartender who happened to be standing around when I met with my landlord at a café. It seems quaint, but you can trace this practice right back to the earliest laws almost a millennium old—nothing was considered legal (or even true) unless two or more local farmers would swear to it.

The tradition of hospitality is still very strong too—if you read the old law codes, or even poetry of advice like Hávamál (a great read, by the way), the first thing that always comes up (besides “never forget your sword”) is the sacred obligation to be a generous host. In fact, in the stories Odin had the habit of showing up at people’s doors dressed like a beggar, and if you didn’t show him the proper hospitality, woe to you! Nowadays, there are still networks in the countryside where farmers register cottages on their farms, or even rooms in their own homes, to be rented out to travelers and tourists. I can’t imagine this happening in paranoid America. Some of the farmers will cook for you and even let you help out with the chores around the farm before you leave! I haven’t gone on a “farm stay” yet, but if I ever do I shall report back on the experience.

Another charming remnant of this country’s heritage (and forgive me if I’ve mentioned this before) is that the bookstores are bigger and more numerous downtown than are the grocery stores. No one really knows how many medieval Icelanders could read and write, but there is no doubt that they had a higher literacy rate than other contemporary nations, and they produced and consumed books the way most Western cultures now produce and consume fast food. I love the fact that one can walk into Bónus (the cheap grocery store in town, if it can be called cheap) and take in the whole place at a glance, but walk into Eymundsson (one of the many chains of bookstores) and you have to explore four floors to see it all.

And finally, all the girls knit. Seriously. Some of the boys too. Even teenagers whip out their knitting needles and go at it during downtime in class. I thought for sure when I first heard about it that it had to be a stereotype left over from the 30s, but how wrong I was! Some things are just part of the national heritage and won’t be given up, and it looks like knitting (prjóna is the verb) remains one tradition that’s alive and well.

This coming week I’m off to Denmark (for the first time ever!), for a conference at the University of Aarhus and then a little jaunt in Copenhagen. It will throw off my nice, neat little schedule of posting regularly over the weekend, but hopefully I’ll have some good pictures at least when do I get back!

All Things, Iceland-Style

Ái á Á á á á á – Great-grandpa from Á has a sheep in the river (Not kidding, it’s a legitimate Icelandic sentence! Spoken, it sounds like: Owie ow ow ow ow ow ow. Think about that next time you hit your thumb with a hammer.)


Lent has begun, in Iceland as much as anywhere else, and I have to say the first three days this week were most interesting. The Icelanders let other nations have their Mardi Gras and their Pancake Tuesdays—here, they do things their way.

The Monday before Ash Wednesday is called Bolludagur—Cream-Puff Day. (It’s even on the calendars the banks give out!) I assume this is very close to Pancake Day in other parts of the world, traditionally used to finish off the eggs and cream people weren’t allowed to eat during Lent. But Icelanders can have pancakes any day (now)—it’s not every day you have an excuse to eat a sweet pastry with a heap of whipped cream and berries on the inside and chocolate on the outside! They sell them everywhere, just this one day. Well, and the day after—you can’t waste leftovers. This, by the way, is a decided improvement over the other traditional Icelandic foods I’ve blogged about.

The Tuesday before Ash Wednesday is called Sprengidagur—Bursting Day. Apparently the tradition is to stuff yourself to bursting with meat and (for whatever reason) peas. I can’t figure the pea thing, but as the university cafeteria took a break from their usual mushroom or cauliflower soup for their version of split pea and ham, I’m not complaining.

Ash Wednesday itself is called Öskudagur—Ash Day, creatively enough. Only instead of a day of fasting, somehow it has morphed into an Icelandic Halloween, with kids dressing in costumes, trick-or-treating door-to-door, and generally getting into sugar-induced antics. I was most confused as I walked around town, but fortunately Google educated me.

A few more tidbits about life in Iceland, for the curious:

First, you can’t get Ziplock bags here. This may actually be a Europe-wide phenomenon, since after I complained to my French roommate about this sore gap in packaging provision, she asked me in a very confused voice what we use them for. Um…everything? I guess they don’t show that commercial here where the lady puts soup in a bag and turns it upside down to show how watertight it is.

Second, Iclanders love gas-guzzling monster cars—which is slightly ironic given that their city buses run on clean fuel whose only exhaust is water. The snow tires (which, naturally, I haven’t managed to take a picture of) make a certain amount of sense for driving outside of the city, but the sheer number of SUVs, pickups, and well-equipped jeeps makes me feel sometimes like I’m back in Nebraska.

Third, one of our professors here told us that the entire police force (Lögreglan) is unarmed—the Icelanders don’t have the right to bear arms, which doesn’t seem to bother them in the least—except for one patrol car that apparently has a single gun in it. This gun is not to protect against criminals, however: its sole purpose is to shoot livestock who have been hit by cars on the highway. Such is Iceland.

Now, wasn’t that just worth the read?

News and Nothings

Þetta reddast (It’ll work out—Iceland’s unofficial national motto)

I graciously decided not to complain about the weather here this past week because Virginia, where practically everybody who would even consider reading this blog lives, has been buried under who knows how much snow. I’ve stopped tallying the inches—though perhaps the people who had to shovel it haven’t.

Instead, a report on a wonderful annual cultural event, and then an explanation for my Icelandic quote of the week (above).


This cultural event is called Safnanótt, or Museum Night, in which the city’s museums stay open late (most of them until midnight) and have free admission, plus many special events scheduled just for the occasion. With my friends, I took advantage of this Safnanótt to see the Settlement Exhibition (built around the excavated remains of the oldest manmade structure in Reykajvík, from about 871 AD), the National Museum, and the Saga Museum at the Perlan (that funky domed building I keep taking pictures of).

I didn’t take any pictures at the Settlement Exhibition because it was too dark, but at the National Museum they had a ballet troop dancing around the exhibits (how’d they get permission for that?!), and then an Icelandic couple sang folk songs in the foyer. What was really lovely about the folk music was that even the obscure ones were familiar to some people in the audience—an older woman behind me hummed the tunes the whole time. And then they had sing-along at the end, and every single Icelander, young and old, new every word to every song. Not only that, but they sang them out, loud, proud, and in tune. (Can you imagine that ever happening in the U.S. unless there was a campfire or heavy drinking involved?) Reykjavík is a bustling, modern city, but some spark of folk life still survives here, and that is charming.

The Saga Museum is the silicon answer to an old wax-works show; it uses characters from the sagas to tell the story of Iceland’s settlement and medieval history. Some people find it kitschy (especially the area by the gift shop where you’re invited to try on the chainmail and not-so-accurately-reproduced helmets and swords. But the artistry is really impressive—the figures all have eyelashes and individual hairs on their arms, and half of them were made from casts of the artist’s relatives. Even the artist himself modeled for the figure of Ingólfr Arnarson, Iceland’s first settler. (I know this because the artist was actually there, and he told us himself while chatting up my friend.) This picture is of Snorri Sturluson, the Icelandic Chaucer I wrote about after our trip to his homestead last semester. Decidedly more stout and Santa-Claus-y than the version in the statue at Reykholt!

Now, to allay the curiosity as to why “þetta reddast” was my lead-in for this week:

I am in a masters’ program here. Masters’ programs entail a thesis project. I wanted to study a particular manuscript for this project. This particular manuscript is in Denmark. (Is it just me, or is that ironic, after I trek to the edge of the Arctic Circle in quest of studying manuscripts in person?) After some negotiation, digital images of this manuscript were requested from the collection in Copenhagen, and then it was up to the archivists there and my advisors here to make sure the photos were taken. This was before Thanksgiving. “Oh, certainly,” they told me, “you’ll have them by Christmas—probably earlier.” Around Christmas: “Oh, yes,” they said, “by New Year’s at the latest.” Mid-January: “Soon, soon, we promise.” The first of February: “By the end of the week, you’ll have them.” Last Wednesday, I finally get an email with the subject line: “At last.”

I now have images of a very homely little manuscript of a law code, in whose margins some industrious doodler has written probably 20 or 30 proverbs and notes. Non-medievalists (actually, probably medievalists too) will wonder how on earth such a thing could be inflated into the subject of a thesis, but I’m very excited to start work on it…as soon as I figure out how to read the handwriting.

Either way, this whole odyssey just goes to prove that Icelanders (and apparently Danes as well) fully believe that “it’ll work out”—and usually they’re right. Now, if the same magic would only work to get me a lease for an apartment in Virginia next year….

You Have To Try It Once

Réttu mér hákarlinn…og munnþurrku (Pass me the putrefied shark…and a napkin)

When I read my first guidebook about Iceland, the thing that stuck in my mind—as it sticks in every tourist’s mind—was Þorrablót (also written Thorrablot for those of you who want to google it). This is the (in)famous Icelandic festival-of-all-nasty-traditional-winter-foods, and it’s happening right now.


For some reason, every time you talk to an Icelander, or you tell someone you’ve been to Iceland, one of the first things they ask is, “Have you tried the rotten shark?” Well, thanks to the very obliging Erasmus Student Network that arranged a Þorrablót event on campus, I can now answer a very definitive “yes.” Oh, yes indeed.

I do not know what ever possessed a farmer to look at a tube of sausage and think, “You know what? I bet it would keep better if we put it in sour whey.” I further do not know why a fisherman would look at a dead shark, which is poisonous if eaten fresh, and think, “Let’s try burying it in the sand for six weeks and see if that helps.” But they did (the shark much more recently than the sausage, actually), and I have those brave souls to thank for all the truly unique palatal experiences I had this past Friday.

A little history on Þorrablót before I launch into the gastronomic excursus: it’s actually a very modern festival, started in Reykjavík in 1958 by a restaurant called Naustið. It therefore has nothing to do with Thor (Þorr) or pagan sacrifice (blót), which some tourists find disappointing. Why you’d sacrifice soured whale fat to a god anyway is also beyond me, unless it’s to avoid having to eat it yourself. In the words of an Englishman who’s been a professor here for some 30 years (he gave a lecture on Icelanders before the food was wheeled out), Þorrablót is a festival in which modern, wealthy, urban Icelanders can celebrate what they don’t have to eat all winter. The younger generation doesn’t seem to appreciate the value of this celebration very much, but their parents find it very patriotic.

On to the food itself. I’m just going to list each thing that was given to us in its Icelandic name (or the best I can do), along with its translation, and then I’ll reflect a little on what it’s like to put this stuff in your mouth. I apologize in advance to vegetarians. I am an animal lover myself and hardly eat meat at all, but this I did in the name of cultural exploration; I hope you'll excuse me. You may not want to read this if you’re eating (and that goes for carnivores too).

- Hangikjöt með flatbrauði og smjöri (lamb smoked over manure fires, served on flatbread with butter): This is actually palatable. It tastes like mild ham without any salt. Nothing eaten at Þorrablót has any salt in it. The addition of said spice (or any spice!) might help immensely.

- Blóðmör (blood pudding): Lacking the spices of the delightful Irish blood pudding, this stuff is served cold and is practically tasteless. It has the consistency of polenta and is almost black in color.

- Lifrarpylsa (liver sausage): Tastes just like the blood pudding, only it’s white.

- Lundabaggi (sour fat pudding): I have been told this is made from whale fat, but I could have sworn the girl serving it up said it was sheep fat. It probably doesn’t make a great different in taste, but I object to it more if it’s from a whale. It both looks and tastes about as you would expect from the name.

- Súr lifrarpylsa (sour liver sausage): Perhaps I’m a philistine, but to me all of the soured puddings and sausages tasted pretty much the same—like sour cream with the consistency of meat. It is really only possible to get a small amount down at one go.

- Sviðasulta (sheep's head pâté, a.k.a. head cheese): This is another soured concoction, tasting just like all the other soured concoctions. It’s the name that makes it stand out.

- Súr blóðmör (sour blood pudding): Why must every dish have a soured equivalent? This stuff truly is black in color.

- Hrútspungur (pickled ram's testicles): Another Icelandic culinary gem. Sweet meats, they call them—jellied and cut like sausage, but you can still see the borders between the…organs. Again, tastes just like the soured sausages, only it’s worse because you know what it is.

- Hákarl (putrefied shark): Small, rubbery yellow-white bits that smell like urine and taste, as you might imagine, like rotten fish. Actually not as strong as I thought it would be, and I had to try a second piece to remember what it tasted like. I needn’t have bothered; the flavor came back even after brushing my teeth and stayed in my mouth for more than 24 hours.

- Brennivín (“burning wine” also called Black Death): Clear schnapps, they call it, though it has about the flavor and aroma of rubbing alcohol. Used as a chaser for the hákarl. It’s 37.5% pure alcohol, made of fermented potato pulp and flavored with caraway seeds, they say. Prove it, say I. The only reasons I can think for drinking this noxious beverage is to rid one’s mouth of the shark flavor, and to kill any bacteria that might have made it through the putrefaction process.

- Svið (jellied sheep's head): Actually I’m not sure whether what we had was the jellied variety or the boiled. I’m not sure it would make a difference. The head is served cut in half down the middle, which is really the most barbaric and disturbing thing about it. The meat is rather flavorless and therefore quite a relief to the taste buds, but it’s the thing’s eyes that get you! As if it wasn’t bad enough to have your food looking at you in the first place, the Icelanders serve up the eyes as the best part. And this is the worst of all: I ended up with a sheep’s eye on my plate and didn’t realize what it was. (How can that be? you say—It’s an eye for heaven’s sake! But having been jellied or boiled or otherwise abused, it just looked like a rather fatty chunk of meat.) I should say, I didn’t realize what it was until I bit into the thing—and the casing around the pupil shot out into my mouth as I bit down! I realize many cultures eat the eyes of animals, but I just have to say, from my squeamish, girly perspective, the whole pupil-projectile thing entirely trumps the putrefied shark for disgustingness.

Now, aren’t you glad you can go have a salad for lunch instead?

Moonwalk

Ég hef gengið á milli hrauna og lóna (I have walked among lava fields and lagoons)

This weekend my friends and I went on the first of this semester’s day-tours, to the remarkable peninsula called Reykjanes (Smoking Ness), about 45 minutes south of Reykajvík. At the end of this peninsula is the Keflavík international airport, so anyone taking the shuttle from the airport to the city has seen the eerie moonscape lava fields, but how often do you get to spend a whole day there? Saturday was our chance—and a perfect day we had for it, too, given that it was the first and only sunny day since the start of the term!



Our first stop as we drove down the peninsula was a little wooden church, built right on the shore in 1888 by a group of sailors who, during a terrible storm, pledged their word to found a church wherever they made landfall. They say a bright light guided them miraculously to this sheltered bay (thereafter called Engilsvík—Angel’s Bay), and they kept their word. In fact, despite its tiny size it is one of the wealthiest churches in Iceland because sailors continuously donate money to it. The caretaker, who had to have our guide translate for her, told us that they have a spotlight that they shine on the church at night, and if it goes out or they forget to turn it on, sailors actually radio in from the sea and complain that they can’t see their church. In a nation as lukewarmly religious as Iceland, I think that’s a lovely statement.


We continued a long way over Reykjanes, along the southern coastline, gaping at the lava formations all the way, and even though my camera doesn’t like taking pictures from a moving vehicle, I convinced it to give me a few shots that are more or less clear. The road, for part of the way, isn’t paved, and I actually got the best shots on those parts of the drive because it forced the bus to slow down. The fields that look like bizarre scenes from the ocean floor, covered with some 600 species of moss, are older than the rocky, jagged moonscape ones, but none of them are older than 10,000 years. If they were, they would have been smoothed and flattened by the glaciers of the last Ice Age.

The tour stopped at a geothermal area called Seltún too, a place similar to Geysir Park but without the spouting springs. It does, however, have all the Martian-looking red and white clay, plus bubbling mud pots and boiling rivers. Steam puffs from every crevice, even pits in the trail itself, and the chemicals turn the water a shade of denim-dye blue. At one point scientists had drilled an experimental hole into the surface, from which steam rose for years. Then one day, it stopped. And a few years ago, without any warning, it exploded, destroying the concrete facility around the hole and flattening the hut of the caretaker. Fortunately, no one was around when this happened.

Our last stop of the day was a much less hazardous geothermal area, the famed Blue Lagoon. The formation of the spring was actually a manmade accident, our guide told us: in building a power plant to harness the natural geothermal energy, water was diverted from a hot spring, and the designers assumed it would be absorbed into the porous lava field—but they were wrong. There is so much clay-like sediment in the water that it soon coated the lava and the water pooled into a huge natural hot tub. Well, it didn’t take long for this hot tub (plus the skin-friendly silt it collects) to attract a large tourist following, and after a couple of people drowned in the 70s, they evened out the bottom and built up a fancy state-of-the-art spa in the past decade or so. I expected the whole place to be quite tamed and organized, but even though the building itself is very sophisticated, the pool itself remains more or less in its natural state—some spots hotter than others, one spot even freezing over where the water runs out into the lava field.

I should note that I didn’t go swimming because spas are rather pricey and I know I’ll be going again on other occasions, but I’m told that it was a lovely time, even though the air was only 25 degrees! For my own part, I explored the area outside the building with a couple other friends who weren’t feeling aquatic. Now, when I hear the word “lagoon,” I start thinking of parrots and pirates and Kokomo. I was not prepared to find this area a breathtaking Arctic wonderland of milky blue water the exact same color as the sky, surrounded by vast lava fields coated in sparkling frost!

The lava field surrounding the Blue Lagoon is called Illahraun—the Evil Lava Field, undoubtedly because it would be impassable had the road not been leveled out and paved by an inconceivable amount of work. (The sagas tell stories of berserkers being roped into clearing paths through lava fields because they were the only ones hearty enough to manage it!) But standing there, in the dead quiet of a winter afternoon, it did not feel evil. It was magic.