New Year's, Buns, and Some Rotten Shark

Thanks for coming back! I would like to apologize (to all seven of you who read this) for not having an update available for quite some time. Things have been pretty busy since Cat returned, so I have lots of information for you, and I am going to use her return as an excuse for not updating this weblog. I have a quick point of business to slip in before I start. If you wish to be removed from this email list for any reason, please just email me at dan.govoni@gmail.com and let me know. If you have arrived at this page because someone told you about it or because you ran a Google search for “super-hot guy with enormous pecs and glorious eyebrows” and you would like to be added to the list, please email me at the address above.

Year’s End Eve

Cat arrived back in Iceland about a week before Christmas. Everybody in Iceland goes home for Christmas, so we had all of Hólar to ourselves. A hamlet of about 200 people is already really quiet, and when all but 10 of those people are gone it gets silent. Each of the few people who stuck around invited us over for dinner, so we had something to do almost every night. Most people shut down about two weeks before Christmas and don’t restart until a week after, so I had the office and the lab almost to myself for about three weeks, which was nice.

A few people started to return to Hólar for New Year’s Eve (or Year’s End Eve, as they call it here). New Year’s Eve is a pretty big deal in this country, and fireworks are very legal. The local rescue teams sell fireworks to raise funds and, I believe, to give them people to rescue. The fireworks that you can buy here are much bigger than anything that you can buy just across the Iowa border into Missouri, which is the extent of my fireworks buying experience. The most interesting fireworks are the big boxes that have one fuse and a character from the sagas printed on them:

I said most interesting, but what I meant was most terrifying to have in the back of the car you’re riding in.

On New Year’s Icelanders get together with their local community (for us, this means everyone in our valley) around 9:00 p.m. to have a bonfire and sing songs. It is mostly shipping pallets that they burn in the fire because there are no trees in Iceland, and the shipping pallets make for one large fire. The local rescue team shoots off the professional fireworks and everyone goes back home by 10:30 to watch Áramótaskaupid. Áramótaskaupid is an hour-long sketch comedy show that is aired once a year, on New Year’s Eve, to poke fun at the events of the past year. It was pretty funny even though I only understood about 20 words of it. At 11:30, everyone walks to the center of his/her town to shoot off the personal fireworks and get ready for the countdown.

Some shots from the bonfire:

One of my really exciting personal fireworks:

Þorri, Þorrablót, and Góa

Þorri (pronounced thor-ee) is a month from the old Icelandic calendar. Although they use the christian calendar now, they still celebrate a few of the days from the old calendar. The first day of Þorri is Bóndadagur (husband’s day/farmer’s day), which is always on a Friday (January 23^rd this year). The last day of Þorri is Konadagur (wife’s day), which is sort of akin to St. Valentine’s Day, and is always on a Sunday (February 22^nd this year). Somewhere between these two days is the Þorrablót (pronounced thorra-bloat) feast.

Þorrablót was unlike anything I had ever seen before. Everyone from our valley and the surrounding farms (about 300 people) got together for the feast. Hundreds of years ago, Icelanders had two main techniques for preserving meat so they could stay alive over the winter: smoking or souring. The smoking technique seems pretty obvious, but as I mentioned earlier, there are no trees in Iceland, so they use sheep dung. The souring technique is similar to pickling, but a lye solution is used instead of vinegar.

In the picture below, the lighter colored food in the middle is sour, and the food on each side of it is smoked. On the left, there is salted lamb, smoked lamb, smoked horse sausage, blood sausage, liver sausage, smoked puffin, and smoked beef tongue. In the middle, there is sour liver sausage, sour whale, and sour ram’s testicles. On the right is more smoked lamb (it looks like bacon, but unfortunately it tasted nothing like bacon) and boiled sheeps heads:

I tried some of everything. The tongue almost made me sick because of the texture, and surprisingly enough, the sour ram’s testicles were actually the best tasting. Cat and Pamela (American) did not necessarily agree with me on the testicles. Here’s a before and after:

A committee of people from the community is chosen every year to organize entertainment for the evening. They put together about three hours worth of skits and songs to attempt to distract you from the taste of the food. While you kick back and watch skits that you don’t understand, you try to have just enough Þorra beer to get the taste out of your mouth. After a bit you start to feel pretty good and think that the worst is behind you, but then you see this guy out of the corner of your eye:

This is the hákarl, which is the shark flesh that has been buried in the ground for months so the pressure from the soil can press the ammonia out of the tissue in order to make it nontoxic. This batch was much stronger than we had the first time we tried it. The Icelanders we were with we nice, and they only made us eat one. The companion piece for the shark is Brennivín. Brennivín is the national schnapps of Iceland. It is distilled from potatoes and flavored with carroway seeds. That combination of flavors should produce a taste similar to vodka mixed with rye bread, but unfortunately it is much worse than that. Brennivín is had with the shark because it is the only way either one can be handled. If you eat the shark without taking a shot of Brennivín, then you will have the shark taste in your mouth for the rest of the night. If you have the Brennivín without having eaten the shark then you will probably die.

Brennivín on ice, even though no amount of cold can kill that taste:

After the shark, the evening turns into a normal Icelandic party, which means a bunch of people in fancy clothes getting completely out of control... except for us, we behaved:

Apparently Cat still had a little shark left on her finger, and you don’t want to let that nice ammonia flavor go to waste:

The month of Góa follows Þorri. This month begins with Bolladagur (Ball Day/Bun Day). This is probably the most wonderful day of the year; you get to gorge yourself on “buns,” and everything you eat is ball-shaped (meatballs, potato balls, etc.). The buns that everyone eats on this day are basically two donuts with jam and whipped cream in between and chocolate on top (there are a few variations on this basic plan that involve caramel or similar substances), and you are expected to eat a minimum of three:

The second day of Góa is the same day as Mardi Gras, but instead of Fat Tuesday, they call it Sprengidagur, which translates roughly to “eat until you burst day.” People take this day seriously, and everyone eats salted lamb and pea soup until they experience physical discomfort. The following day is Öskudagur, which is Ash Wednesday, but this day takes on none of the forehead-smearing characteristics of the christian holiday. It gets its name from the bags of ashes that boys try to pin to the clothing of girls. Girls have bags of rocks that they have to try to pin to boys’ clothes. If you are able to successfully pin your bag to someone’s clothing without him/her noticing, and he/she goes through three doors without removing the bag, then he/she will fall in love with you. The children also dress up in costumes and get candy for singing songs on this day, so it has essentially become an Icelandic Halloween.

Northern Lights

I’m not going to spend a lot of time writing about the lights because they’re something that you just have to see. They don’t photograph very well, but here are a couple of pictures. In these first two, they aren’t very exciting looking. They’re just shooting over the top of a mountain:

These two were taken out of our back door. Some other people went driving to a place with less light pollution, but I was really sick, so we didn’t go. The bright spot is the moon:

The picture below was taken by Birgir Örn Sigurðsson. This is from the drive mentioned above. I think he has a pretty nice camera and a tripod:

Random Pictures

I think I’ve covered the major stuff, so I’m just going to post some pictures with short descriptions.

Hólar outdoor heated pool and hot tub:

Driving home from work:

The Hólar church, which is very famous:

Horses with snow on their backs:

Drying fish next to my office:

Frozen harbor:

Frozen harbor with steam farther out:

A nice walk on the beach:

Harbor in the morning:

Reykjavík:

Alþingi (Parliament building where all of the protests took place):

Caution: Drunken Viking:

The darkness has disappeared and the days are starting to get really long already, so I hope to do some traveling and have more pictures next time. Thanks for coming back again.

--Dan (The Hairy American)

PS - If you've ever heard anyone say "Iceland is green, and Greenland is ice," then you've heard the voice of someone who may have visited Greenland but never lived in Iceland.