Archive for the 'Iceland' Category

Mon., Jan 12, 2009, Reykjavik, Iceland

The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Eaten
“Wanna try it?” asked the fish monger.

“Uh… ok.” I respond with a mixture of caution and intrigue.

“Brace yourself.” Commented the Icelandic lady standing next to me at the Hákarl counter in the food section of the Reykjavik’s indoor weekend market.

Her British companion expressed interest as well, but she refused.

“Don’t smell it!” our fish monger friend advised us, strongly.

::fuzzpic-right(“Iceland/thumbnails/IMG_6385.jpg”,”So very much Hákarl.”)::
I didn’t. I just took the sample of rotten shark off the tooth-pick and started chewing. Hey! It’s not so bad, I thought at first. Really it just burned so much that I couldn’t taste it. As the aromas spread to my nasal passage and the back of my throat, everything burned there too, for a few instants. After the burning wore off the taste came on like a deluge of putridness. The shark tasted more like urea than I imagine urea would ever have tasted had I ever had the cause to imagine the taste of urea.

“Now you can smell it,” he said, smiling, and held out the tupperware yet two-thirds full of sample-sized Hákarl chunks. It does smell worse than it tastes.

I feel no need to ever eat that again, but even knowing what I know now I would try it again for the first time.* *(This is of course a hypothetical impossibility, so please indulge me by making up something to do with time-travel or [¿¿tele-oleathy??].)

“So how is it made?” I asked.

“We bury it in the ground for three months,” was his simple answer. Apparently it is actually poisonous were they not to do so, rather than just very convincingly poisonous-tasting.

Hot Water

This is a mostly-barren volcanic rock in the North Atlantic. Now that I’ve seen this place I can really understand why the Vikings once had to get so creative as to bury something poisonous in the ground and check back a few months later to see if it’s not poisonous anymore.

::fuzzpic-left(“Iceland/thumbnails/IMG_6374.jpg”,”Hot springs in the middle of town.”)::
Now they grow their own tomatoes, in greenhouses heated with geothermal water and lit during the long nights and overcast days with almost-free geothermal electricity. It’s not just the greenhouses, but nearly every home in Reykjavik is heated with geothermal water, pumped straight out of the earth and into your radiators and showers. People don’t buy water-heaters here – they’re living on top of one. You get used to the sulfur smell after a few showers, trust me.

The cold water tap comes straight from the ground too, and in the case of public water fountains, it does so all day long. 24/7 superbly delicious and pure spring water burbles out whether you want to drink it or not.

::fuzzpic-right(“Iceland/thumbnails/IMG_6418.jpg”,”Driving by a big geo-thermal power plant.”)::
It’s not just geothermal water heating homes, but ocean water heats the whole island. Thanks to the Gulf Stream it was warmer when I arrived in Reykjavik than when I had left New York. There wasn’t even any snow save on the distant ridge across the harbor.

Locals, and younger ones at that, regaled me with stories of how much colder the winters used to be, something I’m sure you’ve heard to if you’ve traveled anywhere non-equatorial in the past few years. Apparently centuries ago it has been much warmer and the ancient Icelanders had a nice spell of successful agriculture.

Hellvítas Fokking Fokk

If I was more of a gambling man, I might start buying up future farmland and wait for global warming. Nearly free water, heat, and power are quite appealing, as is Iceland’s Nordic-style market socialism. Free education, health care, liberal social values, etc., lead to one of the highest qualities of life in the world. In recent history all this has been available with taxes quite low relative to the large Scandinavian countries as well. But now that the Icelandic economy has crashed and the treasury is bankrupt, Icelanders are very worried about all these nice things going away. For six months after losing one’s job the government used to commit to paying 50% of ones paycheck. This sounds very unlikely, and the many young, unemployed people I met with immediately plans to head overseas know it well. Unemployment is shooting very quickly beyond 8% at the same time as the government is running out of money. The exchange rate has plummeted by half in a year, and inflation soared.

“Iceland is small, so it can crash very quickly. But, similarly, it can recover much more quickly than other countries,” an optimistic Icelander explained to me, “actually, it’s good. The crisis will make us more creative. All of our best, most successful companies were started during the last crisis, in the nineties. This crisis will lead to political reforms too. So it’s an opportunity too.”

Many Icelanders are very interested in that question of social reform, but not necessarily so optimistic about the current situation. I saw one of the very friendly Icelanders I met on Saturday night presented with a shirt from another friend. On the shirt was written “Hellvítas Fokking Fokk!” A phrase you should be able to more or less figure out yourself, it has become quite famous in the past weeks. For several past Saturdays a motley crowd of students, radicals, unemployed, and grandmothers have been demonstrating in front of the parliament building. Recognizing the face that none of them really knew what they were protesting, a young man (friend of the friend of the guy with the new shirt) simply scrawled “Hellvítas Fokking Fokk!” on a large sign and held it out in the crowd. The next day he was all over the newspapers, and the sense of panic, outrage, and uncertainty felt by Icelanders was immortalized in those three words.

Utsala Utsala Utsala

The economic collapse is only obvious in a few ways, such as the few large construction projects on the Reykjavik periphery obviously halted indefinitely. Very noticeable are the number of “Útsala” signs in every downtown boutique. Previously the most expensive country in the world, many fancy shops are selling luxury goods, considering the new exchange rate, at well less than they must of paid for them. But a stroll in the evening, or a night out in the bars, and Icelanders certainly do not seem depressed. Nearly every beautiful young person was out bumping, griding, and buying expensive drinks when I was quite ready to quit and stumble back for the night. I’d assumed it was around 2:00 in the morning and accepted that I was just a pansy to be heading to bed. Much to my shock, I got in and saw the clock: 5:00 a.m. On the walk home I’d even seen bars that still had lines to get in.

Dear Iceland, you have lived up to your reputation for being fokking hardcore. Rest easy, your friend, Adam Skory.