You left too soon

Not just because we loved having you here, but also because you missed this:

And whereas one can scarcely fall out of bed here without landing in the newspaper, see if you can spot us in this article’s second photo.

Marengsterta

What’s that? You want the recipe for the cake that wasn’t the Lego cake?

It’s called marengsterta or meringue tart, and Raggi’s mom made five of them. You may have heard the story of how Raggi’s cousin got two of these for his birthday and I ate one of them all by myself. That’s how I know they’re good.

Warning: sugar.

2 meringue layers

4 eggs

200 ml white sugar

100 ml brown sugar

750 ml Rice Krispies or other crisp bland cereal

1. Separate out the eggs yolks; set them aside.
2. Whip the 4 egg whites until very stiff, until you can invert the bowl and have the egg whites stay in place.
3. Add both sugars and beat until dissolved.
4. Add Rice Krispies and stir with a spatula.
5. Place waxed paper atop two plates. Use a pen and a third plate to draw a circle on both pieces of waxed paper. Divide the dough in two and spread it within the drawn circles.
6. Bake at 150°C / 300°F for 60 minutes. It’s best to have the oven’s fan on.

Between the layers

0.5 l whipped cream; reserve a little bit to use in the frosting

a healthy portion of chocolate-covered raisins

Frosting

3 (not all 4) egg yolks

70 g icing sugar

80 g cooking chocolate

1. Melt the chocolate and allow it to cool but not to set.
2. Mix the sugar and egg yolks very well. Stir in the little bit of reserved whipped cream.
3. Frost the cake. Drizzle the chocolate. Set in refrigerator.

Best results come from making this cake the day before it’s to be eaten.

“Verði ykkur að góðu!”  -Brynhildur (Raggi’s mom)

Global proprioception disorder

Those who went on the south coast trip Sunday might not remember the names of the places we went. No problem. Icelandic place names do strike the anglophone ear as a stochastic garble immune to retention. So here´s where we went:

Hveragerði
steamy valley with a river of warm water

Selfoss
town with hotdog stand

Seljalandsfoss
tall skinny waterfall you can walk behind

Skógafoss

enormous waterfall with with stairs to the top

Vík í Mýrdal

village with black sand beach

Of shoes and ships and sealing-wax, of cabbages and kings

Actually, just shoes. People have been asking about them.

From Vancouver designer John Fluevog, they conform to my "dullest thing in the hippest store" program. You can get them here; Icelanders might swing by the store in Boston.

Wedding

It worked!

SO many thanks to all who came.

But which boat?

This one.

In case of ultimate disaster

Suppose you don't show up at the Old Harbor downtown comfortably before 12:30 Saturday. There you are, panting and running toward the pier, your carefully styled lid falling askew, the high heels we told you not to wear snapping like old wishbones as you sprint fruitlessly toward the slip only to see a distant dot of ship peacefully receding toward Viðey. You miss the wedding. Your soul vanishes and is replaced with a silent grey mist.

If this happens, there are hourly ferries from the newer, not-downtown harbor called Skarfabakki. They take only a few minutes to make the crossing.

But that won't happen. Get yourself to this office...

...on the whale-watching pier at the old harbor, and someone will point you at our boat.

Look for the balloons.

Street closures Saturday

On the Saturday the 18th / wedding day / marathon day / Culture Night, the streets shown in orange are closed to traffic. It’s pretty much all of downtown. Not the streets nearest the harbor, though, which are in the upper corner of this picture.

So plan for that.

If you can rustle up a copy of last week’s Reykjavík Grapevine you’ll find a pull-out paper guide to all the events. There’s a stack of them in Raggi’s apartment.

We saw your refrigerator

and we look forward to seeing you on Saturday. We set sail at 12:30.

 

The Tolkien thing

Are you a Lord of the Rings fan? You may find certain things here disturbingly familiar. Here’s why:

Tolkien was an Icelandophile. He taught Old Icelandic at Leeds and hired Icelandic au-pairs for his kids so he could practice the language. His project was to re-mythologize England by filling the void of story left after the Norman Invasion, and some of the handiest materials with which to do so were the sagas and Norse myths.

Some signs include...

His saga-like prose style, especially in The Silmarillion and The Children of Húrin. He even directly re-wrote the Poetic Edda, calling it The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun. 

The determinedly pagan flavor of his books’ cosmology: there’s a hierarchy of gods, they fight, there are semidivine humans running about, there’s less talk of
forgiveness than of generation-spanning blood feuds, and history ends with everything coming to ruin. 

Specific items of landscape, like the way the waterfall Boromir went over is split in two by a rocky outcropping just like Gullfoss or Hjálparfoss.

Certain tics of syntax like “Theoden king,” which is how you order the words in languages derived closely from Old Norse (Icelandic is probably the closest), and more generally the Old Norse flavor of words like Theoden, which derives from þjóðann.

The country was once divided into Shire-style farthings /  fjórðungur / quadrants. 

The X son of Y patronymic formula; the re-use of the top 50 names, producing a lot of Magnús Magnússons; the consequent hobbit-habit upon meeting someone new of trying to establish social context by finding a shared relative. 

The focus on genealogy -- in this, Mormons have nothing on Icelanders. It’s not impossible to trace back 55 generations to the settlers.

Traditional turf houses.

And Mordor.

  

For those of you about to fly

Everything is set up. We’ll meet you at BSÍ, have keys for those staying at Raggi’s, and we’ll show you where the food is.

Relax. Everything will be fine.

Álfheimar? About 5 minutes away.

The Norse pantheon and mythos - Odin, Thor, Loki, Freyja  -- the world-tree Yggdrasil and the battle of gods at the end of the world called Ragnarok -- are known to us mainly from the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda, great big books written in Iceland in the 14th to 17th centuries. If you want to know on whom to blame Der Ring des Nibelungen, or certain comics, start there.

Iceland was pagan until Christianization happened around 1000 AD, but to this day will you find yourself not only walking down Odin Street or Loki Street, but also talking to people named Óðinn, Þór (“Thor”), Baldur, and Sif.

Þór. 

Thor. 

Jón Þór.

What about the days of the week? Tyr’s day = Tuesday, Odin’s day = Wednesday, Thor’s day = Thursday, Freyja day = Friday. Not here, though, curiously, where they are boringly called third-day, midweek-day, and fifth-day.

Weirdly, the Norse religion Ásatrú has been revived. Its adherents know they’re working from fragmentary sources and have had to simply make certain things up. Probably because of the nativist flavor, some branches have attracted a creepy racist element; others are strenuously progressive and environmentalist.

Elves, dwarves of the supernatural sort, ice-giants: blame them on Iceland. You may have heard stories about people re-routing roads and otherwise taking care not to disturb the elves. You may not have heard about the ELF SEX.

Or about the flying love goddess.

Weird things

What local weirdness haven't I mentioned yet? Time to mop up straggling topics.

Population density: 3 per square kilometer, ranking 234th out of 242 countries.

Number of cities: 1. There are plenty of towns like this, though.

Military: zero. Not counting the Coast Guard.

Language: freaky. But all you really need to know is that þ is like th in thick, ð is like th in that except when it’s not, hn is the sound of exhaling through your nose, and you’re strongly encouraged to concatenate items boxcar-style to produce words like snjóflóðavarnargarður or hæstaréttarmálaflutningsmaður or vaðlaheiðarvegagerðarmannaverkfærageymsluskúrslyklakippuhringur.

Percentage of people who will publish a book during their lives: 10%.

Politics: well, it’s a bit of a gong show. Maybe Raggi will explain it to you. Suffice it to say that this was the mayor this past weekend:

Overall: you could try this 2008 Guardian article. It’s perhaps too optimistic, and its adumbration of the economic crash that came a few months later is ironic in retrospect, but it sets about the right tone.

Moneychangers

A noted Halifax sysadmin writes:

Where's the best place to buy króna - at the Keflavík airport, or downtown...?

Downtown. Just as airports offer only punitive captive-audience prices on food, tickets, souvenirs, toiletries, and everything, they offer only a captive-audience rate on currency exchange. You’ll do better downtown.

You’ll likely get the best rate of all just getting cash out of an ATM. Only if you want cash. People really do use credit cards for everything here.

If you want a bank, they’re downtown on Laugavegur. Just wander until you see one of these signs:

New logistics

Wednesday the 15th

Darren, Audrey, Paul, Rose, Lorne, Alain: no change. Same plan as before.

Rob and Bill are now arriving later than expected. Thus Raggi and I are going to stay in the apartment for tonight and the next day instead of retreating to Mosfellsbær. This way we can offer people drives.


Thursday the 16th

We’ll intercept Antonio at BSÍ.


Friday the 17th

Adriane, Rob, and Bill are all on the same plane from Halifax. We’ll meet at BSÍ and improvise a breakfast plan.