Iceland

We're flying Icelandair tomorrow to Denmark and naturally will have a short layover in Iceland. Since I've never been to Iceland my attention was drawn to an editorial on Iceland in the Sunday Tribune last week (Iceland: The fairies, the fair sex and the far-out foods, by John Flinn, from the San Francisco Chronicle), and it was so good I feel obligated to share some of it:

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So what follows are a few of the things I discovered in Iceland. Nearly everyone who visits Iceland discovers these same things, and it should be noted that Icelanders are a little tired of having them pointed out. Nevertheless:

They believe in fairies: Icelanders are probably the most educated people on the planet, with a 99.9 percent literacy rate, and nearly one in 10 ends up writing a book during his lifetime. Yet, according to the Icelandic Tourism Board, 90 percent of them take fairies, elves, trolls and other manifestations of huldufolk -- "hidden people" -- quite seriously.

Public engineers routinely reroute roads, pipelines and underground cables to avoid disturbing fairy habitat, often at considerable expense. Construction of golf courses and even harbors has come to a standstill when the wee folk appear to have been offended, and a woman named Erla Stefansdottir, who claims to be able to communicate with them, is frequently consulted by the Reykjavik city planning department.

They're obsessed about our obsession about their sex lives: It's been going on for a while, but the latest round started, as all cultural phenomena seem to do these days, with Oprah. Back in April, on a show about women around the world, a Reykjavik anchorwoman, Swanhildur Valsdottir, got everyone in a lather by saying, in front of an audience of 30 million people, that Icelandic women didn't consider it any big deal to sleep with someone on the first date.

Icelandic feminists were outraged, angry letters poured in to newspapers and Valsdottir was vilified for perpetuating promiscuous stereotypes.

In the middle of the flap, the Grapevine, an excellent, irreverent, English-language Reykjavik tabloid (and my main source on this topic) published the results of a 2004 global survey by Durex, the world's largest manufacturer of condoms. On all the major benchmarks of sexual behavior, the paper reported, Iceland was at or near the top of the list. Perhaps understandably, this didn't calm anyone down.

They eat revolting things: And by this I don't just mean hrutspungur, which are pickled ram's testicles; or svio, a sheep's head that's been singed to remove the wool, then cut in half, boiled, and either eaten fresh, eyes included, or pressed into jelly; or slatur, Iceland's version of haggis: sheep innards tied up in sheep's stomach and cooked.

All these things sound like lip-smacking treats compared with the notorious hakarl, Greenland shark that has been buried in sand for four to six months until it's good and putrefied. Then it's dug up, hung on a hook a few more days for a final rot and then served to a presumably ravenous public.

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