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FEÒRAG

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Boireann IPA: fjɔːrag 🎧 Faidhle-Fuaime leis an Fhaclair Bheag: http://bit.ly/2d0zYau 🎧 Faidhle-Fuaime le Learn Gaelic: https://bit.ly/3biO5sC

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Hi! I love your blog so much! The translation and especially the notes you make on them give me so much insight in the song! I also read the thing about the whole cultural thing of names in Iceland which I thought was very interesting. Are there more aspects in Icelandic culture that are specific like that? I'd love to read about it!

Well, we’ve got some very interesting traditional food. Most other countries have their own special delicacies, but the Icelanders were primarily concerned with surviving on this cold little island, and our traditional food largely revolves around finding ways to eat absolutely every part of every available animal, and preserve it all through the winter with extreme and grotesque methods. Highlights include:

- Greenland shark! Greenland shark is poisonous. The Icelanders were apparently really determined to eat this shark anyway, and they found a way: by burying it in the ground to rot for a few months, then hanging it to dry for several more months! It is absolutely disgusting by all accounts. There exist Icelanders who genuinely like it (my grandpa did), but much more who eat it solely as a test of bravery (and others who just don’t dare; I’m very sensitive about food and I’m not touching it with a ten-foot pole). We love getting tourists to eat it just to see how they react. Testimonials:

“the single worst, most disgusting and terrible tasting thingI’ve ever eaten” - Anthony Bourdain

"That's hardcore. That's serious food. You don't want to mess with that. That's not for beginners."- Andrew Zimmern

"like chewing a urine-infested mattress"- Ainsley Harriott

- Sheep heads with eyes and all, staring you in the face! You don’t waste any part of the animal, so you eat the head. This one’s actually supposedly pretty tasty, if you can get over it psychologically. But don’t look at me, I don’t eat any of this stuff. (There is a pretty good Icelandic crime thriller film, Mýrin or Jar City, where the protagonist buys one of these at a drive-through, which you can actually do in Iceland, and eats it while reading up on some evidence, just casually scooping out the eye with a pocket knife and sticking it in his mouth. It is glorious and I really want to watch this film with foreigners sometime and watch them react to this scene.)

- Ram testicles! Who doesn’t want to eat some of those! I said every part of the animal, damn it.

Mostly our traditional food is eaten during þorri, one of the months of the old Icelandic calendar, approximately mid-January to mid-February. We’ve got feasts featuring nothing but this food, called þorrablót. It’s going to vary whether your family does these or not (mine did not), but you’ll almost certainly at least experience some in your kindergarten or elementary school.

Also, we still have intermissions in the middle of movies at most movie theaters. On the one hand it disrupts the flow of the movie since movies aren’t designed for intermissions anymore, and sometimes they’re not very well placed and the audio doesn’t come in immediately when it starts up again. But on the other hand, I kind of like it because you can go to the bathroom, or talk to whoever you’re with about what’s going on, or get popcorn, or just stand up and stretch your legs for a bit. Very helpful for those three-hour movies.

#iceland #boireann #asks #asks: iceland