My favorite fact about Iceland is that their horses are all members of a labour union.
I really want this to be true because it's amazing. Do you have a source by chance?
Horse, not source.
Wired were the eyes of a horse on a jet pilot When he smiled as he flew over the bay
I can see why no one's favorite fact about Iceland is that their national dish is shark fermented in its own urea and then hung out to dry for months.
I mean I can see it back when they were Vikings, desperate to survive, but come on, Iceland. Move on from eating the dried pee sharks.
I'm pretty sure they just do it for the tourists now.
I remember when I was there. They were all very excited about a Costco opening up, and I don't imagine they carry shark pee soup.
Why go to a Costco when you can make your own fermented shark pee?
Blahaj
Umm actually 🤓🤓🤓 because icelandic is closer to old nordic its a lot different than swedish(and norwegian, danish)
It isn't staple food you'd see on modern dinner plates: it essentially is only tourist food, or eaten during Þorrablót - a mid-winter celebration of of traditional Icelandic food (which in many cases was starvation food, but we let that slide)
"Those new to it may gag involuntarily at the first attempt to eat...". Fantastic!
How the fuck did you collect the sharks urea? I see how it gets expensive... Lmao
Sharks don't really pee. It gets stored it in their body tissue instead. Part of the preperation of shark is essentially pressing it for weeks to bring out the ammonia and let it break down into something that won't kill you. Doesn't taste good, but won't kill you.
They basically sweat it.
Worth pointing out that Greenland sharks are rare, live for a long time, and probably don't breed quickly.
So get 'em before they run out! /s
It's among my favorite Iceland facts, but only because of that time James May kept it down.
Sounds like he has a lucrative consulting career in his future.
My favorite fact about Iceland is that it was a dry country, with beer being banned until 1989. Home brew is limited to 2.5%.
Strong alcohol is only really sold at state ran shops called Vinbudin hat often have weird opening hours.
Its also very expensive, majority of the cost being tax.
Oh no I accidentally added too much sugar to my homebrew oh nooooo
2.5% geez. I'm not sure my kombucha doesn't have that much ABV.
Given the number of pissheads flailing about in the streets, I can only assume that the more enterprising fishermen are bringing in a fuckload of bootleg booze.
They could be secret millionaires of course, but I doubt any of the people I saw were rich enough to be that fucked up. They don't seem to have the local equivalent of three litres of Frosty Jacks for £4.
Most buy their booze exactly that way or from abroad as they do in most of the Nordics.
However the drink driving limit is very low, a quarter of the UK legal limit and they want to lower it further. Not worth the hefty fine for getting caught, I wouldn't drink the night before driving personally.
Meanwhile in Germany, you were allowed to distill your own schnapps at home but only "in small amounts". Small amounts meant less than 450 liters per year per person in the household, yes children counted.
Since 2018, you are not allowed to do that anymore tho, but there are distilleries that accept your home-grown fruit and distill schnapps for you.
Probably to stop winter depression turning to alcoholism.
I have to say though, having visited Reykjavík, the beer is delicious, presumably because the water's so nice.
[Off topic]
Actual book. 'Body Trauma' by David W. Page, MD. Subtitled 'a writers guide to wounds and injuries' it explains things like how it feels to be shot, and how long it would take to wake up after being knocked out.
I somehow read "how long it would take" as "how good it would be" and got really confused.
Did you take a head injury yourself?
/s
I wonder why they have so many crime writers
I think there are many writers in general. There are 300,000 people, and 1 in 10 will publish a book in their lifetimes.
Okay, but one guy writing 1000 books would skew that number substantially.
You get 20 doing 10 that’s still a large portion changing the statistics.
Is it actually 1/10 or is just 30000 books from the population.
Seems to be a few writing a lot.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Icelandic_crime_fiction_writers
Keep in mind, that's just the people famous enough to have English Wikipedia articles.
There's no way 1 in 10 people in Iceland are full-time professional authors publishing a book every year.
In the US, most authors I personally know write for fun and have a novel or few on something like wattpad and they've made exactly $0 on it.
That's '1 in 10 Icelanders will write and publish at least one novel at some point in their life', not 'one book written for every 10 Icelanders'.
It's a stat you'll see floating around the internet, though I haven't seen the ultimate source.
Yes it’s deliberately worded to be vague it could really mean either with no source, I did some research and most of what I found was multiple books are being published by people, with that same 1/10 being repeated, didn’t look into publishing rates or anything yet though.
Damn Novels Georg.
When I visited (so take it with a grain of salt) a local (who was a friend of a friend and showed us around) said that culturally there is a lot of encouragement to be creative in various forms. Be interested if any Icelandic people would either confirm or deny this.
I wonder if this is actually true? Like I could probably take the time to look this and verify its validity, but I won't.
It is. 10% of the population are published writers. Not much to do there during the long and harsh winter...
Step 1: make music.
Step 2: get real weird with it.
I can't imagine they have many forensic pathologists.
They have like 2 murders a year.
My favorite fact about Iceland is that 2/3 of the names that got carved in stone about me, actually contain my real name.
I had 3 accounts when the EvE memorial got made.
There is almost a 0% chance that I will ever see that stone.
We booked a holiday to Reykjavik and I was SO excited to go find my name, but then realised we'd booked for almost exactly one month before the planned unveiling. Guess we'll just have to go back one day!
Did get a cheesy photo of myself doing a thumbsup outside of CCP HQ. And you know, saw awe-inspiring natural wonders and stuff. So that counts for something I guess.
When I went twice and I dragged everybody over to go and look at the building. I don't think they really understood why I wanted to go see it.
In case anyone else was OOTL about this like I was:
If you live on or near the East Coast, Play Air has round-trips from Dulles to Keflavík for less than 500. I just got back and Iceland was amazing!
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