Living with an Icelandic (Part 1)

I must confess that, if I had avoided something, it is to acquire a different accent from mine. I do not know why, or the science that exists behind it but, I have met people who moved to another country, or who visits it just for a month, and come back with a pseudo accent of the place they went to.If I'm proud of anything is that I don't speak with any Icelandic intonation yet (or Swedish). That and say "aplicación" to an application. God forbid! What is really difficult is that ANYTHING sticks to you. Whether from learning the language (even a word), to acquiring a new musical taste, living with someone leaves you something. Here is a not so extensive list of things that I have noticed I have acquired after living all this time with an Icelandic man.

Since I met my husband and every time I meet an Icelandic person, one of the first conversations I have to break the ice is to talk about the language. And of course, being Icelandic a somewhat complicated language, they know that we, foreigners, find difficult to articulate the groups of agglutinated vowels and consonants with which they give names to unpronounceable volcanoes or ultra-specific objects.

If as a child, someone would have told me that, just for the pleasure of experimenting, I would try fermented fish, not only me, but my mother would have laughed at whoever dared to suggest it. I was one of those girls who pouted at whatever was inert on my plate, using a thousand and one excuses to not try it. To this day, peas disgust me, I take them off from my rice. But that same girl, now turned into an adult, gives herself the chance to venture, like Andrew Zimmern, to taste things she wouldn't ask for whatsoever.

Nudity. When bodies cease to belong to our privacy, invading the public space. At least the one in the pool locker room. I come from a family that is very open, in my family we talk about everything, without taboos. That included sex and various topics. But, nudity, the one that is supposed to be the most natural thing, was still reserved, as is usual in most Mexican families, to privacy. Iceland laughed at me when, ashamed of my superficial ideas about nudity, she invited me into hot, warm and relaxing waters. Not without testing myself first. To walk naked from the locker to the shower and, while showering as the diagram on the wall said (head, armpits, genitals and feet),avoiding the staring eyes of others.

I have been to Mexico twice in these 3 years that I have lived abroad. Specifically, on the second time, I had a craving to satisfy: a Cinépolis (a Mexican movie theater chain) hotdog. I don’t know what the trigger was, but the result was to see any movie just for the sake of eating a Maxi jumbo hot dog, with tomato, onion and jalapeño. But I was missing something. Halfway through the hot dog, I remembered: Steiktur laukur. Fried onions, which the here called pulsur, are served with. Now they are part of my favorite hot dog construction, while for my husband, the addition has been jalapeño and Valentina sauce (mea culpa).

I have the impression, but not the accurate data, that Icelanders are quite patriotic. The achievement of an Icelandic outside Iceland seems to be an achievement of the entire nation. And for this reason they have memorized, as if that was written on their history books, all kinds of data that, directly or indirectly, have to do with the country. The anecdote that I remember the most was when I came to know that Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin was about Iceland. I know, I sin of being ignorant, but, in my defense, it is one of those songs in which I know only the melody and the “Aaaaahh…. ahhh… ”, I never paid attention to the lyrics. I shared the information among my acquaintances and I must say that they didn’t know that either. Anyway, you always learn something new.