Fun facts about Iceland

[Shetooktothewoods]

“If you want to use a genealogy database as a dating app… that’s none of my business.” 😂

[trystenryder]

Real Iceland fans know the last one is factual

[BOTB_RBLX]

As a swede, elves are real, the nordics can all agree.

[robinharwood]

I recall President Vigdis Finbogadottir (spelling?) saying “everyone knows that the elves live in the stones”. It’s the most sensible and truthful thing I’ve ever heard from a politician.

[doughnutts]

Nematocera is the latin name for a subgroup which contains mosquitoes but it seems the lake has loads of midges which also fall in to the subgroup nematocera :)

[Spiklething]

Fun fact about Iceland. 75% Icelandic patrilineal (male) ancestors are Scandinavian. 62% Icelandic matrilineal (female) ancestors are Scottish/Irish.
So Scandinavian men ‘picked up’ their female partners in Scotland and Ireland on the way to Iceland!

[psychedelicpegasus]

I'm Irish, and I have an uncle and cousins who live in Iceland. They come to see us every few years. I haven't visited them yet, but my father has. My uncle took Dad to see puffins (apparently tourists go wild for them. In Ireland who have our own), to see a geyser and to have food and drinks with friends and family.
Pabbi's verdict: "Great hospitality, and we all got on really well because I actually bothered to pack for the weather and didn't do stupid things like get myself stuck on a glacier trying to get a selfie". 😂

[optillian]

Ef álfar eru ekki til, hver er þá að stela sokkunum mínum úr þvottavélinni?

[alinkdfuture]

My favorite Icelandic elf is the one that comes around Christmas to lick all your spoons

[ThatWildcard]

"Believe in elves" is something someone who has never had to deal with elves before would say

[clinetime]

The last part reminds me of my step mom from Ghana that was like don't be ridiculous we aren't superstitious but some people can turn into snakes

[BadgerOfTheSea]

With the Elves thing it is honestly better safe than sorry. Like no one actually believes THEIR house is going to burn down, but they still install a smoke detector

[rudolfp]

Love how much I’m learning with each video!

[zhyakoxalid]

Dude just watching you talk about iceland is fun as hell. Keep it up man. Much love and respect from Kurdistan-Iraq, Sulaymaniyah

[KamiKazevr]

I went to iceland a while ago and was on a bus tour for the aurora borealis. The bus tour guy asked if we'd like to hear stories about elves, but my bus tour had rude people who yelled 'no!'. I was so appalled by them. I wanted to hear what he had to share :(

[RoberinoSERE]

I saw a series called Vikings. You guys have really changed. You have a sense of humor now.

[dstinnettmusic]

So, on elves.

Modern people like to laugh at these kinds of holdovers from the past and then especially like to laugh at people of the past…but in a pre-scientific era, these were explanations for the random daily events we still sometimes struggle with.

Headphones tangled in a way you can’t explain? Like…with a literal knot that makes absolutely zero sense because how could it loop around itself that way just being in your pocket? That’s the kind of thing that people would blame elves for.

[ladyofthemasque]

Icelandic Elves Are Real! And they REALLY like the banana bread sold in the café at the top of that geothermal hot water facility you can go take a tour of, in Reykjavic.

What happened was this: My mother and I were on our way to Helsinki for the World Science Fiction Convention, but we wanted to visit iceland for the hotsprings and the Phallological Museum, so we did a 3 night layover. Well, one of the days we did a tour of Reykjavik and various important locations, and that included the geothermal water plant...where I picked up some banana bread at the little café.

Seriously, super good banana bread! I hope whoever was making it in 2017 is still making it, it's that good.

We moved on with the rest of the tour, which included visiting a charming little gardne called Elf Cave Park (or something like that), where there is a little cave that the locals know are inhabited by the Little People, aka Elves. So since I still had some banana bread left, I left the last decent-sized bite of this really tasty banana bread on a garden bed curb near the cave, and I politely thanked the elves for letting my mother and me visit such a lovely land.

And then the Icelandic elves MUST have agreed that the banana bread was that special, too, because I had the BEST string of luck EVER in the week that followed!

I got back to the hotel, and found out in an email that I'd been invited to meet the assistant mayor of Helsinki in a "welcome to Finland" gala for authors and other professionals attending WorldCon--limited attendance, and they picked me, so I felt extra special. I had planned to go with my best friend & mother to Tallin, Estonia on that day (my BFF had married a Finn and was living near Helsinki. so she made the trip all the time), and we discovered that yes, we COULD swap which day we went to Tallin on the ferry at no extra charge, and still get the day cabin we wanted, yay!

We had gone early enough to go visiting, and I picked up the BEST FLU experience of my life--seriously, ALL it did to me was make me super sleepy for a day and a half. Like, the kind of sleepy where you feel like a cat in a sunbeam, you just sleep and you're fine. I was even able to reassure another convention attendee when I overheard her in the hotel lobby saying how "weirdly tired and sleepy" she felt, that she was "about to have the BEST flu of your life, just go sleep for a day, and you'll be fine!" and she WAS fine. I heard it from her directly 3 days later when I caught up with her! (Normally "con crud" is a dreaded thing to catch, but this was seriously the best of my life.)

We did the trip to Tallin a day early (I recommend the medieval restaurant). Then we did the gala evening, and to have a place to change, my friend's boss agreed to let us use their office which was downtown at the train station just a few blocks from the mayorial offices. And to thank her, I knew the boss liked strawberries, so I hurred back down outside to find the last of the strawberries about to be sold to a Finnish gentleman from the fruit vendor. I explained I was hoping to repay the boss' kindness with those strawberries...and the Finnish man LET ME BUY THEM--which let me tell you, they don't normally do! String after string after string of good luck!

The gala was wonderful; I got to converse with several people (my friend thankfully could translate in Finnish, so that included the city's movers and shakers), and to my surprise, even the assistant mayor had read some of my wtuff! We then got to sightsee around the region (we got to visit a castle that had *just* finished renovations, and I even got to dabble my toes in the sea!), and everything was fantastic. Even the fact the stitching nearly broke on my leather belt was caught before it *actually* broke, AND I was able to get both a replacement belt on the spot, AND was able get some epoxy to fix the spot where the stitching at the buckle had come undone.

And then...the storm hit. I had decided to rest in the hotel room a little longer while waiting for the epoxy to dry. My friend & mum went downstairs to go back to the convention, but suddenly a micro-downburst of sheer wind and heavy rain hit just a few blocks of the city right around our hotel. It struck before they left the lobby, which they had delayed leaving because they had a sudden urge to check some of the sight-seeing brochures.

Mum & friend hurried back upstairs, and we watched as mini tornados hit the schoolyard across from our hotel. BUT, all the kids had JUST gone back inside to class from recess about ten minutes earlier, so nobody got hurt! Not even the saplings, being swirled around like freaky swizzle-sticks, which was more than a bit unnerving to see (all three of us were ready to swear they were going to break)...but no damage! And for some reason NOBODY was outside within its radius during the microburst, and that was a busy hotel! Everyone just had this...instinct...to go inside. We talked about it with the other con attendees, and I just knew it was the blessings of the Icelandic elves and the magic of Reykjavic banana bread.


Everything else just went fantastically well. So, for our last evening's meal, i saved a little bit of it (very tasty India cuisine) and tucked it under some bushes near the hotel entrance, and thanked the Finnish elves as well for helping carry forward the good luck all the way from Iceland...and THEY were very kind in sharing their good luck with us all the way home, too, because that "sleepy flu" was the ONLY con crud any of us caught!

I will therefore always STAUNCHLY defend the fantastic kindness of Icelandic elves...IF you are kind to them *first.*

[benrutgers]

I partied with a guy named Jan Janson from Iceland in South America during the financial crisis. We had a crazy night and poor dude woke up and the value of his bank account was halved. I hope he is doing well out there

[heimirjosefsson]

I'm an Icelandic elf and I approve this message.