BlackNotBlack.com

Flags of Our Soccer Hooligans, Part 2

I said I’d discuss Iceland again, and now seems as good a time as any, but I want to start with a clarification of my previous Iceland post.

First, I wrote that Bjork was in a hot dog line and I feel I need to explain that. As any travel book will tell you, hot dogs are the staple snack food of Iceland, strange as that seems. The main reason is that most food is imported, thus expensive—exorbitantly so. Reykjavik prices are about the same as those in say, Beverly Hills. That means a draft beer runs the equivalent of eight dollars. A typical restaurant meal, with no drinks, runs forty. But hot dogs are cheap, which means there is always a crowd of Reykjavik hipsters orbiting the many hotdog stands located in the middle of town. Of course Bjork is rich enough that she doesn’t have to slum around wiener stands, but perhaps I should add that Reykjavik wieners are the best I’ve ever tasted, with available toppings ranging from potato salad (my favorite) to fried onions. The only hot dogs that rival them are Hebrew National kosher dogs, the brand sold at many American baseball parks.

Second, I wrote that Icelanders hate foreigners, but that was a generalization I didn’t feel like clarifying at the time. Now I will. It’s actually Icelandic men who hate foreigners, and the main reason is because foreigners tend to hook up with Icelandic women. It’s all about protection of natural resources, people, though unsurprisingly, the resources in question don’t necessarily want to be protected. Below are pictured three very typical Icelandic girls hanging with three Americans, and as you can see, they aren't under duress.





It’s no mystery why foreigners like Icelandic women—they’re beautiful and have perfect skin. Why Icelandic women tend to reciprocate the attraction is open to speculation. I think perhaps it’s because some of them believe Icelandic men don’t offer much in the way of long term prosperity, mired as they are in a fishing and farming culture. The thought goes: why hook up with a guy who works at a tuna cannery when it's possible to escape the island with a rich traveler? Personally, I don't know if this supposed outflux of women is an actual fact, but I do know that many Icelandic men believe it and are willing to go to lengths to stop it.

There’s some irony in all this, since the only reason there are any women in Iceland at all is because the Vikings who settled there put ashore in Ireland first and abducted all the women they could find. This was a brilliant move, in a slobbering pirate sort of way, but at some point the women were bound to run away. The fact that it’s happening centuries later just makes it fate, generationally delayed.

Icelandic women are particularly vulnerable to the wiles of celebrities. During the Flags of Our Fathers shoot my friends and I preferred low key bars, like the little pub Sirkus, where we could enjoy our eight dollar Heinekens in peace. But inevitably in such a small town, the cast members would eventually make an entrance, whereupon starstruck locals would dig out their phones and relay the news, causing the place to fill up in the next ten minutes with dewy-eyed blonde chicks.

I’ve spent a lot of time in Hollywood, off and on, and the thing you notice quite a bit is that celebrities are only as careful about committing a newsworthy fuck-up as they have to be. Since it was clear there were no paparazzi in Reykjavik, the (perhaps married) actors got pretty friendly with the local beauties. In fact I saw one girl high-fiving her friends on the way out the door in celebration of bagging a not-to-be-named trophy hunk. You’re thinking I could have read the scene wrong. But no, my girlfriend was in the women’s restroom with this group earlier and gave corroborating testimony that the girls were not high-fiving because of soccer results.

An L.A. girl would be way too cool to publicly celebrate being on the receiving end of a Hollywood infidelity, but Icelandic women don’t have that same kind of jaded reserve. Their excitement was actually sort of contagious, if a little uninventive. I was hoping they’d step it up a notch, give each other the NCAA flying chest, or maybe duckwalk out the bar like Shaq when he makes a tip-slam. Alas, Icelandic girls have a lot to learn about celebrating.

For the Icelandic men, of course, this was all a nightmare.

It was shortly after the high-fiving that my friend Dan was told by a pair of brave local boys: “Go home American. We don’t want you here.” I think this amply illustrates the worldwide guy credo: When in doubt, take it out on some random bloke. Dan should have responded: “Maybe you don’t, but your girlfriend does.” But besides being a stone killer he has evolved beyond the need to make petty quips (unlike me). And so he let these poor guys live to perhaps find enlightenment of their own one day. Nice work, Dan.

Now let’s go kill someone and dump their body in the woods.
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Labels: bjork, iceland, sirkus, travel

posted by Egan Ehlers @ 3:12 PM