By Jordan Bolker
News Editor
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While most NCC students went on vacation, tanned under the sun, or took summer classes, senior Ian Wright traveled to Iceland to conduct research for his College Scholar Honors thesis.
While most of his three-week trip consisted of observing and discovering the different features of Icelandic geology — hills, rocks and mountains — Wright also experienced the amazing and bizarre cultural experiences that only Iceland can offer. We sat down with Wright to learn about some of these thrills.
Chronicle: Were there any weird foods that you tried while in Iceland?
Wright: There was this one particular food called hákarl, or “rotten shark.”
Vikings would eat this a lot because if you ate it raw, you would be digesting the poison that most fish have in their bodies.
So what you would do is bury the shark meat deep into the ground and let it stay there for several months.
After the few months were up, you would take the meat and put it into a barn to dry. You would then rip chunks of the meat out and eat it, or in a lot of people’s cases, try to choke it down. After you were able to get it down, you would drink a small shot of vodka to get rid of the taste. It sounds disgusting but it’s also cultural.
Chronicle: What were some of your favorite sites? Was there somewhere in particular that you spent a lot of time?
Wright: I spent a lot of time at the Westfjords. It’s in the northwest corner of the island and it’s a part that isn’t very inhabited. The mountains are huge, there are rocks everywhere, and the further north you go, the less people you see.
The landscape is so perfect that it almost does not look real. It’s so picture-perfect that you cannot believe that it is standing right in front of you.
Another one of my favorite sites was Námafjall. This is an area on the island that looks just like Mars. It’s full of orange dirt and lava formations and a ton of boiling mudpools. There’s a lot of steam that comes up so it looks like an alien planet.
I had to be careful where I stepped because the lighter the ground looked, the hotter it felt beneath your feet. There were even parts of the ground that were white and if you stepped there, it would completely melt off your shoe!
Chronicle: Are there any quirky events that happened to you while you were traveling?
Wright: I was traveling on this bus that was more of a small van that could only fit around 10 people. We had 15 with us so it was a tight squeeze but we managed.
We were going along this supposed “bus route” which was not even a road; it was basically gravel. The bus driver was just crazy because he would be going 15 to 20 miles over the speed limit. We would be going over gravel so fast that all of us would be bouncing so high in our seats even if we had our seatbelts on.
He also had a tendency of slamming down on the brakes every 15 minutes whenever we would pass by a cool mountain landscape or anything else we saw.
Every time he did this he would shout, “Picture time!” and we would all jump out of the bus and take pictures and enjoy being on solid ground before we had to go back on again.
