icelandic mardi gras

...is called sprengidagur, and it's today. Sprengidagur translates as explosion-day and people eat until they explode. We lost a couple just now at lunch in a gut-busting live-action version of the Mikie-from-Life-cereal drinks-Coke-and-eats-pop-rocks story I grew up half-believing.

Like seemingly all Icelandic holidays, there is special food associated with sprengidagur. In fact, to most people, sprengidagur is just about the food. All ties to the start of Lent tomorrow seem to have been forgotten. Instead the day is all about eating salted meat and a kind of creamy bean soup. The hardcore sprengidagurists chop up the salted meat and add it and the cubed vegetables into the bean soup, eating them all together in a kind of Icelandic soul-food mélange.

I have to say, the salted meat was "exploding" with flavor and nobody in the world does soup quite like Icelanders. Sprengidagur er allt í lagi hjá mér.