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About me:I was born in 1970, in the town of Hafnarfjörður, where I lived with my parents and brother until I was six. Then we moved to a small fishing village on the north coast of Iceland, where my parents still live.I had a pretty normal upbringing for an Icelandic kid, excepting the fact that I was mercilessly teased and bullied by some (socially retarded) kids throughout my stay in elementary school - the only reason I could find was that I wore glasses and liked to read books. I went to Menntaskóli (According to one of my college teachers this is called sixth-form college in English-speaking countries. It's halfway between high-school and college.) in Akureyri, and graduated in 1990. After a year of working to earn money, I went to the University of Iceland to study the English language and literature, with a minor in mass communication studies. I graduated with a B.A. degree in English in 1995. I am now working towards a M.A. degree in translation studies. In the summer of '95 I went to a community college in Denmark. After a 5 month stay there, I departed on a 4 month trip to India, along with a group of 9 others from the college. Travelling to India in an old bus with two incompatible groups of people was an unforgettable experience, parts of which I would not like to repeat, ever. But I must admit that parts of the trip were excellent. After having travelled solo around the Indian sub-continent for 6 weeks, I came home with a highly-developed case of the travel bug, and my mind firmly made up to return to those parts of India and Nepal I didn't have time to visit then. If I have time, I will tell you more about my travels, but that will have to wait until later. My interests include travelling, reading, rockpainting, quilting/patchwork and crafting, photography, and, you guessed it, cooking! I also like hiking, bicycling and horseback riding. I am now living in Reykjavík, have aquired three pet birds,
a tank full of fish and a
new apartment, and it looks as if my traveling days are over for a while. ReadingWhen I was a kid, I always had my nose in a book. It got so bad that sometimes I became completely oblivious to the outside world, and would not answer (or even hear) when I was spoken to. My grandmother got so concerned that she took me to have my hearing tested!As a child and in my early teens, I was an omnivorous reader, although my very favourite books were the Icelandic folk tales collected by Jón Árnason and Ólafur Davíðsson, along with various world mythologies, my favourites being the Nordic (as told in Snorri's Edda) and the Greek/Roman. My love of fairy tales led me to start reading authors like J.R.R.Tolkien and Michael Ende. But apart from that I read pretty much anything I got my hands on: history, romantic novels, children's books, biographies, geology, comics... While I was in Menntaskóli and University, it seemed to me that we were being made to read some of the most boring pieces of English literature ever written, typically novels of 600 to 1000 pages (like Bleak House - which completely put me off Dickens). Other works were not so bad: Gulliver's Travels, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.... Looking back, I realise that I got a pretty good overview of English literature, certainly good enough to be able to appreciate the more literary allusions in modern literature. Right now, my favourite reading material is Terry Pratchett's Discworld books. I "discovered" Pterry while I was in my first year of college, and have been a great fan of his ever since. I also like reading history books, the kind that cover some subject in depth, like The Raj at Table, David Burton's culinary history of the Raj-era in India, or Ísland, framandi land, which is about the writings of foreign visitors to Iceland about the country and the people. My latest
favourite is a marvellous book about Icelandic food through the centuries, Íslensk
Matarhefð by Hallgerður Gísladóttir. It has been a great help having
this book to back me up when I've wanted to give background for some of the
recipes on this site. |
Jo's
Icelandic Recipes