Day 16: Last day of geothermal class

So this morning I slept through my alarms and had to quickly shower and then power walk to class. I was only 5 minutes late and class hadn't started. Today we finished discussing geothermal energy and talked about geothermal heat pumps and how the Icelandic government subsidizes heat pumps since they reduce energy consumption. We also did several calculations determing how many kilowatt hours and money (in krona) that a consumer (and the government) can save by installing certain geothermal heat pumps. Tomorrow we have the day off, but most of us plan on studying as we have over 100 pages of environmental policy and resource economics articles to read by Friday for class. Also, we have our oral exam in Icelandic on Monday.

After our Icelandic class most of us headed to a nearby bar (which a fellow student's host dad had opened up only a week earlier). It was quite swanky, but she told us pretty much everything was furnished from IKEA (which Icelanders pronounce eh-kay-uh). For the next hour or so we continued our discussion from last week on Landsvirkjun's dam project for the Aloca aluminum smelter and discussed Icelandic politics. Not more than a couple of weeks ago did Iceland's government legally redefine marriage as a union between two individuals instead of a man and a woman. Iceland's current prime minister Johanna Sigurdardottir is Iceland's first female prime minister, and the world's first openly gay head of state. Also, the mayor of Reykjavik is Jon Gnarr who ran under a party he created called The Best Party. He's an actor and a comedian who ran for mayor with several ludicrous policies but was still elected.

It was nice to just sit around and have stimulating conversation about national issues with our group leader Caitlin (and her husband), our guide Thordur and the rest of the SIT students. However, I had to leave early because I didn't want to miss dinner.

Arriving back in the neighborhood I got Nina and we went upstairs to discover we were having sheep's head for dinner! It's a traditional meal in Iceland, and Icelanders make use of almost every part of the sheep. We literally ate a cooked head, you could see its teeth, eye sockets and nostrils. To eat it you start by cutting at the jaw line and separating the top half of the skull from the bottom half. Surprisingly, the meat wasn't that bad. I avoided eating the fatty stuff next to where the brain would have been, but the meat around the jaw and the bottom part of the skull tasted similar to dark chicken meat. I ate the tongue too, which was really chewy and flavorless.



The head really isn't that meaty, so you'd have to eat a couple to have a full meal. Our host mom just wanted us to try it, so after picking the meat off our sheep's heads we had eggs, toast and sausage. Next I want to try puffin!