Iceland review - 2006, Side 73

70 ICELAND REVIEW ICELAND REVIEW 71
Yes, I know svid. It’s essentially half a cooked sheep head with
eyeballs, ears and teeth intact, and makes a regular appearance
around Reykjavík. To a foreigner in Iceland, svid is pretty hard to
miss.
Also on the home cooking lunch menu is slátur, a kind of blood
sausage that comes with a variety of fillings, and sheep heart sautéed
with onions – all foods served in the mid-winter food festival,
Thorrablót. “Very traditional foods,” she says again.
In the kitchen, lilja Ólafsdóttir, is running frozen sheep heads under
tap water. lilja is 22, the oldest student currently enrolled in the
school. she grew up in grundarfjördur, a very small town in west
Iceland. lilja tells me this will not be her first time attempting this
kind of food, and explains that the heads I’m gaping at have actually
already gone through the first part of their preparation when their
fur is singed off with a handheld blow torch.
“most people don’t know how it’s done, but I did it when I was a
little girl,” lilja says. “It’s actually really fun.”
lilja tells me later that she stopped going to high school in
Reykjavík four years ago. she is dyslexic, and had been working at a
kindergarten until she came here. she likes her job, but has wanted
to come to one of these schools since she was a teenager. Her mom
went to one in the 1970s.
“I heard there were more rules in this school than the other. That’s
why I came here,” she says, laughing, telling me about her specific
choice to come to this school and not the one in Reykjavík. “not
that I’m a really crazy person, or anything like that.” she admits
other students were not as happy to find out that the school had a
curfew or a no-drinking policy. “I feel really comfortable in these
rules. They are strict, but okay.”
Another student who has been assigned the sheep heads is making
“baaaa” noises at her station. When it’s time to put the sheep in a
large boiling pot of water, lilja works at separating the halves of the
head, sometimes still attached around the mouth, and piles them in.
she adds five heaping teaspoons of salt to the water, and cheerfully
moves on to the next task of making blood sausage.
In the afternoon, I sit in on sewing class and take on an assignment to
embroider a small thistle into a square of linen. Halla Ormarsdóttir,
the sewing and embroidery teacher, shows me the way to make the
right stitch, and I can see immediately this is going take something I
don’t know if I’ve got: several hours of intense concentration.
I make a goal to get it done before I leave, but I find myself
procrastinating by seeing what everyone else is doing. I pass by
the evening weaving class, where a young norwegian woman is
teaching, dancing around the room to Björk’s “You Ring That
Bell” blasting from her laptop while the girls sit at old-fashioned
looms weaving wool and silk scarves and blankets. “I find that if I let
them have music, it helps them concentrate,” Ane Korner tells me.
At 29, Ane is the youngest teacher at the school. she has heard the
stereotypes about it – that the school is just about learning how to
clean, and how strict it is – but doesn’t think it ref lects the spirit of
the place today.
“I think now a lot of the people who come here have finished their