The Icelandic Canadian - 01.09.2000, Page 10

Vol. 56 #1
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
8
I went to that party. So did children from
some of the schools in the Ottawa area. They
sang “Happy Birthday” to little Snorri, and
we all ate birthday cake. The impressive con-
clusion of all these celebrations find their
fruition fittingly in Winnipeg/Gimli with the
formal opening of two buildings partly fund-
ed with money from Iceland: one million dol-
lars to the University of Manitoba!
Have you ever thought of exactly what it is
a consul does, a real one? Not that Heather
Ireland, Jon Jonsson and Neil Bardal, current
honorary consuls, are not real or have not
served the Western Icelandic community long
and faithfully, but they have day jobs. What is
it like to be a full-time Consul, a very specif-
ic one, in a country like Canada, where Nyja
Island was long since assimilated into this
hybrid nation. (Or was it?)
Well, for one thing, language is usually a
major problem for consuls settling in a for-
eign country. Not so for our multilingual pair.
Both Svavar and Gut) run speak and read
English fluently, easily able to communicate
with their constituents in Canada whose lan-
guage is Icelandic - well, sort of Icelandic. (I
myself can say hello, how are you, thank you
and I have hiccups in Icelandic.) Those
Western Icelanders who do speak Icelandic,
unless they have studied it at school, as the
children of the first settlers were required to
do, speak an Anglicized tongue with lots of
English expressions and a rudimentary gram-
mar. Still, our Consul doesn’t experience a
pressing necessity to learn, say, Portuguese or
Finnish, and for that he may be grateful.
As for the Icelandic food here, though we
are told it’s in a state of arrested development,
representing the tastes of our ancestors and
not those of Icelanders today - witness the
great vinarterta debate - it’s not so different
from that back home. We Western Icelanders
don’t eat rotted hakarl (shark), but we still
love our skyr, and most festive occasions
wouldn’t be festive without rullupylsa and
ponnukokur. The world is smaller than it was
and tastes are almost universal. Iceland is a
modem, sophisticated, European country so
there are few cultural surprises for the new
ambassador.
In fact, the big surprise, according to
Gu8nin, was the “blooming cultural life of
Winnipeg. It is more” she admits, “than is to
be expected of a city this size.” She and her
husband enjoyed the Winnipeg Symphony
Orchestra so much they wanted to recipro-
Fjola & Freyja, Kathy Amason, GuSrun Agustdottir and Snorri & Snaebjorn in Ottawa.