Day 37-supper guests

   February 10-Spencer was the last member of the family to celebrate the ancient Norse month of þorra, when his kindergarten class ate the traditional þorrablót foods for their dinner.
He said he tried shark, seaweed, lamb's head, dried fish, and Icelandic bread.  He liked it all and thought it was really fun, because he got to experience something Icelandic.
   Shan and Sally went to Borgarnes to pick up our debit cards and check on our new Icelandic bank accounts.  The Fulbright Foundation had paid Sally for January and February and reimbursed her the travel costs to come to Iceland.  Since Fulbright money must be paid in the local currency, all of that came to just over one million krónur.  Once in our lives we got to feel like millionaires!  It didn't last long, though, because we had some bills to pay.
   We had our first guests over for supper tonight: Sally's officemate Sígrun, her husband Einar, and their kids Þorgerður, who is Alex's friend, and Einar, whose birthday Spencer attended yesterday.  After school today, Sígrun picked up Spencer from kindergarten and he and Einar played over at their house until it was time for them to come over for supper.  We introduced them to the raclette, and they really liked it.  Like Sígrun said, how can you not like something that combines bread and cheese?  Since we have such limited seating space,
the two boys ate first, then the adults ate, and then the three girls ate.  That arrangement seemed to work out well for everyone.
   Spencer and Einar played together most of the night, usually on the iPad, but sometimes with Spencer's slowly growing collection of Playmobile toys.  At other times, they just tried to annoy their big sisters.  The girls mostly played Uno, talked, and tried to limit their interactions with their brothers.  The adults managed to stay out of kids' drama for the most part, despite the small size of the apartment, and we had some great discussions.  Einar spent many years managing fish processing plants and companies.  More recently, he went back to school and is now a full-time faculty member at Bifröst in the business department.  He and Sígrun are currently pursuing their Ph.D.s at the University of Exeter in England.  Sígrun's focus is the psychology of music and she teaches part-time at Bifröst in the PPE department.  We had some interesting discussions about the epistemiologies of philosophy, the social sciences, and the natural sciences.  The two of them also gave us some ideas of places we should visit while we are in Iceland.  Ultimately, everyone had a great evening.

In order to better learn some of Icelandic geography, we (and local kids who have cycled through the apartment) have been working on this 500 piece puzzle since we brought it home a few weeks ago.  We finally completed it this evening.