Icy Connections

See if you can follow this: After college, my roommate from France went to Taiwan and made friends with a guy from Iceland who just moved to New York for his masters in engineering. Said friend passed my information to the guy since he didn't know anyone in New York and he and I got lunch recently.

Have you ever met anyone from Iceland? Me neither! But for the lack of sunshine they supposedly get, he was an incredibly cheery and jolly personality. It's also a West Germanic language so they pronounce their V's as English W's. Which means I have to resist smiling and laughing when they talk about "wisiting the willages" which seems to come up more often in conversation than you would expect. (On a side note: I did once meet a guy from Greenland. GREENLAND. It was at some bar in Barcelona and no one in our group believed him so we made him show us his national ID card and sure enough it was legit. This girl with us, Daphne, got so excited she kissed him. I have a picture of that moment somewhere...)

ANYWAY, the Icelandic chap asked which building I worked at and I told him.

He said "Is that the one with the really fancy lobby?"

I replied, "Um, I wouldn't call the lobby fancy but there are some TV's and all the international flags hanging from the ceiling."

"Oh yeah, that's the one. Any place that takes the time to put up Iceland's flag is fancy to me."

Maybe it was funnier when he said it, but that was probably the moment I decided that I could continue to be his friend. I mean, sure I'd always help out the friend of a friend, but after that I figured, okay I can probably bring you around my other friends with that sense of humor.

And on this international note, Cousin Bobby and I ate our ways across the world and we never even had to leave New York City. We had Japanese, Turkish, Szechuan, Irish, Cuban, Mexican, Greek, Thai and Lord only knows what else. We also had a fun time!



Vive la New York City.