Of Kleiners and the Pepperoni Taco Sandwich

I’ve once again disturbed the timeline of the narrative,

because what I recount here happened close to my

arriving in Iceland. And it has to do with sandwiches.

The Pepperoni Taco Sandwich, to be exact. It’s a pre-
wrapped convenience that comes in its own shiny
cellophane, and can be found in the prepared foods
refrigerated section of any Icelandic supermarket. I
know you can get them at Bonus, so try there first.
It's the store with the somewhat demented-looking
piggy bank adorning a yellow flag outside the store--
something of a Nordic Piggly Wiggly.

Pepperoni Taco Sandwich

Pepperoni Taco Sandwich. With a name like that, how can it NOT be good? Long and slender, it is pleasing to the eye. Yes, the list of ingredients is long, but I don't dwell on it. It is like the drawn-out
descriptions you come upon in a good book where you mostly want to get back to the action. Do you REALLY need to know all that? 

So I set out on Christmas day to visit the geysers about two hours away, perched in the seat of my rented Jeep. A rarity on this day--I found a store that
was open. Walking up and down each aisle, I finally
found a store man who could tell me where they kept
the sandwiches. I'd had them before, and was
determined to have them again on this trip.

Bonus Supermarket

"Is there. By vegetables,"He nodded vaguely towards
a display. He was spare in his speech,
getting his meaning across using the fewest words
possible. He then went back to the pastime I'd
interrupted--which was staring blankly at the empty
conveyor belt that currently wasn't conveying
anything other than bleak emptiness.

I'd found my sandwich. There aren't many things
cheerful about a dark and cold Icelandic winter. The
days offer up a steady pelting of ice, snow, rain,
sleet--which I think is the stuff that comes down in
the form of little white pellets. You get all this and
more, because I could be faulted for leaving out the
wind. It's a howling wind, and not just howling
because it blows all the wetness and various sky-
fallings directly into your face and against your
person. It would be howling even without all that.
Earlier in the trip my host and I stopped for gas in her
car, and she was reluctant even to get out and fuel
up. She was Icelandic, and did not want to leave the
car. I even offered to take on the job, feeling it the
proper thing to do, but she decided she really wasn't
in the mood for gas after all. 

I can imagine the Pepperoni Taco Sandwich is a real
mood-lifter for many Icelanders. It's a substantial
outlay--costing around 500kr.--which is roughly five
dollars. But, given the weather conditions they deal
with usually for days on end--if anyone deserves a
Pepperoni Taco Sandwich, I think Icelanders do.

Typical Kleiners

I rounded out this meal with a kleiner I bought at the
same time. And an orange, and some Icelandic
licorice. The kleiner deserves a closer look. It's a
traditional Icelandic doughnut, twisted in a special
way to form a kind of knot. So it is not a round
doughnut, nor does it pretend to be. At the risk of
name-dropping, I happen to know the Icelandic
National Kleiner-Making Champion. She has racked
up honors too numerous to list, but year after year
the crown goes back to her. She currently resides in
a city in the northern part of the country.
The thing that stands out about this woman, is that you 

could spend two hours talking to her and you would never

know she is reigning Kleiner Queen. No entourage,
no special car or security detail. Even if you specifically 

asked her about kleiners, it is likely her modesty
would prevent her from revealing the enormity of her
position. Not to belabor the point,
but she is not some county fair blue-ribbon winner
who was judged on a few nibbled doughnuts from a
grease-stained paper plate. No--she is National 

Kleiner Champion for ALL OF ICELAND. The
magnitude of this is beyond my understanding, and I
always feel guilty when I eat a kleiner, because of this
simple thing: I can't tell if the kleiner is as good as
hers or if it falls short in some obvious way. For
me all kleiners are good. After two or three days they
are beyond eating, as might be expected. But when
they start out, I think they are really on equal footing. 

But back to the sandwich. Yes, again. I thought I'd
exhausted all I had to say, but now I remember a con-
versation. I was in the kitchen of my Icelandic hosts'
 talking to the eldest of their young sons. We
hit upon the topic of food, this being the kitchen, after
all. He told me about his preferences--the fish, the
Icelandic version of Kentucky fried chicken that uses
actual Icelandic chickens in its making, the chocolate,
cokes, the mish-mash of things that nourish a young
person's body to a greater or lesser extent.
Then it was my turn. What did I like?
"The Pepperoni Taco Sandwich," I said.
A pause.
"That's it?"
"Yes."
Truthfully, there is not much food I like. Being afflicted
with a condition that makes it terribly difficult to swallow,
I am pretty selective about what I try to jam down there.
This sandwich goes down pretty easy.
But it gets better, this conversation. Never could I have
dreamed this up.
My young friend told me of a time when his aunt ate
one of these sandwiches and got terribly sick. Food
poisoning. It went on for quite some time, this illness.
The makers of the sandwich were made aware of this-
either through litigation or another formal complaint.
He had my full attention.
"Go on, Go on!"
I sat, my chin in my hand, face absorbed with every
detail of this sandwich story.
To settle this unpleasant business with the sandwich
and the woman's illness, the company offered up this:
A lifetime supply of Pepperoni Taco Sandwiches. Yes,
as long as this woman is still drawing breaths, she can
have as many of these sandwiches--and, I presume,
the other offerings from the same company--as she can
manage to eat.This seemed like paradise to me. I can't
imagine a world with an unlimited supply of sandwiches.
Get up in the morning and feel like THREE sandwiches
that day? No problem! Maybe skip a few days, then hit
the sandwiches hard again? That's okay, too! Granted,
I did no fact-checking, am basing this all on the account
given by my young friend as we chatted in the kitchen.
I for one am all too eager to believe it, however.

For this trip, my overland travels will take me to a
distant part of this island that I’ve known

and come to see as a second home. The drive can be

made in one day, but I’ll split it in two, resting for a night

in a town called Holmavik. I’ll say a few words about

Holmavik, for the simple reason that I don’t know much

about it. It’s a fishing village and the town’s offices overlook

the fjord with a magnificent window that invites an

undisturbed view of nature. The building sits up high, and

the builders made sure they placed this window to

allow an enormous slice of the fjord to be viewed from

the comfort of the town’s offices. I simply wouldn’t 

get any work done there. Do they ever see seals?

This question is always foremost on my mind. Yes, the

town’s administrator said, sometimes they do. A giant window

and the possibility of seeing a seal. The town would quickly

devolve into a chaotic and disorganized mess under my watch.

For the time being I am on the southern coast near
the airport in a town called Keflavik. The house is
warm--being heated by the hot water that comes
directly through pipes under the street and that runs
through its radiators. There is a dog and a cat and a
Bonus supermarket just across the street. Hopefully, I
trekked across the iced-in parking lot in search of
another Pepperoni Taco Sandwich this evening. It
was late and I knew the chances were slim. I
described my wanting to the store man at the Bonus. 

“Is finished, the sandwich,” he said

I’ll borrow his words to wrap this up: 

“Is finished, the narrative.”