A week or so ago, Rob and I were heading back to New York on the connecting leg of an 8-hour flight, and I started to worry about being hungry. I have this thing on long flights where I get really, really famished exactly at the moment when all the flight attendants mysteriously disappear, so for hours I sit there starving, and obsessing over how starving I am, because of course I’m too nervous to push the summon-a-flight-attendant button to be like, “hi I’m a little piglet, can you bring me more snacks?” So this time around, thinking ahead, Rob and I decided to order a boatload of food during the flight attendant’s initial pass through the cabin.
This was very exciting, because A) I felt like the kid in Blank Check going bananas on junk food, and B) we were flying Iceland Air, and their food options are about as fun as you would imagine they’d be. They have all these specialty “meal packages” promoting Icelandic food, so like, you can get a hoagie and an Icelandic beer together for $5, or you can get a twin-set of their strange bjork (birch) alcohols together, and for some reason these deals always include a side of Pringles, which really appeals to the side of me that’s still bitter about being deprived of junk food as a kid. You can also get three mini hamburgers in a cute little box which, while these may not technically be Icelandic, or discounted, they do come accompanied with a regional “special sauce,” as well as that generally whimsical quality the country has cultivated so well through its mini horses and avant-garde musical artists.
So as the lady behind us ordered “one snack pack and two glasses of white wine, please,” Rob and I went to town on all sorts of treats, including but not limited to the tiny hamburgers, the beer, and a snack pack. Then, at the last minute, we impulse-added an Icelandic candy bar called Rís. What can I say, we’re heathens. But I have no regrets. The candy was filled with amazing surprises. First it contained tiny malt balls, which were perfectly bite-sized and not hard to chomp through like American malt balls, and which gave the bottom of the bar an excellent reverse-cratery texture. I was admiring this pleasing texture when I turned the chocolate bar over and what do I see but… pictures of TINY CATS, engraved all over the surface! Perfection. To top it off, the candy bar’s slogan ( as evidenced from the wrapper) is “gott…gott…gott…” which I believe means “good…good…good.” What more could you possibly want from a slogan?
The chocolate itself was light and milky, which if you ask me is the kind of chocolate one should eat while flying. If the plane goes down, I don’t want to be snacking on some high-end 80% cocoa joint, what can I say.
So, I don’t know, everyone go to Iceland and load up on candy. Also check out the mini horses and the tiny hamburgers. The glaciers are pretty cool, too.
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Remember that Nickelodeon & Toy-R-Us Super Toy Run from the ’90s (where the winning kid got to filling up carts with toys for 5mins)? As a kid, just thinking of the possible strategies would make my chest tighten. That feeling came back to me while looking at the Nordic store website. Just candy? Candy and blankets? Dried fish?…Great writing and beautiful shading on the candy wrapper.
Elle, that show was the best. Old-school Nickelodeon was so amazing. Tram and I went to high school with a girl whose family was on family double dare and I truly thought that was the most glamorous thing I’d ever heard.
Lucy, two girls at the high school nearest mine were once on the Phil Donahue Show. We treated them like queens.