Miscellehneous Iceland

Over the past month, we have jotted down some interesting Icelandic tidbits that never made it in a post. Here they are, roughly in order of discovery:

*Traffic lights turn yellow not only to signal upcoming red, but also upcoming green lights.
*Iceland's population has the highest percentage of Internet users in the whole wide world, at well over 90%. In a country of 320,000, that has interesting consequences. There's actually a new Icelandic term - Fesbokarlydraedi - that means Facebook democracy. A lot of important fallout, reaction, and response to the 2008 economic collapse was driven by FB. The gov't even polled the public about constitutional amendments on FB.
*Entering each town (or village...settlement...), there are not gates, but grates that welcome you. (They keep out livestock.)
*There are very few trees in Iceland. Although we learned that about 30% of the country was wooded when first settled, that figure is now only 1%. That is part of what made driftwood so valuable here (that and it's high salt content serving as a preservative).
*They have Doritos here in several varieties, including Nacho Cheese. We didn't immediately recognize the Cool Ranch - ranch must not translate well so they are actually called Cool American.
*We biked as early as 7am and as late as about 11pm. At both extremes, the sheep about were grazing. We'd like to know more about their daily/circadian rhythms and whether or not they vary by season this far north.
*The unconventional (to us) naming here makes listing the population, such as in a phone book, interesting. With so many Gudmundsons and Johanndottirs around, alphabetical by last name is not too helpful. So, they are listed alphabetically by first name. This isn't overly helpful either, so they have tiebreakers: last name, then profession, then address. This fun fact becomes even more intriguing when you learn that there isn't regulation on professions declared. There are sorcerers, ghostbusters, alien tamers, and Jedi masters listed. (Okay, we never saw a phone book and aren't sure if we could find one if we tried, but loved reading about this.)
*The domestic airline Flugfelag's motto is: We'll be landing shortly.
*We saw a cow with a bra one day. She had about double Q sized utters and actually had some mesh support for them strapped on.
*Gummi told us about a cool trick you can do with your tent: set up the rain fly over a hot vent to create a sauna. We'll try it next time.
*Iceland Air planes are all named after famous mountains/glaciers
*Iceland is home to the world's only Phallological Museum. Of course we checked it out. Field mice to blue whales, they have quite a range of specimens. Seeing the Icelandic handball team players' manhood in silver as a monument to their second place finish in Beijing will be hard to forget, as will reading about the "member of the month" (the giraffe) and looking over contracts for the next human specimens to be delivered.