Saturdays and Sundays

The Icelandic word for Saturday is laugardagur, which literally translates as "bath day." In the olden days, from whence this day gets its name, the day before Sunday was the day when everyone in the family would take a bath, I assume in preparation for going to church on Sunday. So you got clean physically on Saturdays, and clean spiritually on Sundays.

Now a days of course this is not the case. Icelanders bathe usually daily (though perhaps not as obsessively as Americans), and Saturdays seem to not begin here until after sunset, ie: around 8pm Saturday night (kind of like a Jewish or Muslim day), extending well into Sunday. Sundays are therefore generally speaking pretty shot, everyone laying around recovering from a hangover and trying to prepare for reintegrating into the time reckoning of western society.

I think however Sunday is also the new laugardagur. Not in terms of people bathing, but in terms of the house getting cleaned. After waking up around 3pm, the only way to acquire some sense of a productive Sunday is to rouse oneself enough to throw a load in the laundry and sweep the floor.

That at least is my participant-observer ethnographic note for the day.