My husband and I co-founded an interactive design firm called Plexipixel 7 years ago. Before then, I was a quite the globetrotter and had even spent a year as an exchange student in the Netherlands. Since we started the business, we've had to be content with leaving the fine city of Seattle for the odd meeting here and there. Experiencing the world has been reduced to sitting on the couch to watch the Travel Channel with my computer perched on my lap so that I can continue to work while at home (multi-tasking is a requirement).
Part of the goal for 2008 is to get out of both the office and the house, meet new people, connect with old friends and clients, see new things, and get new business. But for now, there’s just too much going on for us to get away.
Last night, I decided to watch my just DVRed episode of "Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern". Laptop in front of me, I listened to the audio while taking the odd glimpse of the TV screen. This week, Andrew was touring Iceland. I listened to him chomp on a couple of pieces of puffin and then went to visit a family farm. While I was in the middle of typing an email, I heard the voice of a woman introduce herself to Andrew as "Dadda".
As I mentioned, I had been an exchange student in the Netherlands back in 1989-1990. I lived in a village called Nieuwe Niedorp. An Icelandic girl named Gudrun Asmundardottir lived in the older part of our village aptly named Oude Niedorp. We would both bike every morning to the same school in an adjacent town called Heerhugowaard.
Gudrun went by the name Dadda. Now, I don’t know a whole lot about Icelandic culture except for what I’ve learned through reading articles about Bjork and the Sugarcubes and watching the movie "101 Reykjavík". Of course Dadda told me a few things while we were friends, but if the name Dadda was common or not in her country was a fact about Iceland that I never knew about or perhaps has just escaped me over the years.
My assumption last night was obviously, "there must be thousands of women and girls named Dadda in Iceland". I rewound the show to where the woman’s full name was printed on the screen: "Gudrun Dadda Ásmundsdóttir". I mean, what are the odds of that? There just must be many a woman with the first name Gudrun who go by "Dadda" in Iceland. Besides, I knew that Dadda had 9 siblings and that her "last name" Ásmundsdóttir was because she was the daughter ("dottir") of Asmund. So of course, there must be a million Asmunds in Iceland who have daughters, right?
No, her smile was the same… and her laugh… it was the laugh that I remember from my senior year in high school at Huygenwaard in Heerhugowaard. It was the face of the person who had looked at me with a puzzled expression at the Niedorp carnival because I wasn’t walking out back with a boy whose first name I didn’t know who just said that he loved me and wanted to make out with me. You see, in Iceland as Bjork has been quoted as saying "making babies" is the thing to do ("101 Reykjavík" confirmed that fact, too) and as an Asian American from Hawaii even living in a fairly free-thinking place like the Netherlands not knowing a boy’s name before expressing the word "love" or even making out was just not what I was used to. Besides I just wasn’t as drunk as either he or Dadda was at the time and probably thinking too logically. Uptight? You know it! Being a sober 16-year-old at a Dutch village carnival is pretty darn lame but hey, I can’t change history.
So thank you, Travel Channel (and Andrew Zimmern) for not only my virtual one-way reunion, but a reminder of my old geeky life which I’ve apparently exchanged for a shiny new geeky life.
Travel Channel Discussions 
