I went all the way to Iceland for a hot dog

There are plenty of great reasons to travel to Iceland: the famous hot springs, the headache inducing partying in Reykjavik and the rapidly falling Krona among them. This is not the reason I went. I went for hot dogs. Sure, I was planning on stopping there anyway, on a layover from Paris. Based entirely on a recent episode of Andrew Zimmern's bizarre foods, Jocelyn and I decided to extend our stay, detox from heavy French cuisine and eat some lamb hot dogs. We made the right decision.

"Bæjarins beztu pylsur," which translates to something like the best hot dog in town, was not that difficult to find. Armed with my Wikipedia printout, we set out from our overpriced hotel, priced premarket crash. Typical tourists, we refused all assistance until Jocelyn's hypoglycemia set in and we finally had to ask for directions. Since all of Reykjavik consists of about 10 square blocks, we were lucky to discover that we were only about one and a half blocks away from heaven.

Being my typical overly friendly self, I set out to become friends with the guy making hot dogs. Despite the fact that he clearly understood English, he refused to answer questions with any syllable above a grunt. Apparently the American TV show was giving us a bad name. Nevertheless we managed to order things in our typical style: Jocelyn with lots of ketchup and me with lots of everything else.

Other than the fact that they are famed for their lamb content, the "everything" included some unusual ingredients in addition to the standard sweet mustard and ketchup. First there was a remoulade, a mayonnaise-based concoction with sweet relish mixed in. Second, there was both fried and raw onions, a combination I have come to desire with every subsequent hot dog sighting. Seriously, I crave this. Onions make everything better. I think a root canal would be better with onions. And having two types of onions at once, with the sweetness of the fried and the crispness of the raw is a brilliant combination. In fact, if Iceland somehow managed to patent this combination I think their economy never would have collapsed. You could base a banking system on this.

We polished off four hot dogs between the two of us, and then dragged our asses back to the hotel to nap. What else can you do with that much goodness working its way into your digestive system? Besides, we needed to rest up for the city's famous bars, which didn't really get busy until after midnight. For the record, they weren't nearly as wonderful as the hot dogs.