Góðan dag!
Well. A lot has happened in the last week and I am uber late blogging AGAIN. Sorry about that, things have just been so insanely busy!
I hope New Zealand has great weather right now because we had a BLIZZARD last night. Yes, a blizzard. Winds got up to 80m/s and everything had to close and batten down the hatches etc etc. We woke up to a foot of snow stuck to the North wall of our house. But it was beautiful, and I'm going sledding tonight with a bunch of my friends because finally there's enough snow to do it!
Yeah so, on Friday I went, at 10.30AM, to the ferry terminal to meet my band and travel to the island of Suðuroy - in true Faroe fashion, every single one of them was late and I wound up on the boat alone standing in the deck 6 restaurant and desperately hoping I was meant to be there. A girl spotted me and started talking to me having recognised the AFS logo on my bag, and as it turned out, she had gone to Australia for a year (she had a terrible Aussie accent), worked on the ferry in the restaurant, and lived in the village of Porkeri on Suðuroy. I was very thankful for her as the band was stil AWOL ...
Eventually they all turned up, thank goodness, and we set up our little stage thing with amps and keyboards and all that for our first performance of the weekend. It was INSANE, because there had been a massively huge storm the night before and the sea was really, really rough. We played, though, after a rough start where we hit a particularly huge trough right on our first count-in. It was kind of, 'eitt ... tvey ... eitt tvey trý fýra WHOOOOOOA'. Our tenor saxophonist, Eirikur, got really, really seasick and everyone pitied him enormously as he had 3 very complicated solos to play. Poor fellow. The minute the set was over he was off like a shot ... I have never seen someone actually turn green but he did.
The boat was full of politicians - the ferry company had invited them all to Suðuroy for this reception which we were all meant to be play at also. We were sitting eating our lunch on the boat and we turned around and hello, here's Joannes Eiðesgaard, the prime minister of the Faroe Islands. Good grief.
Anyway, so we got off the boat and headed to the reception which was in the village of Tvøroyri where the AFS coordinator, Elisabeth is from. On Suðuroy they speak with a strong, strong accent - instead of vit (we) they say oker, and tit (you plural) is tiker. They say jeg instead of eg (that's Danish and means I) and lots of other strange things I can't remember. For me, Suðuroy Faroese is harder to understand which should be interesting as I am doing a mini exchange there for a week on the 10th. And, strangely enough, I'm staying with the family of the girl I met on the boat.
Anyway, at the reception we realised that the venue was way too small for the huge sound of a big band and so we played rhythm section only with our two vocalists. So the rest of us got to hang around, eat food, drink wine and mingle. Mingling is important here - they do it a lot. Anyhoo, while mingling, this Joannes Eiðesgaard fellow casually wandered up to me and said, 'Hello, I hear you're from New Zealand.' (Everyone knows everything and everyone here.) I guess he was expecting me to go 'Hello, I hear you're the løgmaður,' but I really did NOT know this and so I just chatted away for a while thinking he was a local politician or something. He wandered off to mingle with other people eventually and the girl I was with, Hannah, was like, 'Don't you know who that was?' I was a little shocked to find that I'd just met the prime minister and hadn't even realised. Oops.
After that we went to our little house at Hotel Øravík where we were staying - Øravík is really a hilarious place as all it has of note is the hotel. Gosh, it's funny. But we had an entire house which was fun - I stayed in a room with Hannah (from Greenland, plays the trumpet) and two twins, Óluva and Maria, who both play the trombone. Yes, it was quite interesting.
That night we set up our stage at the Stóra Pakkhús which was to be our third concert venue, and we practised a bit until a grumpy old man came and told us to shut up. So we went bowling instead, followed by dinner at Hotel Bakkin, which was in the town of Vágs (this is a common name in the Faroes. Vágs. Everything seems to be something-Vágs or Vágs-something. It's pronounced Vox). Then, at about 10, we headed back to our concert venue to finish setting up and relax a bit before we started playing. We played from 11PM-1AM (you have to do this here because the audience arrive so late) but then we got encored so many times we wound up playing until 2AM. We got back to the hotel at about quarter past and then sat around eating and playing cards until 4 or 5AM when we all made it into bed. We had to get up at 8AM to catch the ferry and then it was late leaving anyway, but we didn't mind.
The ride back to Havn was almost as rough as it was going over, but lucky me, I never seem to have this seasick thing. Sjúrður, my fellow alto saxophonist, did, and the poor kitchen ladies had to come and clean him up in the cafeteria. How embarassing for everyone involved ...
But yeah, we arrived back in Havn to snow and ice and general gorgeousness (it had also snowed overnight on Suðuroy) and I headed home for sleep.

On Saturday night I went to my friend Olga's place for a girls' night involving a bunch of girls from my class. I made ANZAC cookies and took them in a tin and today Olga did the cutest thing - she gave it back to me filled with waffles. Haha. She's one of the people you just want to hug. The Faroes are full of these types of people.
Yeah so anyway, I got there and we ordered pizza and such, and sat eating and taking stupid photos of each other (as you do) and reviewing all the photos that have been taken of our class so far - we actually have our entire back wall in homeroom devoted to photos of our many escapades and it is getting fuller and more hilarious every day. Free period? Double lunch break? Print some photos. We even have a tally of how many times each person has appeared on the wall. It's awesomely cool.
Then we watched Pearl Harbor. Of course. And then we had tea and coffee and cake and cookies and then we headed home. It was very fun. Very cute.

School this week has been much as school generally is except our classes have been slightly more fun - on Wednesday we made a hot air balloon in physics and then cooked livers in biology (most disgusting thing I have ever watched ever in my life). We had a test in French on Tuesday and I was amazed today when I got top of the class! Three 11 scores, which is the second highest you can get and I don't think 13 was possible on this test. So yes, I pretty much rock at multilinguality. Multilingualism? Multilingualness???? Something along those lines.

Anyway, I do believe that's about all I have to report. Which is good as this is a long blog.
Leave me some comments, people!
Kelsy