This week, Kelsy is actually going to blog on Sunday. Now, isn’t that incredible?
It’s 2PM on a Sunday afternoon and I just realised that I’ve got time, for once, to do what I promise every week. This week, I shall blog On Time.

So what’s happened this week in the Faroes?
Well, for a start it’s getting colder pretty quickly. These days you’re lucky if the temperature reaches nine dregrees. It doesn’t happen often. Downtown, there’s one of those electronic billboards that tells you the time and the temperature, and it always seems to say six or seven. Yeah, it’s cold, but I don’t mind.
About three weeks ago, I woke one morning to see the mountains in the distance covered in the first dump of snow for the winter. I’ve never lived anywhere you can see snow from your window, so this was a big thing. But the next day it was gone and it hasn’t happened since.
It was very early, everyone said, and that means that maybe winter will come early to Tórshavn, that MAYBE I will get a white Christmas. I hope so. My host family spends Christmas in the North, anyway, in Klaksvík, which is picture perfect and looks like something from a postcard. I’m sure it will be even more beautiful in the winter, covered with snow. It’s colder in Klaksvík, so I live in hope of snow on Christmas day.
But yeah, you do NOT go outside without a jacket, or at least a thick jumper and a scarf, unless you’re keen for frostbite. Even on days when the sun is out, the sky is blue, and it looks as if it should be a wonderfully warm day, I can see my breath when I walk to and from school. It’s a cold little country, this, and people keep telling me that sometimes in summer it reaches twenty degrees. I have a suspicion this happens about once every ten years ...
Having said all this, I love the weather here. Yes, it’s cold, it’s windy and for the most part it’s grey, but the air is crisp and clear and breathing feels much healthier than it ever did at home. And on days when it’s overcast, grey and threatening rain, that’s the time I love it the most. I don’t know why – maybe because it reminds me of New Zealand weather. But I enjoy it.

I went to Klaksvík last weekend, with my host family. That was nice – it was for my host-grandfather’s birthday and there were scores of people who had heard all about me but not met me. (I swear, everyone in this country knows me these days. Wherever I go, there are people saying ‘Hey – you’re Kelsy from New Zealand?!’) And so I had lots of host third cousins once removed and the like introducing themselves and everyone seems to know someone who has been to New Zealand, come from New Zealand, holidayed in New Zealand, worked in New Zealand, been on exchange in New Zealand. The Faroe Islanders have a strange idea that I come from a place very similar to this. It’s because New Zealand is, like the Islands, physically isolated from the rest of the world. They sometimes seem a little disappointed when I explain that that’s really the only similarity. I think the 4.15million difference in the population is what does it.

Yeah, there really aren’t that many similarities between New Zealand and the Faroe Islands – I’ve been waiting for the culture shock and the homesickness but it hasn’t happened, which surprises me as everything seems so different. There are a lot of new impressions. Well, everything is new. I think the biggest difference for me is how amazingly kind and generous the people are – all of them, and how welcoming and accepting they are of me, a foreigner who barely speaks their language.
New Zealand, though we are loath to admit it, has an increasingly large racism issue, and yet we remain one of the most multicultural countries in the world. This is something I find very difficult to understand, especially as I have come here now, to a place where foreigners are not only accepted, but almost revered. I have been asked to speak in several places, I am invited to every party and function that takes place, people go out of their way to translate for me when I don’t understand. They’re so amazingly helpful, and it’s all because I’m not from this place. The other exchange students are having the same experience – people here are amazed by us, by the fact that we made it up here, and so they treat us more kindly than any people we have ever come across before.
I think this is also partially affected by the incredibly strict immigration laws here. The Faroes are a very, very small community and they take steps to ensure that the community remains primarily Faroese. As a result, in order to move to the Faroe Islands, one has to first secure a job, or enrol in a school, and then make payment to the Faroese government, either in the way of money, or by promising to give up a percentage of income for the first five years that one resides here.
There aren’t many foreigners in the Faroe Islands because of this, and those that there are mainly come from Denmark. There are a few from Norway. And so, we from New Zealand, are a great novelty.
What astounds me the most, though, is that people welcome us readily into their homes. My host aunt, who I have never met, has invited me to stay in the upcoming holidays on the Southern island of Suðuroy, where she lives. My contaktperson, Leila, has invited me to the Western island of Vágar, where she lives, and promises to take me to the beautiful island of Mykines, a spot frequented by the few tourists that know this place. In the supermarket I met a man who is married to a woman from New Zealand, and we am invited to their house for dinner one night – they live in a very small farming village about an hour out of Tórshavn. Another family that knows my host parents has a branch of their family living in Wellington, and they also have invited me for a meal at their home, regardless of the fact that they speak hardly any English themselves. I think that shall wait until my Faroese is better.

Anyway, this is a very long blog, so I shall leave now to do my physics and French homework, once I have translated it out of Danish!
Kelsy