Faroe Islands, day 1

I easily slept until noon eventually made breakfrast and studied a map of torshavn. Where I'm staying isn't actually in Torshavn, but just north in Hoyvík. It's about a 45 minute walk, or a 15 minute busride to the school. The buses only run every half hour from 6:30am to 11:30pm on weekdays and only once an hour from 7:00am to 5:30pm on weekends.

The university was hosting a dinner for us at 5:30pm, but I left the house around 1:30 to walk around and explore Tórshavn. The first part of my walk is through these small pathways around this sort of park like area. The pathways are public, but the land around it is people's yards. Every house I've seen with a large yard has at least a couple sheep or maybe horses. One house has a chicken coup. It's really beautiful to walk through. It really does look like the pictures. I pass the Nordic House and the SMS mall on the way. just past SMS is where the downtown/shopping area of Tórshavn is.

I went to FK first, which is a grocery market, to buy some food for the next day. I wandered some more and found where the school was but I still had an hour and a half before I needed to be there. I walked down to the harbor and down tinganes and saw all the red government buildings. There's and old fort at the edge of the harbor that I wanted to go see but I didn't think I'd have enough time.

There are several shops selling Faroese knit wear that I passed by but I decieded to go into one of them called 'sirri.' I ended up buying a coat there. I'll probably go back for a hat too. Turns out they're well known for their crafts.

Once I had finished my shopping it was time to go back to the school. I had a backpack full of stuff as well as the bag with my coat in it that was fun to carry around all day. I got there a little early and I met these two Italian guys who were there for the institute as well. They're both PHD students in Art history and study scandinavian languages for fun. (They ended up having to leave early because one of their professors randomly decided to have an exam in August.) Slowly everyone else got there and we all went inside and upstairs and Turið gave us an overview of what we would be doing and then we went to the bigger room an sat down for dinner.



The dinner was nice, we had fish potatoes and salad. We all talked for a few hours and then decided to go to Café Natúr (which is really more of a pub then a cafe). It turned out to be "pub quiz" night, and they asked trivia questions and what ever table won got a free pitcher of beer. The questions were all in Faroese of course and we called ourselves "Team English." We did get on of the waitresses to translate for us and we got 4 out of 11 right. Not too bad. I ended up going home around 11:30 and dragged all my stuff back with me.