FAR14.1: Happy Faroeaster! (Part One)

Firstly, I hope you had a great Easter!

I knew that a week after arriving, I would have the chance to see how the Faroese celebrate Easter. Well, evidently, they celebrate it behind closed doors with their families. As I mentioned in the last video, the entire country shut down for five days, from Maundy Thursday to Easter Monday, and the people seemed to disappear. The streets were empty, the shops were shut, as were the libraries and the university, bus services were either irregular or non-existent, I had no internet access, and although there was a meeting every day at The Salvation Army (apart from Easter Saturday), I was a little concerned about how I was going to fill my days...

But it actually worked out rather nicely in the end. I managed to get lots of reading done (so I’m doing particularly well on my new year’s resolution to read more books) and it was nice to go out walking and see places I hadn’t been to before.

So, on Maundy Thursday, I set off on one of these walks, and the results of that were in the last video. Here I am half-way up the hill, and I think I’m doing a pretty good job of not looking absolutely knackered.

Back home, Good Friday always starts with hot cross buns, but they don’t have those here, so I assumed that was a tradition I was going to have to skip this year – but little did I know. My parents had actually sent me a little envelope with the writing ‘Not to be opened until Good Friday’ on the front. I’d had no idea what was in the envelope and opened it first thing Good Friday morning, and there were these little marzipan hot cross buns: I was mega-impressed!

Good Friday evening was actually really good – after the meeting, I went to a friend’s house with loads of people from the corps to celebrate someone’s birthday, and then four of us went to a Christian concert at a huge church on the island of Eysturoy. There were various Faroese Christian artists – all very good – and the words were there for us to sing along. And sing along we did.

Easter Saturday saw me take another big walk, and I went to have a look at the Vesturkirkja (Western Church) in Tórshavn. It’s a pretty weird building you can see from pretty much everywhere in Tórshavn, but it has a certain charm...:

Part Two to follow...