The end of my stay here on the beautiful Faroes is coming to an end. Tonight I'm taking the ship further to Denmark, check-in starts at around 10 p.m., and I'll have to spend a day and two nights aboard. Arrival is scheduled on Tuesday at 8 a.m., but it's always a lot earlier and they get you out of bed a couple of hours before.I feel sorry for leaving, because I have done so little here, although I was always around. But I am utterly amazed at these people, they are absolutely the most kind, open, gentle and hospitable that I have met so far. I have already mentioned how I have a whole apartment just for myself, and how kind my host has been to me. Now it's time to tell the rest!On Friday night after the pizza me and my host fell asleep together in our clothes while we were trying to watch an old funny Danish comedy show. It took less than 5 minutes, and that night I slept as if I hadn't been sleeping for years. In the morning I decided to go to Suðuroy, the southernmost island, because of a big festival called Jóansøka. The Faroese have kept all saints' celebrations even after the Reformation, while everyone else in the Nordic countries lost memory of them - apparently, everyone seems to have alsways forgotten about the Faroes: they were part of Norway until the Kalmar Union (the period when all Scandinavian Countries were one kingdom under a Danish king), and when Norway became independent again, they just forgot to bring the Faroes with them, so they remained part of Denmark. And after the Reformation, nobody really thought of travelling as far as here to update the Faroese on saints' festivities. So they kept on their own way, as with ship building - they are the only ones, I was told, that still build ships as the Vikings did.So I took the ferry to Suðuroy at 10:00, and since I was late, my host Eyðbjørn ran with me to the docks and told me to run up through the car deck. During the 2 hours of the trip I spent some time chatting with two Norwegian tourists, reminding myself how nice is to talk Norwegian and how much easier it is than Icelandic. There on the island there was supposed to be a big celebration, but apparently the real party was on the ship, because during all the time of the ferry transfer the locals were consuming huge quantities of Føroya Bjór brought along in boxes, and singing and screaming as if their football team had won an important match (it was 10 a.m. as already mentioned). On land, nothing was really going on, except a canoo race and people drinking like crazy and crowding the only two-three places where you could buy food on the island. Although in Denmark there is no such a thing, the Faroese have their own Vínbúð, or Alcohol Monopoly Store, and as far as I understood, there is only one in the capital, and nothing else. The places at the festival that had a licence to sell alcohol were really few, so that is why so many people brought boxes of beer from home. People were mounting some rollercoasters and stuff like that, and two stages, but nothing was really going on. So I decided to go for a hike in the island. I walked for half an hour to reach a spot were I wanted to start hitch-hiking to Fámjin, the only village on the Western coast of the island. In the free guide I got in the tourist information centre I had read there was a lake called Kirkjuvatn ("church lake") close to it, and since that seemed to be the only one on the island, I wanted to go there. After a couple of minutes with my thumb up, two girls who had recently graduated from high school picked me up. They looked at me as if I was doing the coolest thing on earth, which I didn't understand, because they said they had been hitch-hiking every day home after school because they didn't want to wait half an hour for the bus. Even though they weren't going there, they brought me there anyway, since they had basically nothing to do, and were just going around on mom's car. The village was very nice, although nobody was around, and I thought it'd be hard to be back in Tvørsoyri to take the ship back to Tórshavn, or at least to see if the festival had evolved into something more cultural than getting drunk before noon. I hiked up the mountain and I found the lake when it had become so hot, that I really wanted to bathe. There was also a nice pier from where I could have dived, maybe. Nobody was there, except someone fishing on the very other end of the lake, so far away that I could barely see him. So I took off all my clothes (I didn't have a suite), walked to the pier and into the water. I experienced a great sense of freedom, but also a great cold: the water was coming directly from the springs and it was icecold. Apart from a slight dizziness in my stomach that I experienced about an hour later, bathing for those few seconds was good, because I was really sweating a lot. There are over 20C these days, not even a cloud in the sky or the usual fog, and hiking on the mountains can warm you up a lot! So, after bathing, I hiked up the mountain and to the road, that was higher up than the village. I was about 20km from my destination and there were no cars. To reach a spot where I could maybe find more cars, I'd have had to walk for almost 10km. But after a couple of minutes, an old man pulled over and picked me up. I didn't know what language to speak with him, because he wasn't fluent in English although he understood my simple sentences - but eventually we kind of agreed on Danish and he told me of him being shepherd after many years working in different places, first in Denmark, then on the Westman Islands in Iceland, and 4 years in Greenland, all around the Rigsfællesskabet. Then at some point he stopped and came back to his native place to look after sheep. I listened to him with great interest and almost saw myself as an old man. The next guy that pulled over and brought me back to the "festival" in Tvøroyri didn't want to talk to me at all, but he drove fast and in less than half an hour I was back. I was amazed at how early it was, and how easy it was to hitch-hike, although there were such few cars.Today I went downtown to buy stamps for my postcards, and then I took a bus (the red buses in Tórshavn are free, to incourage people to leave their cars at home!) to a point where I could trek over a hill and then down to the small village called Kirkjubøur. Although the sign said that I needed proper gear, a compass, food and blablabla, and 2 hours one way without breaks, I did it in little over one hour and no problem at all. There I was resting at the small harbour, when an old man that apparently had nothing to do came to me and praised the beautiful whether in Faroese. I understood what he said but didn't attempt a reply in my broken Faroese, so I asked "Bor du her?", do you live here in Danish. He asked if I was Danish and I told him my story. He was amazed and even happier to talk about Iceland, and then started telling me in Icelandic of the time he spent in Iceland doing language research: he, Jóan Hendrik, is a retired linguist, who worked for most of his years on dictionary projects on the Faroese lexicon. With his knowledge of Icelandic, he created lots of new Faroese words from Icelandic models, and collaborated with the local administration in many ways, among others inventing new names for streets of the new neighbourhoods of Tórshavn built in these recent years. We also talked about Gianfranco Contri, the Italian that wrote the first and only Italian-Faroese-Italian dictionary , whom I had met years before in Bologna, invited by my Norwegian professor. Then he brought me home, where he fed me tea, raisin bread and butter, showed me all his books, and then ended up talking about hitch-hiking: he said that when he was studying in Copenhagen, he would hitch-hike from there to Germany, Holland, England up to Northern Scotland, where a Faroese fishing boat would bring him home. Other times. Nú eru allir hræddir, he said in his perfect Icelandic, now everyone is afraid - true, but at least in Iceland and in his country it still works so good! At last, he said he would bring me home with his car whenever I wanted to, and eventually did it, saving me two hours walking over the steep hills.Now, I must cut this about feeling lucky. I am not lucky, when awesome things happen to you every day like this, then that's just the way it is: if luck happens every day and to everyone, then it's no longer luck, because it lacks the "unexpectedness factor". Then I thought about those other few tourists in Kirkjubøur, who came by car, took some pictures and drove away. Nobody has time to stop a bit, rest on the grass, talk to the locals after a good hike on the mountains. And misses all this bliss of a forgotten humanity that invites you home for tea after a 2 minutes chat.
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